Battle in Heaven Critic Reviews

Reygadas asks audiences to plunge headlong into his chaotic vision of the world, no questions asked but complete trust required. Not everyone is going to be willing or able to take this leap of faith, but those who do go along with Reygadas may well feel they have come away having undergone a stunning revelatory experience.Read the full review

Working again with Diego Martínez Vignatti, the cinematographer for "Japón," the director doesn't just seize our attention; he commands it - forcing us into a world of terror and beauty.Read the full review

Battle In Heaven is like a serious of artful photographs, except that Reygadas also moves the camera in astonishing and unusual ways, swooping around the conventional x- and y-axes while teasing the audience with what he's about to show. He's got an astonishing technique. Here's hoping that someday he'll use it to make a movie.Read the full review

With relentless and ruminative deliberateness, Reygadas shows us a Mexico City that seems to be decaying from the inside out.Read the full review

Both intensely exciting for its cinematic inventions and terribly uninvolving on emotional and dramatic levels.Read the full review

Proves to be a disappointing turn-off. The film deliberately works against most cinematic expectations.Read the full review

A notorious opinion divider last year at Cannes, Battle in Heaven is less about heaven or battle, or hell on earth, or the soul of Mexico, and all too much about gawking. And so, for all the ''shock'' of the movie's clinical carnality, this battle is lost.Read the full review