Critic Reviews
65
Metascore
Generally Favorable
positive
9(60%)
mixed
5(33%)
negative
1(7%)
Showing 15 Critic Reviews
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All Reviews
Metascore
Metascore
100
The film exists as an unforgettable experience, but not as a comprehensible one.
100
Alejandro Jodorowsky’s movie has a strange, magical aura for cineastes.
80
Inventively composed, beautifully photographed and boasting lakes of blood, shoe fetish action, mystical iconography and dwarf pantomime – often in the same scene – it’s by turns mesmerising, grotesque, surreal, satirical, rousing and impenetrable.
80
Violent, visionary, vital.
75
More enjoyable for its unending string of outrages than for its capacity to make coherent sense.
75
One of the classic midnight movies of the Pink Flamingos -- Rocky Horror era, star-director Jodorowsky's metaphysical western about a violent wanderer plays like an especially gun-crazy Sergio Leone saga filtered through several layers of radical European/Latin American cinema and Christian and Buddhist mysticism. Zero cool in its day, it remains a striking film oddity. [16 Feb 2007, p.C4]
75
Alejandro Jodorowsky’s El Topo remains an enduring cult-film experience.
70
El Topo is a good deal more interesting and a good deal less hung up on its own pretensions than all my most intelligent friends had led me to believe.
67
El Topo is never boring, but neither does it hit the trippy heights of something like The Saragossa Manuscript, or the best of Luis Buñuel and Federico Fellini. And with its emphasis on one virile stud's journey to manhood—with women grasping at his cloak—El Topo isn't just drippily New Age-y, it also offers the kind of stealthy paternalism common to the counterculture.
60
Without the aid of mind-expanding narcotics though, El Topo can't help looking laughably ramshackle, the combination of bad dubbing, shoddy camerawork and over-the-top performances making it pretty much unwatchable by modern standards.
