75
The Globe and Mail (Toronto) by Barry Hertz
The impact of modern vice upon the Wayuu is a captivating tale never told before, and the final few minutes are brutal in the best possible way
What are people saying?
What are critics saying?
79
This is a story about power, but it’s also a story about place. More than that, you’ve really got to see it to believe it.
75
While it never reaches the psychedelic heights of Guerra’s previous effort and relies on a more conventional pattern of events, Birds of Passage delivers another fascinating tone poem about Colombia’s fractured identity.
100
Guerra and Gallego’s film is no dusty period piece, it is wildly alive, yet it reminds us that no matter how modern we are, there are ancient songs our forebears knew whose melodies still rush in our blood. We are not creatures of one era or another or of one place or another, we are only ever birds of passage between our mythic pasts and our unwritten futures, being tossed around by the wind
80
The Guardian by Jordan Hoffman
In the most reductive way, it is another mafia story. But as with their previous film, it is the specificity that counts, and while certain genre tendencies prevent the narrative from truly unmooring, hardly a scene goes by without something fundamentally familiar being rendered in a unique fashion.
80
The Hollywood Reporter by Jordan Mintzer
The drama feels a bit leisurely and distant at times, and the film runs a little long, yet it intelligently and assuredly explores how longstanding traditions can be gradually upended by drugs, money and outside influences.
100
Birds of Passage is an enthralling, powerful statement and lamentation on the drugs trade’s inevitable encroachment upon on indigenous peoples and how gangsters casually destroyed them.
90
Few films have captured quite so powerfully the tension between the old and new worlds — a feat Birds of Passage accomplishes while simultaneously allowing audiences to channel the Wayuu’s surrealistic view of their surroundings, where spirits walk the earth, and wise women interpret their dreams.
91
The Film Stage by Rory O'Connor
As effectively violent and entertaining as Birds may be, there is a real current of bitterness and tragedy running through it. That bitterness speaks not of the physical colonization we saw with the conquistadors and rubber barons of Serpent, but more of a sort of colonization of ideas.
90
Screen International by Wendy Ide
Notwithstanding the bleak trajectory down which any film about blood feuds must spiral, this is an engrossing narco-thriller which deftly balances the storytelling tradition of the Wayuu with the genre conventions of the crime movie and the western .