Northfork
Paramount Classics | Release Date: July 11, 2003 CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION
64
METASCORE
Generally favorable reviews based on 31 Critic Reviews
Positive:
18
Mixed:
8
Negative:
5
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Critic Reviews

Critic scorePublicationBy date
100
Los Angeles TimesKevin Thomas
A thoroughly original accomplishment of a high artistic order, Northfork features flawless, spare production design by Ichelle Spitzig and the Polish brothers' father, Del, and cinematographer M. David Mullen's striking images slide effortlessly into Dalí-like Surrealism. Read full review
100
Christian Science MonitorDavid Sterritt
The movie elegantly mingles drama, comedy, and low-key spiritual resonance. It also has a splendid cast. Read full review
100
Chicago Sun-TimesRoger Ebert
There has never been a movie quite like Northfork… The movie is visionary and elegiac, more a fable than a story, and frame by frame, it looks like a portfolio of spaces so wide, so open, that men must wonder if they have a role beneath such indifferent skies. Read full review
90
VarietyScott Foundas
Love it or hate it, Northfork is a cinematic vision (visually and textually) unlike any with which most moviegoers, even arthouse regulars, will be familiar. Read full review
90
The New York TimesDana Stevens
There is nothing quite like this movie, and I'm not altogether sure there is much more to it than its lovely peculiarity. But at a moment when so many films strive to be obvious and interchangeable as possible, it is gratifying to find one that is puzzling, subtle and handmade. Read full review
90
The A.V. ClubNathan Rabin
With their third film, the Polish brothers find their authorial voice, resulting in a lyrical work whose free-floating Lynchian weirdness coalesces into an unexpectedly touching movie. Read full review
89
Austin ChronicleMarjorie Baumgarten
Gets under your skin with its graceful edits and poetic elisions, lovely performances, and faded imagery. Read full review
88
New York PostLou Lumenick
Strictly a love it-or-hate-it proposition, it requires viewers to work at a movie with a narrative that could support at least half a dozen interpretations. Read full review
83
Seattle Post-IntelligencerBill White
A love letter to the state of Montana and a landscape that is biblical in its desolation and splendor. Read full review
80
Dallas ObserverRobert Wilonsky
Northfork may be doomed, but the Polish brothers and cinematographer M. David Mullen (who worked with the brothers on their previous features, "Twin Falls, Idaho" and "Jackpot") make the place feel like heaven on earth. Read full review
80
Washington PostAnn Hornaday
Isn't everyone's cup of tea -- as the Polishes admit in a clever bit of critical preemption -- but it possesses an undeniable, haunting grandeur. Read full review
80
Chicago ReaderJ.R. Jones
Stark, mysterious, and often weirdly funny. Read full review
75
Charlotte ObserverLawrence Toppman
I predict Northfork will give you food for reflection or a case of the hives. I stopped scratching 20 minutes into the movie, settled into its lulling rhythm and floated away into the Polish brothers' flaky, austere dreamworld. Read full review
75
Boston GlobeTy Burr
This is very much the bargain that Northfork offers an audience: Buy into the brothers' elegiac meditation on angels, Eden, and the death of American innocence or sit back and scoff at it as so much David Lynch lite. Read full review
75
Chicago TribuneMichael Wilmington
It's a film that is mystifying and haunting -- a cool, brotherly vision of the last day and the coming flood, of American dreams and the vanishing frontier. Read full review
75
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)Rick Groen
Just when the movie seems set to soar, there's a drag factor -- it keeps getting weighed down, if not sunk, by an anchor of ponderousness. Read full review
67
Portland OregonianShawn Levy
There's real craft here and a vision that's nothing if not unique. Read full review
63
PremiereGlenn Kenny
Northfork feels like the work of a couple of ardent art students who, for whatever reson, are very keen on pleasing their teacher. [July/August 2003, p. 23]
60
SalonStephanie Zacharek
Just about gets us off the ground on its dreamy, feathery angel wings; it just doesn't have the strength or the stamina to keep us aloft. Read full review
60
Village VoiceLaura Sinagra
Northfork's overall ponderousness prevents it from becoming a transcendent fictive poem on the violent domestication of the West. Read full review
60
EmpireNick Dawson
Every tiny aspect of the universe here comes from the filmmakers' imagination, and while this occasionally leaves us bemused, the film as a whole is a magical, otherworldly trip into undiscovered areas of cinema. Read full review
50
L.A. WeeklyElla Taylor
So stuck is the movie inside the heads and hearts of its indisputably gifted makers, it never quite makes the leap into ours. Read full review
50
New York Daily NewsJack Mathews
An improvement over "Jackpot," but not much. The best thing about it is Nolte, playing the grizzled priest as an angel in his own right. Everyone else- - save the young boy playing the orphan -- seems to be in on a joke we just don't get. Read full review
50
USA TodayClaudia Puig
The cinematic equivalent of an elaborate and poetically constructed non sequitur. Read full review
50
ReelViewsJames Berardinelli
Moody and atmospheric -- a study in tone over plot and pacing over characterization. Unfortunately, in devoting all of their efforts towards the film's look and feel, co-creators Mark and Michael Polish have crafted a motion picture that is static, occasionally opaque, and, worst of all, boring. Read full review
40
TV Guide MagazineMaitland McDonagh
The film is meticulously crafted but frustratingly meaningless. Read full review
38
Baltimore SunMichael Sragow
American art movies rarely come fancier or emptier than Northfork, a down-home arabesque made of angel fluff. Read full review
38
Miami HeraldRene Rodriguez
An insufferably artsy, pretentious work, the sort of picture that gives art films a bad name. Read full review
30
Washington PostDesson Thomson
It's just too lost in its own presumed self-enchantment. Read full review
25
San Francisco ChronicleMick LaSalle
Numbing and inert. Read full review
16
Entertainment WeeklyOwen Gleiberman
It has that vintage Polish pace, their signature arch pomposity and rhythmless weirdness, only this time the brothers had to go and make a cosmic allegory of American dreams. Read full review
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