Northfork: Critic Reviews

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.

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.

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

Possesses an undeniable, haunting grandeur.

Just too lost in its own presumed self-enchantment.

You may resist Northfork, but I doubt you'll be able to forget it.

This last of the brothers' American heartland trilogy suffers from their trademark self-satisfaction, but as with Idaho, a suffused empathy nearly makes up for the belaboring of key messages.

A drearily pretentious allegory.

A story so tender, so achingly sweet, you'll forgive the rest of the film its amorphousness.

A powerful, surreal fable, one that requires a small amount of patience from the viewer in exchange for a moving experience.

It is impossible to describe all the rich layers of Northfork, clearly an exhausting labor of love for the Polish brothers who wrote, produced, directed and star in the mystical movie.

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.

A dreamy saga with a fantastical feel, epic sweep and a star cast headed by James Woods, Nick Nolte and Daryl Hannah.

Too self-indulgent.

A compelling juxtaposition of the poignant and the bizarre, a movie that tosses moviemaking rules into the nearest Cuisinart.

Like the best work of David Lynch, Northfork is that rare movie that draws you in more (rather than alienating you) at precisely those moments when you least understand it.

Remarkable love letter to the disappearance of the American frontier.

It's a tone poem of a movie, more visual than coherent. As such, what it's about is less important than the spell it casts.

Northfork feels like the unedited dream sequence from the movie it might have been, if only there'd been someone to wake up from it.

Weighed down, if not sunk, by an anchor of ponderousness.

Northfork 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.

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.

Hats off to Michael Polish for his otherworldly slants on the barren expanse of this far-out Americana essay.