The Guardian by Peter Bradshaw

Only God Forgives will, understandably, have people running for the exits, and running for the hills. It is very violent, but Winding Refn's bizarre infernal creation, an entire created world of fear, really is gripping. Every scene, every frame, is executed with pure formal brilliance.

Empire by Damon Wise

Experimental and uncompromising, Winding Refn and Gosling’s Drive follow-up is a tripped-out riff on the crime family movie in which The Grifters — literally — go to hell.

Miami Herald by René Rodríguez

The movie contains little in terms of traditional action, and Refn never uses it in a rousing or exciting manner, either. That would break the nightmarish spell this strange, beautiful film casts on the viewer. A mother’s love has never been this ruinous.

Chicago Sun-Times by Richard Roeper

This is one of the most shocking and one of the best movies of the year.

The Playlist by Jessica Kiang

Refn has consistently delivered films that have subverted our expectations, and has proven himself a master at stylistic self-reinvention, but this feels like the first time he’s gone back to any particular well.

Slant Magazine by Jesse Cataldo

It takes the basic form of the revenge flick and dips it in tar, making for a movie that comes out sticky, nasty, and black.

The Hollywood Reporter by David Rooney

Only God Forgives is a hypnotic fugue on themes of violence and retribution, drenched in corrosive reds.

The Telegraph by Robbie Collin

Only God Forgives is the spectacle of a brilliant young director spinning out in style. It’s a beautiful disaster.

Time Out by Joshua Rothkopf

Crushingly, the dependably perverse art-action director Nicolas Winding Refn has finally made a boring movie.

The Dissolve by Scott Tobias

Only God Forgives suffers from the disconnect between its stylistic high-art archness and its content’s pulp gratuitousness. Refn gives every sequence a hushed consideration, but there’s rarely a sense that he’s earned it with equivalent profundity in theme.

Film.com by Jordan Hoffman

There’s no way to overstate the gorgeous look of this film, but the mannered dialogue and deliberateness of pace becomes less of an homage to Asian revenge films than a parody.

IndieWire by Eric Kohn

The movie is like one thin satiric lark inexplicably slowed down to the point of lethargy.

The New Yorker by Anthony Lane

However mystifying, or downright boring, you find the result, rest assured that the Refn faithful will swoon. Peace be with them.

Time by Richard Corliss

The collision of violent spasms and art-film ennui leave the viewer’s brain bloody but unfilled.

Variety by Peter Debruge

The wallpaper emotes more than Ryan Gosling does in Only God Forgives, an exercise in supreme style and minimal substance.

Time Out London by Dave Calhoun

Style over substance doesn’t really tell the half of it: you can bathe a corpse in groovy light and dress it in an expensive suit, but in the end that rotting smell just won’t go away.