Three Thousand Years of Longing
United Artists Releasing | Release Date: August 26, 2022 CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION
60
METASCORE
Mixed or average reviews based on 52 Critic Reviews
Positive:
24
Mixed:
25
Negative:
3
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Critic Reviews

Critic scorePublicationBy date
91
ConsequenceLiz Shannon MillerAug 25, 2022
It makes for a deeply unconventional sort of fairy tale, but this is George Miller we’re talking about. What else did we expect? Read full review
91
Original-CinKaren GordonAug 24, 2022
Director George Miller’s Three Thousand Years of Longing, with its superb A-list cast led by Tilda Swinton and Idris Elba, plays quite nicely as an intelligent, warm-hearted, visually beautiful, movie that can be enjoyed at face value. Read full review
90
PolygonJoshua RiveraAug 26, 2022
The craft Miller brought to Fury Road’s relentless chases is now channeled into wondrous stillness, a canvas meant to capture the sheer yearning at the heart of a story. The desire to be known by and know others more fully. One could call that love. Read full review
90
New York Magazine (Vulture)Bilge EbiriAug 26, 2022
Three Thousand Years of Longing is indeed a cautionary tale, but it’s a complex, beautiful one, suggesting that love, longing, and loss are all parts of a vast, wondrous life. Read full review
90
Film ThreatTanja M. LadenAug 26, 2022
The film explores themes of free will, destiny, and the tales that we consume while also revealing how they become part of us as we pass them down to future audiences. Ultimately, however, Three Thousand Years of Longing is about bearing the weight of pure love with no one willing to ease the burden — yet resolving to give it away freely nonetheless. Read full review
90
SlashfilmRafael MotamayorMay 21, 2022
Three Thousand Years of Longing tells a fantastic and poignant story about storytelling, longing, and love. It's about the art of telling smaller, intimate stories at a time when big stories seem to only be valid. A fairy tale with more in common with "Babe" than "Mad Max," this movie reaffirms George Miller as one of the great magicians of cinema working today. Read full review
88
RogerEbert.comGlenn KennyAug 25, 2022
[Miller's] mastery makes the movie eye-popping; his freedom and audacity make it surprising and unsettling. Read full review
86
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)Barry HertzAug 31, 2022
Miller’s go-for-broke visuals and his stars’ fiercely committed work allow Three Thousand to speed by on wit, energy, and gushy, bleeding-heart passion. Read full review
83
IndieWireDavid EhrlichMay 20, 2022
In fact, the two stars are so sweet and searching together — their characters’ respective power and mutual solitude pulling them together with practical magic — that some of the film’s more spectacular detours seem flimsy by contrast. Read full review
80
Screen RantMae AbdulbakiSep 2, 2022
Miller’s film is deceptively simple, but there is a tremendous amount of depth and nuance. Viewers will walk away thinking a lot about the film, and a second or third watch is needed to fully absorb the layers within its story. Read full review
80
EmpireBeth WebbAug 31, 2022
Elba’s performance as a lonely Djinn with a bottomless reserve of charm, paired with Miller’s unbridled energy, make this a modern fairy tale worth seeking out. Read full review
75
Entertainment WeeklyLeah GreenblattAug 31, 2022
It's a gentler, sadder movie than the dizzying trailer suggests, and less driven by plot than a stickler for storytelling like Alithea might prefer: a loopy little jewel-box reverie, slipped between two Furies. Read full review
75
ReelViewsJames BerardinelliAug 25, 2022
It’s an elegant and highly unexpected offering from George Miller that allows him to step away from the Mad Max universe if only for one interlude. Read full review
75
ColliderRoss BonaimeAug 25, 2022
Miller’s modern fairly tale is full of beauty, love, and care, even if the film often focuses on the grand instead of the modest moments. Read full review
75
The Associated PressLindsey BahrAug 23, 2022
Miller gets to play in a wide array of cultures as the djinn skips through time, all with their own shimmering palettes and fairy tale hyperrealism. Read full review
75
Slant MagazineDerek SmithAug 22, 2022
George Miller’s film is a passionate exploration of how image-making is inextricable from storytelling. Read full review
75
The PlaylistCharles BramescoMay 21, 2022
The cumulative merits on display in Miller’s museum of amazement, from the whiz-bang recreations of freakified old-world grandeur to the humbler miracles shared between two wayward souls, we hang on every word of the narration — as sure a sign of a well-spun yarn as any. Read full review
70
Paste MagazineJesse HassengerAug 25, 2022
In its loopy, beguiling, occasionally befuddling way, Three Thousand Years of Longing feels like it’s trying—and sometimes failing—to sum something up about Miller’s own history of loving strange movie magic. Read full review
70
Vanity FairRichard LawsonMay 20, 2022
It’s a curious film, messy in all its ambition but consistently transfixing, an earnest labor of love—and one about love. Read full review
67
The Film StageRory O'ConnorMay 23, 2022
As swings go, Three Thousand Years of Longing is a miss, but there is something infectious about Miller’s confidence here: you’re never too far from an idea to enjoy. Read full review
65
ABC NewsPeter TraversAug 26, 2022
This romantic fantasy from visionary director George Miller is all over the place structurally, but odds are you won't be too bothered given the sparks ignited by Tilda Swinton and Idris Elba as a magical djinn hellbent on granting her three wishes. Read full review
63
LarsenOnFilmJosh LarsenSep 1, 2022
Miller and cinematographer John Seale deliver some stunning tableaus, especially in The Djinn’s lush memories, but it all begins to feel as ephemeral as the spectral, CGI dust that swirls out of the movie’s various bottles. In short I appreciated the craft, but never felt the longing. Read full review
63
Boston GlobeMark FeeneyAug 24, 2022
Even if it ultimately doesn’t quite take off, it’s a marvel of craft and care and detail. It’s also not quite like anything else. Read full review
63
The Seattle TimesQina LiuAug 24, 2022
Three Thousand Years of Longing is a cerebral film that barters in riddles. It’s a cautionary fairy tale about wishful thinking. It’s a flawed, but intoxicating kaleidoscope of stories. If only the film's ending were as strong as its beginning and middle. Read full review
60
Little White LiesCatherine BraySep 3, 2022
There will be many people for whom it is love at first sight, and people in whom it provokes a wild allergic reaction. Read full review
60
The Irish TimesDonald ClarkeSep 2, 2022
Miller has, as directors often will, followed up a succès d’estime — this is his first film since Mad Max: Fury Road — with something of a personal folly. Better that than bland boilerplate, but Three Thousand Years of Longing grates as often as it charms. Read full review
60
The GuardianPeter BradshawSep 1, 2022
It’s a garrulous, yet almost static movie, and weirdly for a film about narrative there is no single overwhelmingly important storyline. Read full review
60
The New YorkerAnthony LaneAug 29, 2022
The movie, though a frantic treat for the retina, is also oddly inactive. Read full review
60
Rolling StoneK. Austin CollinsAug 26, 2022
When it’s working, Three Thousand Years is an old curiosity shop of a movie, a cache of curios and strange conceits, many of which, when the movie isn’t working, are submerged into the bland uniformity of Miller’s stylistic approach to large stretches of this film. Read full review
60
SlateDana StevensAug 25, 2022
For the most part, Three Thousand Years of Longing reads not as an unintended allegory of contemporary race relations but as a thoughtful, melancholy, and sometimes mordantly funny celebration of the time-and-space-collapsing power of storytelling. Read full review
60
Los Angeles TimesKatie WalshAug 25, 2022
Miller asks the audience to level up its existential exploration, posing questions about the purpose of storytelling and, perhaps, about the lack of magic in our technological, science-driven world. But the film doesn’t offer any concrete answers, leaving us adrift in a sea of provocative queries. For a film about narrative, it meanders, and loses focus. Read full review
60
Arizona RepublicBill GoodykoontzAug 23, 2022
Thus, despite being stuffed full of inventive, near-visionary visuals, “Three Thousand Years of Longing” winds up feeling a little incomplete. The story lacks the one thing the djinn promises: magic. Read full review
60
TimeStephanie ZacharekMay 23, 2022
The highest purpose of movies is to give us more than what we think we want, and even though Three Thousand Years of Longing offers plenty of rapturous imagery, the arrow it shoots from its mighty bow just doesn’t pierce as it should. Read full review
60
Los Angeles TimesJustin ChangMay 22, 2022
The individual tales, though ornamented with all manner of fabulous CGI curlicues, are overly busy and only mildly involving, and “Three Thousand Years of Longing” ultimately feels arch and encumbered in that self-conscious way that stories about storytelling often are. Read full review
60
IGNRyan LestonMay 22, 2022
While Tilda Swinton and Idris Elba give it their all, neither can save the film from collapsing in the third act. An unconvincing conclusion undermines a far better first half which sees Swinton and Elba waxing philosophical in a hotel room. Read full review
60
BBCNicholas BarberMay 21, 2022
If a screenplay is going to be fixated on the history and purpose of storytelling, the stories within it have to be better. Read full review
60
The GuardianXan BrooksMay 21, 2022
Three Thousand Years of Longing is guileless, open-hearted, like an antiquarian bookseller’s dream of The Thief of Baghdad. It’s so defiantly out of step with fashion that there’s finally something faintly glorious about it. Read full review
60
VarietyPeter DebrugeMay 20, 2022
These days, audiences are so savvy about the tricks at a filmmaker’s disposal that the movie’s greatest achievement is that it seizes our imagination (or perhaps that’s our attention deficit disorder being so brusquely manhandled) and holds it for the better part of two hours, defying us to anticipate what comes next. Read full review
60
Screen DailyTim GriersonMay 20, 2022
Hardly lacking ambition or verve, this amped-up fairy tale comes complete with social commentary and a grownup examination of the consequences of seeking connection, but the episodic, intermittently engaging saga frustrates more than it enchants. Read full review
60
Total FilmJordan FarleyMay 20, 2022
George Miller combines myth, magic, and romance to mixed effect in a visually dazzling adult fairytale starring a committed Swinton and Elba. Read full review
50
The A.V. ClubLeigh MonsonAug 25, 2022
Three Thousand Years Of Longing unfortunately undercuts its own effectiveness as a singular piece, presenting less as a unified vision of an auteur director than a scattershot assemblage of motifs, philosophies, and themes in search of a spine to hold them together. Read full review
50
The New York TimesManohla DargisAug 25, 2022
Despite Miller’s talent and feverish enthusiasm, and the gravitational pull of his stars, the movie’s colorful parts just whir and stop, a pinwheel in unsteady wind. Read full review
50
Chicago Sun-TimesRichard RoeperAug 24, 2022
Three Thousand Years of Longing actually ends on a creative high note, but the path to that conclusion is filled with muddled adventures that play like something out of a 1980s B-movie. We find ourselves longing for the credits to roll. Read full review
40
The Observer (UK)Wendy IdeSep 3, 2022
There’s something rather sterile and bloodless in the film’s approach, with its synthetic and soul-sappingly clean-looking CGI. Plus there’s the palpable lack of chemistry between the leads: a kind of brisk civility rather than the ache of eternal longing the title promises. Read full review
40
The IndependentClarisse LoughreySep 1, 2022
What’s surprising is that, though Miller’s imagination remains entirely untarnished, Three Thousand Years of Longing stands in defiance of all of Fury Road’s sagest lessons. The film sags where it should speed; it mumbles when it should pronounce; it narrows when it should expand. Read full review
40
Austin ChronicleJenny NulfAug 23, 2022
Where Mad Max: Fury Road was lean, Three Thousand Years of Longing feels like a rough draft that should have stayed in a dusty bin somewhere in the middle of a tourist shop. Read full review
40
Time OutPhil de SemlyenMay 23, 2022
A romantic fantasia set in Istanbul, George Miller’s mystical confection operates like the genie at its heart: it’s full of visual sleight-of-hand and boasts plenty of storytelling power, but soon disappears from your mind in a puff of smoke. Read full review
40
The TelegraphRobbie CollinMay 21, 2022
While Swinton and Elba make smooth work of the fairy-tale-toned dialogue, they simply lack the chemistry to make their tryst convince as romance. And the fantasy flashbacks too often sink into chintz. Read full review
40
The Hollywood ReporterDavid RooneyMay 20, 2022
While there’s a liberal sprinkling of humor, the mysteries it conjures are windy and academic, though not the kind of academic that stands up to scrutiny. Read full review
38
Movie NationRoger MooreAug 18, 2022
Miller’s film, based on an A.S. Byatt short story, is long and feels incomplete, weighty without much psychological or intellectual heft, colorful but rarely dazzling and never whimsical enough. Read full review
37
Washington PostAnn HornadayAug 24, 2022
What should be a cinematic journey into amazement and otherworldly adventure instead becomes a tedious, word-heavy slog — all the more disappointing considering the director in charge is George Miller. Read full review
25
San Francisco ChronicleG. Allen JohnsonAug 25, 2022
There’s more to life than just stories and really, Djinn and Alithea just need to get a life. Read full review
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