The Guardian by Peter Bradshaw

An arrestingly bizarre experience.

Los Angeles Times by Carlos Aguilar

A towering filmic achievement, Monos pulsates like an inescapable vivid trance, cosmic and terrestrial at once, fantastical and violently stark, about victims and victimizers. Like all dualities, those in this excursion are two bends that belong to the same river.

Austin Chronicle by Marc Savlov

A pure cinematic experience like Monos is a rare and precious gem. Colombian director Landes has created a surreal, sumptuous assault on the senses that’s as lushly beautiful as it is unforgettable.

The Observer (UK) by Mark Kermode

Tonally, the film is mercurial, capturing the multiple realities of its young subjects who are both children and soldiers – the distressing, disorienting dichotomy at the centre of its eerie spell. With skill and sensitivity, Landes manages to capture both sides of their fractured world, evoking empathy without resort to pity.

The Playlist by Joe Blessing

Though Monos feels very contemporary aesthetically, its subjects are timeless: the malleability of group dynamics and how subtle changes can lead to either violence or harmony. It’s a philosophical film with very few words, examining its ideas through powerful images and feelings.

IndieWire by Eric Kohn

Aided by “Under the Skin” composer Micah Levi’s thunderous score, Landes delivers a suspenseful encapsulation of alienated youth enmeshed in pointless battles that can only lead to further destruction.

The A.V. Club by A.A. Dowd

Monos isn’t a social-issue tract, or just a lament for the beasts of no nation. It’s a fever dream of a war drama, caught halfway between realism and the hallucinatory intensity of an ancient fairy tale.

Screen Daily by Tim Grierson

This is a gripping, sometimes hypnotising film in which notions of good and evil are less clear-cut than the urgent desire to stay alive.

The Globe and Mail (Toronto) by Barry Hertz

Monos sinks you into its mud until the dirt stuffs your mouth. You won’t be able to breathe – but you’ll be thanking Landes for the cinematic suffocation all the same.

Original-Cin by Jim Slotek

Monos is an immersive, sweaty, almost hallucinatory experience of hormone-driven anarchy.

Time Out by Joshua Rothkopf

Kids train for guerrilla fighting in a gorgeously atmospheric film that feels like a transmission from the future.

The Telegraph by Tim Robey

There’s a bicep-flexing quality to Landes’s direction, with its bursts of colour and chaos, its conjuration of a surreal experience out of tactile reality. You tumble out of it bruised, bewildered, mesmerised.

CineVue

Nothing short of an aesthete’s dream, a film crammed with visual bravado that at various times echoes Kubrick, Malick, and Coppola’s Apocalypse Now.

The Film Stage by Jordan Raup

The viscerality will surely leave one shaken, though they may question if the unceasing sadistic acts on display are worth the experience.

Slant Magazine by Christopher Gray

Alejandro Landes’s film depicts amorality with minimal curiosity and a surplus of numbing stylistic verve.

The Hollywood Reporter by Keith Uhlich

Even in this fictional context, the line between portraying and exploiting abused innocence gets uncomfortably, offensively blurred.