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Northfork
Paramount Classics


5.2

based on 31 reviews
Read critic reviews
How did we calculate this?

based on 19 votes
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FILM:

MPAA RATING: PG-13 for brief sexuality

Starring James Woods, Nick Nolte, Claire Forlani, Duel Farnes, Mark Polish, Daryl Hannah, Graham Beckel, and Peter Coyote

In the next two days, the town of Northfork, Montana will cease to exist. The year is 1955 and Northfork is literally about to be "dammed," flooded to make way for a new hydroelectric project. Its citizens are heading for higher ground. With the exception of a few stoic resistors. (Paramount Classics)

GENRE(S):	Drama
WRITTEN BY:	Mark Polish Michael Polish
DIRECTED BY:	Michael Polish
RELEASE DATE:	DVD: December 30, 2003 Video: December 30, 2003 Theatrical: July 11, 2003
RUNNING TIME:	103 minutes, Color
ORIGIN:	USA

All critic scores are converted to a 100-point scale. If a critic does not indicate a score, we assign a score based on the general impression given by the text of the review. Learn more...

100

Los Angeles Times Kevin Thomas

A thoroughly original accomplishment of a high artistic order, Northfork features flawless, spare production design by Ichelle Spitzig and the Polish brothers' father, Del, and cinematographer M. David Mullen's striking images slide effortlessly into Dalí-like Surrealism.

100

Christian Science Monitor David Sterritt

The movie elegantly mingles drama, comedy, and low-key spiritual resonance. It also has a splendid cast.

100

Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert

There has never been a movie quite like Northfork… The movie is visionary and elegiac, more a fable than a story, and frame by frame, it looks like a portfolio of spaces so wide, so open, that men must wonder if they have a role beneath such indifferent skies.

The Onion (A.V. Club) Nathan Rabin

With their third film, the Polish brothers find their authorial voice, resulting in a lyrical work whose free-floating Lynchian weirdness coalesces into an unexpectedly touching movie.

The New York Times Dana Stevens

There is nothing quite like this movie, and I'm not altogether sure there is much more to it than its lovely peculiarity. But at a moment when so many films strive to be obvious and interchangeable as possible, it is gratifying to find one that is puzzling, subtle and handmade.

Variety Scott Foundas

Love it or hate it, Northfork is a cinematic vision (visually and textually) unlike any with which most moviegoers, even arthouse regulars, will be familiar.

Austin Chronicle Marjorie Baumgarten

Gets under your skin with its graceful edits and poetic elisions, lovely performances, and faded imagery.

New York Post Lou Lumenick

Strictly a love it-or-hate-it proposition, it requires viewers to work at a movie with a narrative that could support at least half a dozen interpretations.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer Bill White

A love letter to the state of Montana and a landscape that is biblical in its desolation and splendor.

Chicago Reader J.R. Jones

Stark, mysterious, and often weirdly funny.

Dallas Observer Robert Wilonsky

Northfork may be doomed, but the Polish brothers and cinematographer M. David Mullen (who worked with the brothers on their previous features, "Twin Falls, Idaho" and "Jackpot") make the place feel like heaven on earth.

Washington Post Ann Hornaday

Isn't everyone's cup of tea -- as the Polishes admit in a clever bit of critical preemption -- but it possesses an undeniable, haunting grandeur.

Boston Globe Ty Burr

This is very much the bargain that Northfork offers an audience: Buy into the brothers' elegiac meditation on angels, Eden, and the death of American innocence or sit back and scoff at it as so much David Lynch lite.

Charlotte Observer Lawrence Toppman

I predict Northfork will give you food for reflection or a case of the hives. I stopped scratching 20 minutes into the movie, settled into its lulling rhythm and floated away into the Polish brothers' flaky, austere dreamworld.

The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Rick Groen

Just when the movie seems set to soar, there's a drag factor -- it keeps getting weighed down, if not sunk, by an anchor of ponderousness.

Chicago Tribune Michael Wilmington

It's a film that is mystifying and haunting -- a cool, brotherly vision of the last day and the coming flood, of American dreams and the vanishing frontier.

Portland Oregonian Shawn Levy

There's real craft here and a vision that's nothing if not unique.

Premiere Glenn Kenny

Northfork feels like the work of a couple of ardent art students who, for whatever reson, are very keen on pleasing their teacher. [July/August 2003, p. 23]

Salon.com Stephanie Zacharek

Just about gets us off the ground on its dreamy, feathery angel wings; it just doesn't have the strength or the stamina to keep us aloft.

Village Voice Laura Sinagra

Northfork's overall ponderousness prevents it from becoming a transcendent fictive poem on the violent domestication of the West.

Empire Nick Dawson

Every tiny aspect of the universe here comes from the filmmakers' imagination, and while this occasionally leaves us bemused, the film as a whole is a magical, otherworldly trip into undiscovered areas of cinema.

ReelViews James Berardinelli

Moody and atmospheric -- a study in tone over plot and pacing over characterization. Unfortunately, in devoting all of their efforts towards the film's look and feel, co-creators Mark and Michael Polish have crafted a motion picture that is static, occasionally opaque, and, worst of all, boring.

USA Today Claudia Puig

The cinematic equivalent of an elaborate and poetically constructed non sequitur.

LA Weekly Ella Taylor

So stuck is the movie inside the heads and hearts of its indisputably gifted makers, it never quite makes the leap into ours.

New York Daily News Jack Mathews

An improvement over "Jackpot," but not much. The best thing about it is Nolte, playing the grizzled priest as an angel in his own right. Everyone else- - save the young boy playing the orphan -- seems to be in on a joke we just don't get.

TV Guide Maitland McDonagh

The film is meticulously crafted but frustratingly meaningless.

Baltimore Sun Michael Sragow

American art movies rarely come fancier or emptier than Northfork, a down-home arabesque made of angel fluff.

Miami Herald Rene Rodriguez

An insufferably artsy, pretentious work, the sort of picture that gives art films a bad name.

Washington Post Desson Thomson

It's just too lost in its own presumed self-enchantment.

San Francisco Chronicle Mick LaSalle

Numbing and inert.

Entertainment Weekly Owen Gleiberman

It has that vintage Polish pace, their signature arch pomposity and rhythmless weirdness, only this time the brothers had to go and make a cosmic allegory of American dreams.

The average user rating for this movie is 5.2 (out of 10) based on 19 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.

Ryan M. gave it a3:
Monontonous and silly. the polish bros. are trying too hard to make an art piece. problem is not much substance with hollow performances. weird sometimes for the sake of being weird. some shots were nice while others were very cliche and overdone. i looked forward to this movie but came away feeling empty and irritated.

armando s gave it a0:
This is a real stinkeroo-it gives art movies a bad name-on of the worst movies that i have seen in a long time-I really liked their first movie so was doubly dissapointed with this piece of murky trash-avoid this a all costs unless you need a cure for insomnia.

Robert H. gave it a 3:
Made by people trying very hard but who are also quite lost. boring and meaningless to the point of extreme irritation. but i would recommend it as an example of the kind of films being produced by the degenerated spawn of the david lynchs, tim burtons and cohen bros. of the world.

Tely S. gave it a 5:
It's no masterpiece, but I found it difficult to hate this liitle film. What saves it from my wrath also is the film's main flaw, there's no single theme that stands out as interesting enough to care about., for better or for worse.

Jay W. gave it a 0:
I want my money back... plus damages.

Larry S. gave it a 7:
A flawed movie in many respects but a BRILLIANT MOVIE IN OTHER RESPECTS. Well worth seeing, BUT NOT FOR THE AVERAGE MOVIE GOER!

Chad S. gave it a 9:
Slack should be cut to any filmmaker who attempts an ambitious enterprise like "Northfork". The Polish brothers overt attempts at weirdness can be annoying(like that scene in which the agents make guesses at the diner's only menu item) but the photography, the pleasantly confusing blur of "reality" and dream, and a go-for-broke attempt to create a celluloid edifice, more than compensates for the occasional over-indulgence. "Northfork" is not a masterpiece, but because of the company this sometimes frustrating, sometimes transcendent movie keeps, to see a film that tries to aim this high, shouldn't be so savagely ridiculed as being "pretentious".

Northfork Paramount Classics

Northfork
Paramount Classics