Critic scores range from 0 to 100, with higher scores indicating more favorable reviews.
Of all the movies culminating in a rite of exorcism, Romanian writer-director Cristian Mungiu's remarkable Beyond the Hills stands alone. Read full review
It’s a deceptively impersonal style, because Beyond the Hills seethes with astonishment and rage at a broken society marooned between the 21st century and the 16th. Read full review
Beyond the Hills is an arthouse film from Romania, yet, in its slow, lurching progress toward a tragic exorcism, it is a stylistic nephew of America's "The Exorcist." Read full review
It's tempting to see Beyond the Hills solely as an indictment of religion, but the film is more ambitious than that. Ignorance and superstition aren't confined to the convent; people in town, including the cops, drop casual references to witchcraft as if it were part of everyday life. The broader subject is possession by primitive ideas. Read full review
The deliberate pace Mungiu employs in this incredible work is so engrossing and quietly heartbreaking that its philosophical ending may come as a shock. Read full review
The movie deals with themes of secular and religious love, of how they may intersect and diverge, that are suggestive of Bergman or Carl Theodor Dreyer. Read full review
Exorcist junkies should look elsewhere. Instead of spinning heads and projectile puke, Mungiu offers nuance and provocation. The result is quietly devastating. Read full review
Based on reports of a real 2005 incident, it is a film that asks its viewer to consider the nature of good and evil, love and trust - and trust that turns into something like blind faith. Read full review
Ultimately, the bleak universe conjured by Beyond the Hills is more compelling than what happens in it. Read full review
Beyond the Hills is less fun than any film about lesbian nuns and their psychotic ex-lovers ought to be. But it is an engrossingly serious work, and confirms Mungiu as a maturing talent with more universal stories to tell than those defined by Romania’s recent political past. Read full review
4.5
Dave White Profile
The "devils," inside and otherwise... Read full review