The Loneliest Planet
The Loneliest Planet Image
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Metascore
76 out of 100

Generally favorable reviews - based on 19 Critics What's this?

User Score
5.9 out of 10

Mixed or average reviews- based on 14 Ratings

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  • Starring: Bidzina Gujabidze, Gael García Bernal, Hani Furstenberg
  • Summary: Alex and Nica are young, in love and engaged to be married. The summer before their wedding, they are backpacking in the Caucasus Mountains in Georgia. The couple hire a local guide to lead them on a camping trek, and the three set off into a stunning wilderness, a landscape that is both overwhelmingly open and frighteningly closed. Walking for hours, they trade anecdotes, play games to pass the time of moving through space. And then, a momentary misstep, a gesture that takes only two or three seconds, a gesture that’s over almost as soon as it begins. But once it is done, it can’t be undone. Once it is done, it threatens to undo everything the couple believed about each other and about themselves. All the while, they are not alone. They are always with the guide, who witnesses their every move. The film plays off the relationship between young travelers and the places they travel to, between guide and guided. But at heart, it is a love story -- a tale about betrayal, both accidental and deliberate, about masculinity, failure and the ambiguities of forgiveness. (IFC Films)… Expand

Critic Reviews

Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 15 out of 19
  2. Mixed: 4 out of 19
  3. Negative: 0 out of 19
  1. The A.V. Club
    Reviewed by: Scott Tobias
    Oct 24, 2012
    100
    The film feels as beautifully calibrated as a great piece of short fiction, only with visual accents and emphases filling in for the prose. It's a relationship movie where the most important exchanges remain unspoken.
  2. Wall Street Journal
    Reviewed by: Joe Morgenstern
    Oct 25, 2012
    80
    Blink your eyes and you've lost track of them, but one of the interesting things about the experience is that you don't want to lose track; though the film moves as slowly as its hikers, it demands, and deserves, to be watched closely. (The cinematographer was Inti Briones.)
  3. Los Angeles Times
    Reviewed by: Betsy Sharkey
    Oct 25, 2012
    80
    Bernal and Furstenberg exist within this meditative space with all the ease and unease of a couple still trying each other on for size. The forces that push and pull them feel so rooted in reality that if not for the layers of meaning it might seem a complete improvisation.
  4. New York Daily News
    Reviewed by: Joe Neumaier
    Oct 25, 2012
    60
    Writer-director Julia Loktev sustains the tension for long, Antonioni-esque passages that portend something momentous. The film delivers in unexpected ways, and then ponders what it means.

See all 19 Critic Reviews

User Reviews

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Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 3 out of 6
  2. Mixed: 1 out of 6
  3. Negative: 2 out of 6
  1. dante_finn
    9
    One of the most original odd movies that are interesting. Most of the movie is a wordless mature movie that is emotional and physical at the same time
  2. certified_hater
    7
    While it does have something profound to say about relationships and how one moment can make or break them,
  3. BKM
    4
    The Loneliest Planet is a colossal bore that doesn't offer any real payoff of any sort. Yes, the scenery is nice and the film goes to great lengths to accurately depict the ways in which people are unable of communicating with one another, but the bottom line is that this movie doesn't have very much to say and yet it takes an extremely long time to do so.… Expand
  4. iiigoiii
    2
    Please, if I can save you the nearly 2 hours this film takes to make its point, your time won't be wasted like mine. This is a movie based on a short story by Tom Bissell; the movie might have been interesting itself as a short. However it drags on for nearly 2 hours, during which time there are literally only a couple of minutes of important scenes. The rest of the time is devoted to trying to set the mood of the relationship between the characters (which could have been done in minutes, not hours)...which unfortunately fails to be interesting or believable.

    One of the only saving graces of this movie is the incredible Georgian mountain scenery, and even that is reprised many times in virtually identical shots which themselves drag on so long as to be puzzling.    … Expand

See all 6 User Reviews

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