Battle in Heaven
Tartan | Release Date: February 17, 2006 CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION
60
METASCORE
Mixed or average reviews based on 18 Critic Reviews
Positive:
11
Mixed:
5
Negative:
2
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Critic Reviews

Critic scorePublicationBy date
80
The Hollywood ReporterKirk Honeycutt
The film deliberately works against most cinematic expectations. Read full review
80
VarietyDeborah Young
Both intensely exciting for its cinematic inventions and terribly uninvolving on emotional and dramatic levels. Read full review
80
Village VoiceMichael Atkinson
Promiscuously inhabiting several planes at once, Reygadas's restless inquisition may already be this year's movie to beat. Read full review
80
Los Angeles TimesKevin Thomas
Reygadas asks audiences to plunge headlong into his chaotic vision of the world, no questions asked but complete trust required. Not everyone is going to be willing or able to take this leap of faith, but those who do go along with Reygadas may well feel they have come away having undergone a stunning revelatory experience. Read full review
75
Seattle Post-IntelligencerSean Axmaker
Some audiences will find it an endurance test and Reygadas doesn't make it easy with his confrontational imagery, but he provokes emotions not often explored on screen. Read full review
75
TV Guide MagazineKen Fox
Simultaneously shocking and deeply religious, Carlos Reygadas' follow-up to his acclaimed 2002 debut, "Japon," tells the story of one man's battle for spiritual redemption through a series of explicit images rarely seen by even the most jaded art-house audiences. Read full review
75
New York PostV.A. Musetto
Reyadas' radical rejection of filmmaking conventions is at first off-putting, but he's able to elicit remarkable performances from the cast of non-professionals while building tension that will hold viewers' attention. Love it or loathe it, you won't soon forget Battle in Heaven. Read full review
70
The New York TimesManohla Dargis
Working again with Diego Martínez Vignatti, the cinematographer for "Japón," the director doesn't just seize our attention; he commands it - forcing us into a world of terror and beauty. Read full review
67
The A.V. ClubNoel Murray
Battle In Heaven is like a serious of artful photographs, except that Reygadas also moves the camera in astonishing and unusual ways, swooping around the conventional x- and y-axes while teasing the audience with what he's about to show. He's got an astonishing technique. Here's hoping that someday he'll use it to make a movie. Read full review
63
Boston GlobeWesley Morris
With relentless and ruminative deliberateness, Reygadas shows us a Mexico City that seems to be decaying from the inside out. Read full review
63
New York Daily NewsElizabeth Weitzman
Reygadas is clearly out to shock us, to shake us and show us a host of furious ideas about class, gender, religion, nationality, love - really, there's very little he doesn't throw into this thickly ambiguous stew. If only he hadn't made his deliberately confusing, heavily symbolic story quite so difficult to digest. Read full review
60
SalonAndrew O'Hehir
Reygadas is an undeniably important artist hewing his own path, but who is also self-consciously playing to the tastes of a tiny elite audience that craves obscurantism, confrontation and heavy-handed symbolism. Still, I really want you to see this. Then I'll have somebody to talk about it with. Read full review
50
The New RepublicStanley Kauffmann
We may indeed yawn a bit from time to time, but we know that we are yawning in the presence of a director who is intelligently disturbed by the moral inertia he sees around him and whose future is worth watching. Read full review
50
Austin ChronicleMarjorie Baumgarten
This is really Reygadas' show all the way. And what he's delivered is a sad, tawdry picture in which all hope for salvation lies with God. Read full review
50
Film ThreatMichael Ferraro
There is an interesting set-up here for something great but Battle In Heaven never lives up to the expectations. Read full review
40
L.A. Weekly
Battle in Heaven cannot be so easily dismissed - indeed, it is that rare failed film that leaves you as eager to see what its maker will do next as you were when you walked in the door. Read full review
33
Entertainment WeeklyLisa Schwarzbaum
A notorious opinion divider last year at Cannes, Battle in Heaven is less about heaven or battle, or hell on earth, or the soul of Mexico, and all too much about gawking. And so, for all the ''shock'' of the movie's clinical carnality, this battle is lost. Read full review
25
San Francisco ChronicleG. Allen Johnson
A spectacular failure, despite further evidence of the director's keen eye and bold cinematic ideas. Read full review
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