80
Alexander Sokurov’s riff on Goethe’s tragedy is a bewildering but blazingly styled fever-dream epic.
What are people saying?
What are critics saying?
63
Though its ballast of jokes and spectacle are formidable, it often lurches about at a remote, enigmatic distance
60
Time Out London by Dave Calhoun
It has a rigorous, even unrelenting, grey, green and brown palette and, narratively, it’s tough to penetrate.
80
The Hollywood Reporter by Deborah Young
This is far from a dull, academic work and the fast-paced talk is matched by swiftly changing scenes full of vibrant visuals. Life bubbles out of each frame in a grungy, foul-smelling rush.
100
The A.V. Club by Ignatiy Vishnevetsky
It manages to convey a desire for power in abstract terms, divorced from material gain or a need to be admired. What’s more, it manages to do it with energy and a good deal of weird humor.
40
[A] film with a maddeningly opaque narrative and a brutalizing cascade of nonstop verbiage.
80
Often, Faust plays like a lost cousin to Andrei Tarkovsky’s haunted Stalker (1979), catnip for the slow-and-low crowd. Settle in, because this requires your charity, but you’ll dream it all back up the next night.
75
Portland Oregonian by Marc Mohan
As usual, the director is a wizard at camera movement and more than willing to plunge his audience into unpleasantness.
80
Village Voice by Michael Atkinson
Faust is not your great-granddaddy's selling-your-soul fable, but something new, a dreamy immersion into the messiness of myth, where hubris and desire can get lost in the chaos of time and retelling.
60
The Guardian by Peter Bradshaw
This Faust is part bad dream, part music-less opera: sometimes muted and numb, though with hallucinatory flashes of fear.