Leviathan
Leviathan Image
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Metascore
83 out of 100

Universal acclaim - based on 11 Critics What's this?

User Score
5.6 out of 10

Mixed or average reviews- based on 11 Ratings

Your Score
0 out of 10
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  • Summary: Filmed off the coast of New Bedford, Massachusetts, the country’s largest fishing port with over 500 ships sailing from its harbor every month, Leviathan follows one such vessel, a hulking groundfish trawler, into the surrounding murky black waters. Filmmakers Lucien Castaing-Taylor (Sweetgtgrass) and Verena Paravel (Foreign Parts) use a dozen cameras to present a vivid representation of the work, the sea, the machinery and the players, both human and marine. [Cinema Guild]
    … Expand

Critic Reviews

Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 9 out of 11
  2. Mixed: 2 out of 11
  3. Negative: 0 out of 11
  1. Village Voice
    Reviewed by: Melissa Anderson
    Feb 26, 2013
    100
    Plunging viewers into the thick of chaos, Leviathan explodes the antiquated paradigm of the documentary or ethnographic film, whose mission has traditionally been to educate or elucidate, to create something that seizes us, never letting us forget just how disordered the world is. This may be the greatest lesson any nonfiction film can teach us.
  2. The Hollywood Reporter
    Reviewed by: Stephen Dalton
    Feb 22, 2013
    100
    A highly original film of uncompromising, other-worldly beauty. Leviathan demands to be seen, even if it means you never eat seafood again.
  3. The New York Times
    Reviewed by: A.O. Scott
    Feb 28, 2013
    80
    Leviathan, a product of the Sensory Ethnography Lab at Harvard, offers not information but immersion: 90 minutes of wind, water, grinding machinery and piscine agony.
  4. Los Angeles Times
    Reviewed by: Gary Goldstein
    May 10, 2013
    60
    Though it's a decidedly arty piece, Leviathan, named after the biblical sea creature, also lacks much in the way of traditional beauty or splendor. However, the immersive shots of those swooping and circling sea gulls are quite something.

See all 11 Critic Reviews

User Reviews

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Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 0 out of 2
  2. Mixed: 0 out of 2
  3. Negative: 2 out of 2
  1. Savvy
    0
    This film was lazy, inartistic, intentionally annoying and massively indulgent. The shots were mostly shaky head cams on the fishermen often too dark to see anything. Or the camera was dangled pell-mell in the wake and the audience watched long stretches (like 5 minutes with no cutaways) of churning bubbles. Or the cam was dropped in a pen of sloshing fish for 15 minutes--no music, no voice over, often no discernible images. The quality of filmmaking is the equivalent of when you leave your video camera on by accident and it bounces along by your leg filming the ground? That boring, throw-away less-than-B-roll mess? Leviathan. There were tiny snatches of beauty; the first shots of the birds were stunning--until they went on and on and on and then were repeated later in the film in the same hammeringly repetitive manner. Augh! Not "avant garde" but truly awful posing as important.

    I love thoughtful docs and entertaining avant garde pieces... but this was the most punishing film to sit through, with so few moments of clarity, it made me angry. I pity the poor film students who will have to endure this exercise in bludgeoning boredom.    … Expand

See all 2 User Reviews

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