50
Intermittently playful, consistently confounding, finally petrified, it's a film of fussy, cultivated austerity.
What are people saying?
What are critics saying?
70
The Hollywood Reporter by Deborah Young
The last sequence takes the esoterism one step farther, in a beautiful ending that seems to link European wealth to those long-ago events in Latin America.
63
New York Post by Farran Smith Nehme
With ravishing landscapes, violent political allegory and a glacial narrative that takes an abrupt left turn in the third act: Lisandro Alonso’s Jauja resolutely checks every 2015 art-film box.
83
The A.V. Club by Ignatiy Vishnevetsky
Everything signals birth—of Argentina, cinema, the nuclear family—until Dinesen descends into a womb-like cave and Jauja takes a hard left turn into enigma. Even the title is a mystery, the Spanish byword for a land of plenty.
88
Other films of this ilk use widescreen composition to highlight a terrifying existential void, but these cramped frames tend to produce the nutty energy of cabin fever.
58
Perversely episodic, strangely empty, and unfolding in a series of beautifully composed but static wide shots (giving us the unusual experience of literally yearning for a close-up), the film is a test of patience.
60
It is a demanding watch, but at the same time, Alonso's latest has a bizarre, beguiling quality which drifts towards the sublime even if it never quite gets to its destination.
80
In Jauja, Alsonso saves his most dazzling trick for last: a sudden plunge down a Lynchian rabbit hole that should, by all means, rupture the film’s hypnotizing atmosphere, but instead pulls the viewer in even deeper.
100
Village Voice by Stephanie Zacharek
Even beyond its charismatic star, Jauja is captivating, not least because of Alonso's ability to capture the cruel beauty of the natural landscape — you can almost see the earth itself refusing to accept European imperialism blithely.