90
The New York Times by Ben Kenigsberg
The puzzle-box narrative only grows more hypnotic with repeat viewings. The movie insists on having the audience, like Ventura, pass through madness to reach catharsis.
What are people saying?
What are critics saying?
80
It's a singular and deeply resonant work that finds a mesmerising poetry amidst the chiaroscuro rubble of post-colonial Portugal.
60
Horse Money is an ordeal, but you’ll be glad that Costa was there to help Ventura’s words find their way through the cracks.
91
A rich, almost impermeably strange example of Costa's slow-burn approach to abstract storytelling, Horse Money is more subdued and cryptic than its predecessors, to the point where it might be more appropriately described as a cinematic tone poem.
83
The A.V. Club by Ignatiy Vishnevetsky
Sleepwalking through a role is just about the worst insult you could level at an actor, professional or otherwise, but that’s more or less what Ventura — again playing a poetic representation of himself — does here.
88
RogerEbert.com by Matt Zoller Seitz
As gorgeous and impenetrable as a dream.
70
The Hollywood Reporter by Neil Young
A phantasmagorical vision of psychological purgatory, Horse Money (Cavalo dinheiro) will enrapture some while leaving others dangling in frustrated limbo.
83
The Playlist by Nikola Grozdanovic
Tremendously evocative and inherently enchanting, Horse Money is one of the year’s most profound films and an essential step forward for both Ventura the Cape Verdean, and Pedro Costa the artist.
100
Working about as far as possible from the commercial mainstream of the movie business, Costa has again made a singular docu-fiction hybrid that defies classification as readily as it reimagines the possibilities of cinema for the post-spectacle, post-theatrical era.
88
Slant Magazine by Steve Macfarlane
Costa's storytelling is illusory at best, but Horse Money's self-contradictions are communicated not via plot half as much as in scenography, even in the costuming.