Average Rating: 6.5/10
Reviews Counted: 55
Fresh: 39 | Rotten: 16
No consensus yet.
Average Rating: 6.2/10
Critic Reviews: 11
Fresh: 7 | Rotten: 4
No consensus yet.
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Average Rating: 2.9/5
User Ratings: 14,543
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For years, the fearsome figure known only as One Eye (Mads Mikkelsen - PUSHER, FLAME & CITRON, CASINO ROYALE) has defeated everyone he's encountered, but he's treated more like an animal than a warrior. The only person he has any relationship with is the young boy who brings him food and water daily. Constantly caged and shackled, One Eye has drawn the attention of a new force now sweeping the countryside and displacing the society's leaders: Christians.-- (C) IFC Films
Jul 16, 2010 Wide
Nov 30, 2010
$27.7k
IFC Films
All Critics (55) | Top Critics (11) | Fresh (39) | Rotten (16)
It's a chilly, often slow, uncompromisingly harsh film, but Refn's images will sear your retinas.
If only the pieces added up to an experience that sticks and that didn't finally succumb to a shrug of entropy.
You sometimes wish Refn's gift for Ridley Scott-level mayhem had won the battle over his much iffier Werner Herzog leanings.
It's a trip into a primordial world and primeval sensibilities, and if you're looking to shake off the mall-movie blahs, there are few better places to look.
Mr. Refn, who can pull off stylish brutality (in the Pusher films and Bronson), shows no knack for the kind of visionary, hallucinatory image making that would render Valhalla Rising memorable.
Lots of movies about the Middle Ages can do the mud and blood -- though we sure see a lot of both here -- but in this movie it's like Refn has ripped you out of time and dropped you there.
Mikkelsen verifies that, even without saying a word, he's an unnervingly unhinged presence.
Filled with brutality.
A mad meditation on the primeval nature of man, faith and survival, this is Apocalypse Then, and then some.
Directed in moody and portentous strokes by Nicolas Winding Refn, this is the most abstract Viking movie you'll ever see...
Less Braveheart than Aguirre, The Wrath of God, this evocative Viking tone poem contemplates the convergence between violence and religion.
A Nordic odyssey straight down to Jerusalem
I appreciate Refn for pushing against conventions of rhythm, photography, subject, color, and form, and I don't mind that Valhalla Rising lacks a story so much as I question its reliance on enigmatic hints of some grand, over-arching abstraction.
It's like a gorgeous graphic novel with a protagonist and story that vanish utterly from the mind as soon as the last page is turned.
Aguirre as conceptualized by Jim Jarmusch and executed by Terrence Malick.
This is Aguirre, the Wrath of God, with the despondency jacked to 11.
For an ugly, brutish, überviolent Viking epic, Valhalla Rising is gorgeous, each frame a haunting work of art. Refn's style, though, is unsustainable at feature length.
In the mood for a slower-than-molasses viking movie inspired by spaghetti westerns and samurai swordplay epics. Have we got the flick for YOU!
so formless and arbitrary in meaning that it all borders on pretentiousness
a viking-adventure-cum-acid-trip
Like a John Milius film reduced to its pure, masculine essence and shot through one of Alejandro Jodorowsky's lens filters.
The visual beauty is exceeded only by the gruesomeness of some of the violence...
How could it be? How could one man, Nicolas Refn, direct the best English-language film of 2011 so far ("Drive") and the worst English-language film of 2009 ("Valhalla Rising")? It does not compute. But there you have it. The crazy world of art. "Valhalla Rising" is a laughable stinker. I howled with laughter on at
November 5, 2011
Super Reviewer
An ultra-stylish, dark, moody and intensely brutal epic of bone-chilling power. An impressive, stunning and amazing feast for the eyes and ears that truly stays with you long after it's over. A viking acid-trip that showcases man vs. man, nature, and religon. It's a cool, visually arresting and exhilarating
November 25, 2010Super Reviewer
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