Village Voice by Alan Scherstuhl

Colombian director Ciro Guerra's Embrace of the Serpent is a legitimate stunner, a river-trip that will mesmerize and jack with you, leaving you not quite certain, at its end, how to go about the rest of your day.

The Playlist by Jessica Kiang

It's an absorbing, even thrilling head trip. It is a Heart-of-Darkness voyage of discovery. It is a lament for all the lost plants and peoples of the world.

The New York Times by Stephen Holden

Viewed largely through the aggrieved eyes of a shaman whose tribe is on the verge of extinction at the hands of Colombian rubber barons in the 19th and 20th centuries, Embrace of the Serpent, a fantastical mixture of myth and historical reality, shatters lingering illusions of first-world culture as more advanced than any other, except technologically.

The Guardian by Jordan Hoffman

Ciro Guerra’s gorgeous picture just has that ripped-from-your-dreams sensibility, where surprising turns float alongside a story you feel like you’ve known your whole life. Embrace of the Serpent is the type of film we’re always searching for, yet seems so obvious once we’ve found it.

Consequence by Collin Brennan

This is that rare film that has the power to transform, to shake one’s belief system so thoroughly that one feels like a slightly different person walking out of the theater.

Entertainment Weekly by Chris Nashawaty

While its strange rhythms may not be for everyone, it does provide something unusual in today’s movies: a truly original experience for the mind and the soul.

The Film Stage by Michael Snydel

The movie is more about how outsiders – whether consciously or unconsciously – exert control. The repercussions of colonialism hover over the text even as these characters have “noble” intentions.

Wall Street Journal by Joe Morgenstern

The narrative jumps back and forth between the two time frames, rather than telling Karamakate’s story in linear fashion, and these juxtapositions deepen the film’s resonance.

Los Angeles Times by Kenneth Turan

Beautiful, strange, disturbing, Embrace of the Serpent is a film with a lot on its mind.

Time by Stephanie Zacharek

The majesty of nature is Embrace of the Serpent’s true star, and Guerra captures the glory of every leaf, every inch of sky, in pearlescent black-and-white as luminous as the lining of a clamshell. In Guerra’s eyes, as in Karamakate’s, the forest is magic itself—and it’s no less remarkable for having sprung from something as lowly as the earth’s soil.

Screen Daily by Tim Grierson

The going can be a bit slow at first, but the interweaving narratives, which comment on (and sometimes echo) each other, begin to develop a hypnotic grandeur. It’s a hell of a trip.

Screen International by Tim Grierson

The going can be a bit slow at first, but the interweaving narratives, which comment on (and sometimes echo) each other, begin to develop a hypnotic grandeur. It’s a hell of a trip.

The Hollywood Reporter by Jordan Mintzer

If the film runs a tad too long, especially in its second half, Embrace of the Serpent is still an absorbing account of indigenous tribes facing up to colonial incursions, revealing how Westerners are in many ways far behind the native peoples they conquer.

CineVue by Ben Nicholson

The languorous pacing - particularly in the middle section - may lessen the impact on audiences somewhat, and the two-hour runtime seems a little much, but this is important, harrowing and deeply heartfelt lament that deserves to be seen and most definitely heard.

Slant Magazine by Steve Macfarlane

Ciro Guerra's excesses in arthouse symmetry tend to arrive in the service of a just and angry correctivism.

Variety by Justin Chang

The film would nonetheless benefit from occasional tightening, its digressions and longueurs occasionally moving beyond the lyrical and into the belabored. Nevertheless, as a vision of the past, “Embrace of the Serpent” offers a stately, striking panorama and an entirely persuasive one.

The A.V. Club by Ignatiy Vishnevetsky

One just wishes it weren’t doing all the work for the viewer.