Critic Reviews

Jar City is chilly and cerebral but also morbidly and powerfully alive to grossness and physicality.

Comic, disturbing and affecting by turns, and often all at the same time. Its funniest scenes are also its most unsettling.

Eventually, some mysteries become clear, but Kormákur's attempts to be crafty are too often clumsy, and the movie's unmotivated time leaps are close to a cheat.

The story, based on a best-selling novel, has familiar overtones; but Kormakur overcomes them with stylish direction - Iceland's natural beauty looks great - and a gripping performance by Ingvar Eggert Sigurdsson.

A taut police procedural that craftily blends ripped-from-the-headlines genetic issues with foreboding Icelandic stoicism, Jar City reps a supremely confident stride into mass-appeal genre fare for Icelandic hyphenate Baltasar Kormakur.

Here, the movie's urgency lies mostly in its convincing cast, its varied urban-to-pastoral locations (in light that ranges from harsh to bilious), and its cold-pro handling of familiar genre machinery, made fresh by unusual detail--such as the investigator's fast-food predilection for sheep heads.