Critic Reviews

Novelistic is a term that gets thrown around a lot these days, but Diaz’s film more than earns the adjective, and you’d have to go back to Edward Yang’s "Yi Yi" to find another movie that approaches a marathon-length running time yet still makes you wish it were twice as long.

It is the work of a director as fascinated by decency as by ugliness, and able to present the chaos of life in a series of pictures that are at once luminously clear and endlessly mysterious.

It feels as though wherever the camera might be—and however it might be moving—is exactly where it belongs.

Norte tells a big story on a grand scale, but its emphasis, moment by moment, is on the quotidian. It's simplicity that resonates most deeply of all.

Some might find the dual conclusions too blunt in their irony, but “Norte” does not try to be consoling. Crazy as Fabian’s ideas seem, they might be the ones that prevail.

Filipino maven Diaz delivers a bravura, literary human drama that does justice to its great source material.

As it turns out, "Norte" is not quite the epochal work of cinema greatness that some have suggested but it is hardly a miss either. There are moments of staggering beauty and power on display here and yet there are also moments when it seems to be ambling around with no clear idea of where it wants to go.

If the movie’s universal themes don’t impress, its specific details do.

Norte is the rare film where the characters seem simpler the longer we spend time with them. They’re humans that evolve into types.

There's little in the way of genuine depth, complexity or nuance here, Diaz instead seeks to convey the illusion of profundity by having various characters throw around weighty social and philosophical verbiage in thuddingly sophomoric fashion.