69
Metascore
7 reviews · Provided by Metacritic.com
- 80Los Angeles TimesNoel MurrayLos Angeles TimesNoel MurrayThis movie is more like a gallery exhibition of moving portraits — each more astonishing than the last.
- 75Slant MagazineDiego SemereneSlant MagazineDiego SemereneHere the organic and the frivolously material aren't oppositions or rivals, but partners in a spectacle for men's eyes only.
- 70Screen DailyFionnuala HalliganScreen DailyFionnuala HalliganItalian artist Yuri Ancarani’s mostly-silent travelogue captures the Arabian peninsula without comment, its repetitive, dreamy imagery providing an insight to an age-old sport which plays out within the trappings of extreme wealth.
- 70Paste MagazineKenji FujishimaPaste MagazineKenji FujishimaWith its impeccably framed wide compositions, immersive long takes, and a cross-cutting narrative style that touches on the work of Matthew Barney—or, in a considerably more mainstream vein, Christopher Nolan—The Challenge feels like avant-garde art more than anything else.
- 70The New York TimesA.O. ScottThe New York TimesA.O. ScottShot in rich, wide-screen color, with minimal camera movements (except when a small camera is attached to a falcon’s restless head) and almost no dialogue, it is detached almost to the point of abstraction.
- 67The Film StageDaniel SchindelThe Film StageDaniel SchindelWith this raw animal rush, you can understand the appeal of the sport, and how one might deign to spend part of a fortune on vicariously experiencing it. But it also demonstrates the ultimate hollowness of extreme consumption.
- 60VarietyDennis HarveyVarietyDennis HarveyLoathe to mar his exquisite package with the least hint of vulgar commentary, Ancarani arrives at something that is at once luxuriously alluring and a little too like an advertisement for luxury products — dazzling, aloof, uncritical and fatuous.