The Turin Horse
Cinema Guild | Release Date: February 10, 2012 CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION
80
METASCORE
Generally favorable reviews based on 15 Critic Reviews
Positive:
12
Mixed:
3
Negative:
0

Critic Reviews

Critic scorePublicationBy date
100
New York PostV.A. MusettoFeb 10, 2012
A sumptuous masterpiece by one of the greatest moviemakers of all time. Read full review
100
The New York TimesA.O. ScottFeb 9, 2012
The movie is too beautiful to be described as an ordeal, but it is sufficiently intense and unyielding that when it is over, you may feel, along with awe, a measure of relief. Which may sound like a reason to stay away, but is exactly the opposite. Read full review
100
The A.V. ClubScott TobiasFeb 8, 2012
The Turin Horse has a burnished beauty that's awe-inspiring, like a clear window into a faraway world as it dangles, and then falls, off the precipice. Read full review
100
Slant MagazineAndrew SchenkerFeb 3, 2012
Béla Tarr is the cinema's greatest crafter of total environments and in The Turin Horse, working in his most restricted physical setting since 1984's Almanac of Fall, he (along with co-director Ágnes Hranitzky) dials up one of his most vividly immersive milieus. Read full review
88
LarsenOnFilmJosh LarsenJan 16, 2020
The Turin Horse might befuddle you and it might bore you. But I guarantee you won’t forget some of the images, and more likely than not you’ll be left pondering their potential meaning. Read full review
88
Boston GlobeMark FeeneyJun 28, 2012
The Turin Horse is in a very gray black and white. It looks the same way it feels: bleak, pure, forbidding, transfixing. Watching it, frankly, can be a bit of an ordeal. There's hardly anything in The Turin Horse you would describe as entertaining, but there is a very great deal that's beautiful and absorbing. Read full review
85
NPRMark JenkinsFeb 15, 2012
The Turin Horse is an absolute vision, masterly and enveloping in a way that less personal, more conventional movies are not. The film doesn't seduce; it commands. Read full review
80
Total FilmSam WigleyMay 26, 2012
Tarr risks self-parody with recurring scenes of the pair tucking into scalding potatoes, but if you've got the stomach for it this is an intoxicating vision of life at the end of its tether. Read full review
80
Los Angeles TimesBetsy SharkeyMar 1, 2012
Starkly beautiful and exceedingly demanding, The Turin Horse, which Hungarian master Béla Tarr has said will be his last film, is both easy and impossible to define. Read full review
80
Village VoiceNick PinkertonFeb 7, 2012
An experience comparable to starting down the road with an empty sack then, over the course of the journey, having it weighed down steadily with rocks until you can't go on. But this backbreaking effect cannot be called an artistic failure. It is exactly what Tarr sets out to achieve. Read full review
80
VarietyPeter DebrugeFeb 3, 2012
Though ripe for metaphorical interpretation, the slender setup, about the fate of a horse seen beaten in the streets, gives arthouse audiences little to cling to, and will provide institutional and fest programmers a test-of-wills head-scratcher for their calendars. Read full review
70
SalonAndrew O'HehirFeb 9, 2012
I left the theater oddly exhilarated - to see daylight again was so great! - and, odder still, eager to see it again (although perhaps not today). Tarr's films can be arduous, even wrenching, but they're not boring. Watching them is something like visiting the world's most fantastic art museum and taking an ice-cold shower, both at the same time. Read full review
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