80
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.
What are people saying?
What are critics saying?
38
It broods along as if it's expressing something monumentally important with each slow-as-molasses camera move.
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
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.
75
Chicago Sun-Times by Richard Roeper
Highly entertaining high camp.
38
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.
63
By the last battle, you may find yourself hoping that at least one person escapes without being macheted to death.
40
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.