Refn tries to turn his protagonist into a Christ figure at the climax, which might have worked better if the rest of the film weren’t an endless slog of mud, blood, and graphic disembowelment.

| Aug 10, 2022

Mikkelsen verifies that, even without saying a word, he's an unnervingly unhinged presence.

| Original Score: B | May 31, 2011

If only the pieces added up to an experience that sticks and that didn't finally succumb to a shrug of entropy.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Jul 29, 2010

You sometimes wish Refn's gift for Ridley Scott-level mayhem had won the battle over his much iffier Werner Herzog leanings.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Jul 23, 2010

It's a trip into a primordial world and primeval sensibilities, and if you're looking to shake off the mall-movie blahs, there are few better places to look.

| Jul 22, 2010

Like a John Milius film reduced to its pure, masculine essence and shot through one of Alejandro Jodorowsky's lens filters.

| Original Score: B | Jul 22, 2010

Mr. Refn, who can pull off stylish brutality (in the Pusher films and Bronson), shows no knack for the kind of visionary, hallucinatory image making that would render Valhalla Rising memorable.

| Original Score: 2.5/5 | Jul 16, 2010

Lots of movies about the Middle Ages can do the mud and blood -- though we sure see a lot of both here -- but in this movie it's like Refn has ripped you out of time and dropped you there.

Full Review | Jul 16, 2010

When it comes to crazy, violent, semidelirious, testosterone-laden, proto-Viking tales about a mute visionary one-eyed warrior who breaks skulls, Valhalla Rising is pretty great.

| Original Score: B+ | Jul 14, 2010

Valhalla Rising is nothing more than an updated version of the kind of time-honored Hollywood Viking movie Kirk Douglas used to do in his sleep, which means lots of inhuman, bone-crunching violence and no plot.

| Original Score: 1/4 | Jul 14, 2010

It feels like a Black Sabbath song come to visual life.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jul 14, 2010

A movie as maddeningly ponderous and self-important as its black-metal title.

| Jul 13, 2010

To dismiss Refn's repetitive approach as tedious would miss the poetic undulations of his elegantly minimalist exercise.

| Jul 12, 2010

The Bruckheimer-style storyline is merely an excuse to film a Joseph Conrad-worthy existential journey to hell.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jul 11, 2010

Mesmerizing ... A trippy nightmare of savage poetry burning slow across bleak and otherworldly landscapes.

| May 26, 2010

Has a certain grim integrity, but it's also criminally boring for long stretches.

| Original Score: 2/5 | May 6, 2010

Refn, who made the underrated Bronson in England and the striking Pusher series in Denmark, goes out of his way to avoid the usual clichs of Viking sagas...

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | May 6, 2010

Conjured necromantically from the medieval dawn, spook-raised from the Scandinavian subconscious, Valhalla Rising is a film you must see to barely believe.

| Original Score: 5/5 | May 6, 2010

This is all style and all substance. Refn crams in all the disembowellings you could want but also serves up some spine-tinglingly rich character work.

| Original Score: 4/5 | May 6, 2010

I'm not sure there's much going on behind this blank, brutish surface, but it's undeniably distinctive and packs a certain primitive punch.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Apr 30, 2010