Critic Reviews
| 100 |
LA Weekly
Japón, isn’t just the wildest eruption of the current Mexican film boom, it's the most fascinating new picture I've seen this year.
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| 90 |
Los Angeles Times
Some filmmakers give us dreams and false worlds in which we can find refuge. For others, though, like the young Mexican filmmaker Carlos Reygadas, the movies aren't an escape from the world but a way more deeply into it.
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| 88 |
New York Post
Doesn't have the crossover appeal of the Mexican sexcapade "Y Tu Mama Tambien," but it does herald the arrival of an audacious young filmmaker. We can't wait to see what he does next.
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| 88 |
Chicago Tribune
The work of a remarkable new talent. By the movie's towering, final tracking shot, this imaginative, dazzling film achieves distinction.
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| 80 |
Variety
Its powerfully visual storytelling delivers great rewards as the meditative drama moves into increasingly complex, at times confrontational territory.
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| 80 |
Village Voice
A notably confident and achieved debut.
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| 75 |
Boston Globe
This crudely powerful film is a throwback. Unfolding at an elliptical pace that feels like a revelation, or tedium, or both, Japon recalls the glory days of 1970s art-house filmmaking.
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| 75 |
Christian Science Monitor
It's an engrossing and inventive drama despite its flaws.
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| 70 |
The New York Times
Luckily Mr. Reygadas has talent to match his ambitions; or, rather, gifts that undercut them sufficiently to give his film a prickly, haunting poignancy.
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| 70 |
TV Guide
This strange and beautifully expressive film set in a remote Mexican canyon has nothing whatsoever to do with Japan, but its themes are as universal as they come.
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| 70 |
New York Magazine
Reygadas is both a sophisticate and a primitive: He sets up his film as a religious allegory, with the nameless painter as a kind of suffering Christ and the old woman--whose name is Ascen, as in Ascension--as his redeemer.
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| 70 |
The Onion (A.V. Club)
A dense, challenging work by any measure, Japón snakes toward a justly celebrated final shot that's technically astonishing and immensely powerful, cementing the arrival of a promising new talent.
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| 67 |
Austin Chronicle
The one thing that is clear from Japón is that a major new visual stylist has hit the screen and that Reygadas’ first film represents the beginning of an auspicious career.
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| 50 |
New York Daily News
Tough going for most audiences and should be considered more of a rough draft full of lofty ideas unevenly executed.
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