Critics Scoreboard
All critic scores are converted to a 100-point scale. If a critic does not indicate a score, we assign a score based on the general impression given by the text of the review. Learn more...
Average Critic Score:
64
(31 sources)
64
(31 sources)
-
100
Los Angeles Times
A thoroughly original accomplishment of a high artistic order, Northfork features flawless, spare production design by Ichelle Spitzig and the Polish brothers' father, Del, and cinematographer M. David Mullen's striking images slide effortlessly into Dalí-like Surrealism. Read Full Review » -
100
Christian Science Monitor
The movie elegantly mingles drama, comedy, and low-key spiritual resonance. It also has a splendid cast. Read Full Review » -
100
Chicago Sun-Times
There has never been a movie quite like Northfork… The movie is visionary and elegiac, more a fable than a story, and frame by frame, it looks like a portfolio of spaces so wide, so open, that men must wonder if they have a role beneath such indifferent skies. Read Full Review » -
90
The Onion (A.V. Club)
With their third film, the Polish brothers find their authorial voice, resulting in a lyrical work whose free-floating Lynchian weirdness coalesces into an unexpectedly touching movie. Read Full Review » -
90
The New York Times
There is nothing quite like this movie, and I'm not altogether sure there is much more to it than its lovely peculiarity. But at a moment when so many films strive to be obvious and interchangeable as possible, it is gratifying to find one that is puzzling, subtle and handmade. Read Full Review » -
90
Variety
Love it or hate it, Northfork is a cinematic vision (visually and textually) unlike any with which most moviegoers, even arthouse regulars, will be familiar. Read Full Review » -
89
Austin Chronicle
Gets under your skin with its graceful edits and poetic elisions, lovely performances, and faded imagery. Read Full Review » -
88
New York Post
Strictly a love it-or-hate-it proposition, it requires viewers to work at a movie with a narrative that could support at least half a dozen interpretations. Read Full Review » -
83
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
A love letter to the state of Montana and a landscape that is biblical in its desolation and splendor. Read Full Review » -
80
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80
Dallas Observer
Northfork may be doomed, but the Polish brothers and cinematographer M. David Mullen (who worked with the brothers on their previous features, "Twin Falls, Idaho" and "Jackpot") make the place feel like heaven on earth. Read Full Review » -
80
Washington Post
Isn't everyone's cup of tea -- as the Polishes admit in a clever bit of critical preemption -- but it possesses an undeniable, haunting grandeur. Read Full Review » -
75
Boston Globe
This is very much the bargain that Northfork offers an audience: Buy into the brothers' elegiac meditation on angels, Eden, and the death of American innocence or sit back and scoff at it as so much David Lynch lite. Read Full Review » -
75
Charlotte Observer
I predict Northfork will give you food for reflection or a case of the hives. I stopped scratching 20 minutes into the movie, settled into its lulling rhythm and floated away into the Polish brothers' flaky, austere dreamworld. Read Full Review » -
75
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
Just when the movie seems set to soar, there's a drag factor -- it keeps getting weighed down, if not sunk, by an anchor of ponderousness. Read Full Review » -
75
Chicago Tribune
It's a film that is mystifying and haunting -- a cool, brotherly vision of the last day and the coming flood, of American dreams and the vanishing frontier. Read Full Review » -
67
Portland Oregonian
There's real craft here and a vision that's nothing if not unique. Read Full Review » -
63
Premiere
Northfork feels like the work of a couple of ardent art students who, for whatever reson, are very keen on pleasing their teacher. [July/August 2003, p. 23] Read Full Review » -
60
Salon.com
Just about gets us off the ground on its dreamy, feathery angel wings; it just doesn't have the strength or the stamina to keep us aloft. Read Full Review » -
60
Village Voice
Northfork's overall ponderousness prevents it from becoming a transcendent fictive poem on the violent domestication of the West. Read Full Review » -
60
Empire
Every tiny aspect of the universe here comes from the filmmakers' imagination, and while this occasionally leaves us bemused, the film as a whole is a magical, otherworldly trip into undiscovered areas of cinema. Read Full Review » -
50
ReelViews
Moody and atmospheric -- a study in tone over plot and pacing over characterization. Unfortunately, in devoting all of their efforts towards the film's look and feel, co-creators Mark and Michael Polish have crafted a motion picture that is static, occasionally opaque, and, worst of all, boring. Read Full Review » -
50
USA Today
The cinematic equivalent of an elaborate and poetically constructed non sequitur. Read Full Review » -
50
LA Weekly
So stuck is the movie inside the heads and hearts of its indisputably gifted makers, it never quite makes the leap into ours. Read Full Review » -
50
New York Daily News
An improvement over "Jackpot," but not much. The best thing about it is Nolte, playing the grizzled priest as an angel in his own right. Everyone else- - save the young boy playing the orphan -- seems to be in on a joke we just don't get. Read Full Review » -
40
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38
Baltimore Sun
American art movies rarely come fancier or emptier than Northfork, a down-home arabesque made of angel fluff. Read Full Review » -
38
Miami Herald
An insufferably artsy, pretentious work, the sort of picture that gives art films a bad name. Read Full Review » -
30
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25
-
16
Entertainment Weekly
It has that vintage Polish pace, their signature arch pomposity and rhythmless weirdness, only this time the brothers had to go and make a cosmic allegory of American dreams. Read Full Review »
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