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The Ardor(El Ardor)

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Argentina, Mexico, Brazil · 2014
Rated R · 1h 41m
Director Pablo Fendrik
Starring Gael García Bernal, Alice Braga, Claudio Tolcachir, Chico Diaz
Genre Western, Drama

Kaí is a mysterious shaman who emerges from the Rio Paraná to help a poor farmer and his daughter, who are threatened by a band of cold-blooded mercenaries hired to force them to sell their land.

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What are critics saying?

80

CineVue by Ben Nicholson

Clearly modelled on a familiar western narrative, Pablo Fendrik's The Burning (2014) both embraces and playfully inverts the tropes that define its genre classification.

50

The Hollywood Reporter by David Rooney

While there's some novelty in using genre conventions to contemplate the sin of taming a wild frontier, the reverential film takes itself far too seriously; it ends up being neither sufficiently inventive nor revisionist to surmount its archetypal cliches.

50

Variety by Peter Debruge

Fendrik seems more interested in the rich jungle surroundings than in the generic human struggle in the foreground, alternating between clunky setpieces (such as the sitting-duck rowboat shootout) and long stretches where the characters say nothing.

50

Miami Herald by Rene Rodriguez

Ardor is never boring, but it’s never all that engaging, either. Here is a movie that ends with a can’t-miss scenario — a siege on a farmhouse in which the heroes are vastly outnumbered and outgunned — yet still fails to ever quicken your pulse.

38

Movie Nation by Roger Moore

Ardor, in the end, has little ardor, or originality or magic about it. It’s just a mundane C-movie action picture that tries to pass itself off as something deeper.

40

Village Voice by Simon Abrams

Too bad that Ardor's arrhythmic editing and glacial pacing make it impossible to get lost in its jungles — or to invest in its pseudo-mystical ambiance.

40

Time Out London by Tom Huddleston

Writer-director Pablo Fendrik takes the whole thing terribly seriously, punctuating the action with ponderous slo-mo and laughably pompous discussions about Bernal’s spirit jaguar.

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