Birds of Passage
Interior13 Cine | Release Date: February 13, 2019 CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION
85
METASCORE
Universal acclaim based on 27 Critic Reviews
Positive:
25
Mixed:
1
Negative:
1
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Critic Reviews

Critic scorePublicationBy date
100
New York Magazine (Vulture)David EdelsteinFeb 15, 2019
The movie is a knockout. Read full review
100
The New YorkerRichard BrodyFeb 14, 2019
The cultural richness of Birds of Passage is overwhelming, its sense of detail piercingly perceptive, and its sense of drama rigorously yet organically integrated with its documentary elements. Fusing the sociopolitical, the natural, and the mythopoetic realms, the movie offers a model to filmmakers anywhere regarding the dramatic power that inheres in the cultural specifics of any story. Read full review
100
The New York TimesA.O. ScottFeb 12, 2019
Instead of stepping back to explain the beliefs and practices of its main characters, it plunges you into the reality of their lives, trusting that both their humanity and their distinctiveness will be apparent, that they are no more inherently mysterious — or inherently noble — than anyone else. Read full review
100
RogerEbert.comGodfrey CheshireFeb 12, 2019
The screenwriters’ way of describing this world’s fall from grace due to the lures of money and luxury has the power and inevitability of classic tragedy. It could be Greek or Shakespearean, though it is palpably modern and Colombian. Read full review
100
The PlaylistJessica KiangMay 25, 2018
Guerra and Gallego’s film is no dusty period piece, it is wildly alive, yet it reminds us that no matter how modern we are, there are ancient songs our forebears knew whose melodies still rush in our blood. We are not creatures of one era or another or of one place or another, we are only ever birds of passage between our mythic pasts and our unwritten futures, being tossed around by the wind Read full review
100
CineVueMartyn ConterioMay 14, 2018
Birds of Passage is an enthralling, powerful statement and lamentation on the drugs trade’s inevitable encroachment upon on indigenous peoples and how gangsters casually destroyed them. Read full review
95
TheWrapMonica CastilloFeb 15, 2019
Birds of Passage weaves a tale that is both familiar yet unique, yet it is so culturally tied to the Wayúu, it would be impossible to move it outside the Guajira. The film fits very comfortably in the genres of a gangster movie and an epic, with supernatural forces forewarning what’s to happen in the earthly realm. Read full review
91
The Film StageRory O'ConnorMay 25, 2018
As effectively violent and entertaining as Birds may be, there is a real current of bitterness and tragedy running through it. That bitterness speaks not of the physical colonization we saw with the conquistadors and rubber barons of Serpent, but more of a sort of colonization of ideas. Read full review
90
Wall Street JournalJoe MorgensternFeb 15, 2019
The film can be harrowing in its repetitive violence, but never less than fascinating as a piece of ethnology, with magic-realist dimensions, that amounts to an origin story of the Latin American drug trade. Read full review
90
Film ThreatBrian ThompsonFeb 14, 2019
As ambitiously artful as it is infectiously engrossing, Birds of Passage brings an invigorating worldview to a genre so often riddled with clichés, weaving an astute tale of fortune and destruction as it explores long-held indigenous traditions. Read full review
90
Rolling StoneDavid FearFeb 14, 2019
Part anthropological study, part rise-and-fall epic and all-out mesmerizing, this regional spin on the “family business” saga makes you rethink the notions behind why we watch crime flicks past the vicarious thrills. It’s both foreign and familiar. Read full review
90
Los Angeles TimesKenneth TuranFeb 14, 2019
Birds of Passage tells a story of a traditional culture fighting for its life against incursions from the outside world, of how insidiously clan ways and spiritual values can be compromised, and it certainly has familiar elements. But the electric filmmaking, sense of tragedy and cultural specificity are far from usual. Read full review
90
Screen DailyWendy IdeMay 14, 2018
Notwithstanding the bleak trajectory down which any film about blood feuds must spiral, this is an engrossing narco-thriller which deftly balances the storytelling tradition of the Wayuu with the genre conventions of the crime movie and the western . Read full review
90
VarietyPeter DebrugeMay 14, 2018
Few films have captured quite so powerfully the tension between the old and new worlds — a feat Birds of Passage accomplishes while simultaneously allowing audiences to channel the Wayuu’s surrealistic view of their surroundings, where spirits walk the earth, and wise women interpret their dreams. Read full review
88
Slant MagazineChris BarsantiFeb 12, 2019
Money corrupts, Cristina Gallego and Ciro Guerra’s would say. Easy money corrupts completely. Read full review
80
The Observer (UK)Mark KermodeMay 19, 2019
It’s powerfully affecting fare; elegiac, evocative and profoundly cinematic. Read full review
80
EmpireChristina NewlandMay 17, 2019
Guerra and Gallego offer a masterful, compelling reimagining of the crime drama within the specific ethnographic milieu of a tribal people weathering dangerous change. Unforgettable images in service of a strange, poignant story. Read full review
80
CineVueAlasdair BaymanMay 16, 2019
Ciro Guerra and Cristina Gallego’s depiction of their native country is compelling, one that weaves its magic to leave a rather impressionably wonderous film. Read full review
80
The GuardianJordan HoffmanMay 14, 2018
In the most reductive way, it is another mafia story. But as with their previous film, it is the specificity that counts, and while certain genre tendencies prevent the narrative from truly unmooring, hardly a scene goes by without something fundamentally familiar being rendered in a unique fashion. Read full review
80
The Hollywood ReporterJordan MintzerMay 14, 2018
The drama feels a bit leisurely and distant at times, and the film runs a little long, yet it intelligently and assuredly explores how longstanding traditions can be gradually upended by drugs, money and outside influences. Read full review
79
TheWrapBen CrollMay 14, 2018
This is a story about power, but it’s also a story about place. More than that, you’ve really got to see it to believe it. Read full review
78
Austin ChronicleMarjorie BaumgartenMar 13, 2019
But for all our Tony Montanas and Pablo Escobars, both imagined and real, I guarantee you have never seen a drug-trafficking movie like Birds of Passage. Read full review
75
Washington PostMichael O'SullivanFeb 27, 2019
It’s a watchable tale, yet it’s also hard to know just how much truth there is in the presentation of the Wayuu, whose presence in the film at times seems more picturesque than plausible. Read full review
75
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)Barry HertzSep 8, 2018
The impact of modern vice upon the Wayuu is a captivating tale never told before, and the final few minutes are brutal in the best possible way Read full review
75
IndieWireEric KohnMay 14, 2018
While it never reaches the psychedelic heights of Guerra’s previous effort and relies on a more conventional pattern of events, Birds of Passage delivers another fascinating tone poem about Colombia’s fractured identity. Read full review
58
The A.V. ClubMike D'AngeloFeb 12, 2019
Unique background elements provide flavor, but apart from the drug of choice here being marijuana rather than cocaine, what unfolds could hardly be less rote. Read full review
25
San Francisco ChronicleMick LaSalleFeb 26, 2019
The movie’s failure to engage is illustrated by directors Cristina Gallego and Ciro Guerra’s approach to the climactic scene. They shoot it almost entirely in long shot, as if inviting the audience not to care — or worse, as if admitting there was nothing to care about, after all. Read full review
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