The Green Knight
Showtime Networks | Release Date: July 30, 2021 CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION
85
METASCORE
Universal acclaim based on 56 Critic Reviews
Positive:
49
Mixed:
6
Negative:
1
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Critic Reviews

Critic scorePublicationBy date
100
The Observer (UK)Mark KermodeOct 15, 2021
If the result sends viewers scuttling back to Armitage’s uniquely accessible version of the source text, then that would be marvellous indeed. But there is enough here that is dazzling and enthralling for Lowery’s movie to stand proudly as a grand work of poetry in its own right. Read full review
100
The GuardianPeter BradshawSep 24, 2021
The visual brilliance of this film combines with shroomy toxicity and inexplicable moral grandeur: what a stunning experience. Read full review
100
EmpireJohn NugentSep 21, 2021
A rivetingly weird and exceptionally beautiful fantasy film that offers no easy answers but ponders the biggest questions — through myths, mysticism, and men in crisis. This is major stuff from David Lowery. Read full review
100
UproxxVince ManciniAug 6, 2021
The beauty of Green Knight is that it’s so fully realized on every level — score, cinematography, production design, acting — that even when you don’t know entirely what Lowery is on about you can’t look away. It’s almost as if every individual shot has a narrative arc unto itself. It’s so compelling on a micro level that the “big picture” becomes irrelevant. Read full review
100
ABC NewsPeter TraversAug 6, 2021
In a summer of junk, cinema visionary David Lowery delivers a modern movie masterpiece about a wannabe knight (a sensational, Oscar worthy Dev Patel) who must fight monsters he can and cannot see. It’s a unique and unforgettable film that ranks with the year's best. Read full review
100
Vanity FairRichard LawsonJul 29, 2021
It’s an elusive film, in its plotting and allusions, but is still potent and immediate, as resonant as any of our own late-night quests toward the far reaches of our self-conception. Read full review
100
Los Angeles TimesJustin ChangJul 29, 2021
What does it mean to be a knight, or even just to be human? It isn’t an easy question, and The Green Knight, in taking it seriously, isn’t always an easy film. But by the time Gawain reaches his journey’s end, in as moving and majestically sustained a passage of pure cinema as I’ve seen this year, the moral arc of his journey has snapped into undeniable focus. Read full review
100
The New York TimesA.O. ScottJul 29, 2021
The Green Knight is always interesting — and occasionally baffling — but at the end it rises to a swirling, feverish pitch of feeling and philosophical earnestness. Read full review
100
Screen DailyTim GriersonJul 26, 2021
The exceptional level of craftsmanship — which includes some seamless, low-key special effects — wouldn’t be nearly as affecting without the comparable care Lowery brings to this story. Read full review
100
SlashfilmHoai-Tran BuiJul 26, 2021
The enormity of this film intimidates me. And it hypnotizes me, and seduces me, and captures me until it feels as if the green has grown like moss over my entire body. But rather than threatening to choke, The Green Knight injects a new source of oxygen into the sword-and-sorcery genre. Read full review
100
The PlaylistCarlos AguilarJul 26, 2021
Told in sumptuously gritty imagery, this epic feat of bold imagination, unconcerned with mitigating its creative force for the sake of unadventurous audiences, has an unconventional film grammar and irregular structure that peers into the different possible outcomes of the would-be paladin’s trek. Read full review
100
RogerEbert.comBrian TallericoJul 26, 2021
It is scary, sexy, and strange in ways that American films are rarely allowed to be, culminating in a sequence that cast the whole film in a new light for this viewer. We're all just sitting in that banquet hall, listening to the story requested by King Arthur, told by a master storyteller. Read full review
100
ConsequenceClint WorthingtonJul 26, 2021
David Lowery deconstructs the hero's journey with this sumptuous dark fantasy. Read full review
95
The AtlanticDavid SimsAug 2, 2021
The Green Knight is most brilliant in its wordless sequences. Lowery is exceptionally skilled at conjuring otherworldly sights that somehow retain one foot in reality. Read full review
95
PolygonRobert DanielsJul 26, 2021
Lowery more than catches an attentive audience’s attention with this film. His dazzling visuals, brilliant spectacle, and petrifying sequences are enrapturing. Likewise, Patel finally lays claim to the leading-man mantle so often bequeathed to him, yet so rarely earned. Read full review
91
IndieWireDavid EhrlichJul 26, 2021
Stoned out of its mind and shot with a genre-tweaking mastery that should make John Boorman proud, it’s also the rare movie that knows exactly what it is, which is an even rarer movie that’s perfectly comfortable not knowing exactly what it is. Read full review
91
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)Barry HertzJul 26, 2021
The power of Lowery’s work here is to filter his many influences into a singular vision that feels entirely in his sole possession. Read full review
90
Rolling StoneK. Austin CollinsJul 30, 2021
This being a Lowery tale, the monolithic, the overwhelming, are only more powerful for being rendered in intimate, miniaturized terms. The creepiness creeps just that much more; fear is heightened; fantasies, mysteries tingle with a sense of the unpredictable. Read full review
90
Paste MagazineBrianna ZiglerJul 30, 2021
David Lowery’s The Green Knight is a modern reckoning with a medieval fable. It’s a haunting, confounding, surprisingly erotic fantasy epic; a confrontation between man and nature, nature and religion, man and himself. Read full review
90
Wall Street JournalJoe MorgensternJul 29, 2021
The Green Knight is many things—hypnotic, cryptic, dramatic, occasionally funny, certainly poetic and often magical in its way—but simple isn’t one of them. Read full review
90
New York Magazine (Vulture)Alison WillmoreJul 27, 2021
The Green Knight is about someone who keeps waiting for external forces to turn him into the gallant, heroic figure he believes he should be. But at the film’s heart is a lesson that’s as timeless as any legend — travel as far as you like, but you’ll never be able to leave yourself behind. Read full review
90
TimeStephanie ZacharekJul 26, 2021
Lowery (A Ghost Story, The Old Man & the Gun), in addition to fleshing out the story, puts his stamp all over it so confidently that the results could be annoying, if they weren’t so enchanting. Read full review
90
The Hollywood ReporterDavid RooneyJul 26, 2021
It embraces the strange remoteness of myth and Middle Ages lore on its own terms and creates something quietly dazzling and new. Read full review
90
IGNKristy PuchkoJul 26, 2021
The Green Knight is truly astounding. Read full review
89
Austin ChronicleRichard WhittakerJul 27, 2021
Lowery’s version works because, like Brian Helgeland and Curtis Hanson’s rewriting of L.A. Confidential, it captures the nature and meaning of the story rather than getting caught up in individual events or plot beats. Read full review
88
LarsenOnFilmJosh LarsenJul 30, 2021
At its heart, The Green Knight is about the very idea of legends and myths: how they grow, what they reveal, what they conceal. Read full review
88
Washington PostMichael O'SullivanJul 29, 2021
The yarn that Lowery spins is rich with incident, but ultimately simple. Its enjoyment lies less in the story, but in the marvelous mystification of its telling. Read full review
88
Chicago TribuneMichael PhillipsJul 26, 2021
Lowery creates a spiritual cousin to Shakespeare’s Prince Hal, torn between taverns and common folk and his highborn destiny. There’s a lot here, either on the surface or bubbling beneath it. In its Christianity vs. paganism square-off, The Green Knight lands on a note (and an event) very different from the poem’s. Read full review
88
USA TodayBrian TruittJul 26, 2021
Several heads roll though it’s your mind that'll get truly blown by The Green Knight, a visually dazzling and thoughtful trip back to Camelot. Read full review
83
Original-CinKaren GordonJul 29, 2021
Are audiences, who are used to having their heroic stories delivered to them in fantastically exciting packages, ready for this reined-in version of the wounded hero? In spite of its flaws, Lowery’s The Green Knight makes a case for a different sort of hero whose time may have come. Read full review
83
The A.V. ClubA.A. Dowd Jul 26, 2021
Here, the Texas writer-director revels in the opportunity to create image after image worthy of immortalization: The Green Knight is his most purely striking achievement, offering sprawling forests bathed in ghostly orange light and overhead shots that suggest the surveying eye of a curious god. Read full review
80
Little White LiesHannah StrongOct 4, 2021
Wild at heart, this quiet epic casts a lingering mystical spell, perfect to usher in the forthcoming autumn nights. Read full review
80
The TelegraphRobbie CollinSep 30, 2021
Each vignette has the subcutaneous prickle of folklore – unapologetically weird as they are, you can feel their hooks snagging on your psyche’s most deeply buried regions. Read full review
80
Time OutDavid HughesSep 21, 2021
Lowery wittily interprets the original text, adding a sexual dimension and a better ending, and only once strays close to Python terrain (when the ever-brilliant Barry Keoghan pops up as a lolloping scavenger). It’s close to a cinematic holy grail. Read full review
80
Christian Science MonitorTyler BeyAug 5, 2021
Lowery never needed to convince audiences that Gawain was worthy; Patel did all that himself, extracting the dignity that was within Gawain from the beginning. Read full review
80
The New YorkerRichard BrodyAug 3, 2021
In The Green Knight, Lowery revises a legend, in style and in substance, in order to evoke a way of telling different stories, and of telling stories differently. He takes the risk of perpetuating a deluded gospel of evil, or of seeming to do so, in a daring effort to dramatize a world in desperate need of artistic redemption. Read full review
80
The New YorkerAnthony LaneAug 2, 2021
The Green Knight wields a peculiar magic, the reason being that Lowery—as he showed in A Ghost Story (2017), which ranged with ease over centuries—is consumed by cinema’s capacity to measure and manipulate time. Read full review
80
Screen RantMae AbdulbakiJul 30, 2021
It’s a movie that will have a lasting impression on the audience as its themes, execution, and sharp, lustrous visuals fully take hold, leaving viewers with a lot to think about. Read full review
80
VarietyOwen GleibermanJul 26, 2021
As a movie, The Green Knight feels like it was scraped out of the deepest, muddiest archaeological sediment of the Age of Chivalry. Read full review
80
The GuardianCharles BramescoJul 26, 2021
David Lowery’s complex, visually sumptuous and uncommercial tale of Arthurian legend revels in upending expectations. Read full review
75
ReelViewsJames BerardinelliAug 2, 2021
The Green Knight has its share of flaws but there’s a freshness to Lowery’s approach that demands to be noticed. Read full review
75
Movie NationRoger MooreAug 1, 2021
Thanks to a muddy, gloomy glorious Dark-Ages-on-a-Budget look and the almost heartbreaking pathos Patel brings to each “lesson learned” moment, it works. Read full review
75
New York PostJohnny OleksinskiJul 29, 2021
The film seizes Lowery’s best skills as a director: his eye for innocence and nature (Pete’s Dragon) and how he uses slowness to deepen a story (The Old Man and the Gun). Read full review
75
Entertainment WeeklyLeah GreenblattJul 29, 2021
In a way, the movie feels almost like Marvel antimatter, an auteur's willful response to whiz-bang emptiness and Infinity Stones. Knight is ultimately a tale of honor though, and a deeply moral one — inscrutable, but haunting too. Read full review
75
San Francisco ChronicleMick LaSalleJul 29, 2021
The Green Knight is a strange film — so out of step with current trends, so original in its conception, so willing to take its time and follow its own course — that it must be counted among the better films of 2021. Read full review
75
Chicago Sun-TimesRichard RoeperJul 29, 2021
The Green Knight contains some beautifully written passages, and cinematographer Andrew Droz Palermo delivers one award-worthy visual image after another. Read full review
75
The Associated PressJake CoyleJul 29, 2021
The chapters don’t cohere in a sustained rhythm, but in richly evocative imagery, The Green Knight makes its own vivid film language and pacing. Read full review
75
ObserverBrandon KatzJul 26, 2021
Despite The Green Knight‘s opaque obscurity and scattered whims, there’s a clear beginning, middle and end structure that crescendos with a scintillating third Act. Read full review
63
Slant MagazineKeith WatsonJul 28, 2021
A methodical, if largely allegorical, exploration of its main character’s psyche, the film smooths out the enduring mysteries, opaque psychology, and narrative idiosyncrasies of its source material. Read full review
60
The Irish TimesTara BradySep 27, 2021
It’s certainly something to see – especially Malgosia Turzanska’s costumes and Jade Healy’s production design – and plenty to mull over but both the viewer and the film-maker should have guessed from the offset that there can only be one Barry Lyndon. Read full review
60
Arizona RepublicWeldon B. JohnsonJul 29, 2021
Moviegoers who are familiar with the source material for The Green Knight might find it a thought-provoking, updated take on the ancient poem. The film does offer interesting ideas on masculinity and honor. Just don't go into it expecting action or thrills along the way. Read full review
60
CNNBrian LowryJul 29, 2021
The Green Knight's sheer originality makes the film worth considering for anyone with a taste for such material. Read full review
60
Film ThreatHunter LanierJul 29, 2021
Had these themes of accepting the consequences of actions, living up to one’s word, the moral weakness of youth been better capitalized on, or had a little fun been had, The Green Knight would have done a better job at earning itself a place in the storybooks. Read full review
50
Boston GlobeMark FeeneyJul 29, 2021
Most of the movie feels like an interlude. Pacing, velocity, and flow don’t interest Lowery. He knows the effects he wants and, skilled as he is, knows how to get them. But are they worth getting? A film that’s consciously laborious is still laborious. In a world where nothing is more real than magic, its absence is sorely felt. Read full review
40
TheWrapJul 26, 2021
While there’s a lot of commendable chutzpah and curious longing baked into The Green Knight, the movie’s never as compelling as it is unusual. Read full review
25
The Film StageJuan BarquinJul 30, 2021
The Green Knight is supposed to be a tale about what it means to be human; Lowery’s film is entirely void of that humanity. It’s a dour, bloated experience that not only fundamentally misunderstands the work of art being adapted, but has no interest in exploring or expanding upon what was already there. Read full review
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