88% Beyond The Hills

All Critics (64) | Top Critics (24) | Fresh (56) | Rotten (8)

The film offers rewards for the patient viewer as it examines conflicting visions of love played out in a remote faith-based community.

An austere but subtly textured retelling of a 2005 news story in which a young woman died during an exorcism.

Fascinating [and] anguishing ...

Cristian Mungiu's "Beyond the Hills" moves so effortlessly through the gnarly intersection of love, loss, God and godlessness that you barely notice how much he's doing, and with such effortless grace.

Of all the movies culminating in a rite of exorcism, Romanian writer-director Cristian Mungiu's remarkable "Beyond the Hills" stands alone.

One of the year's most powerful films.

Such is the rigorous and high-minded nature of Romanian cinema that even a real-life exorcism story can inspire something loftier than a horror movie.

Heartbreak at a Romanian convent

...Cristian Mungiu has taken a real life event...to consider deeply human philosophies such as freedom vs. discipline, love vs. security, the choices facing those without financial recourse and the hypocrisies of organized religions.

I found it riveting to watch and fascinating to think about afterwards.

An undeniably tough watch.

Stark, deadpan, and darkly dry.

With this viscerally involving drama, acclaimed Romanian filmmaker Mungiu (4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days) tells another strikingly original story of women caught between old and new world beliefs.

Mungiu is not preaching - he is telling us what can happen when people are trapped within their own emotions and circumstances. Remarkable.

Mungiu's human comedy leaves off where it begins (spoiler alert): out in the middle of nowhere, no direction home.

...if Beyond the Hills is an exorcism movie, the scariest thing about it is that there isn't a demon to be found.

The film's final shot goes straight to the story's heart and the spectator's. Amazing grace. Now at last we know what those words mean.

...quiet, but also quietly devastating, with detours down the roads of intolerance, mercilessness, cold rejection of outsiders' experiences, mystical and subjective interpretation of "signs," overt woman-on-woman misogyny and brutally strict penance...

A slowly, quietly riveting passion play for a nation grappling with secularism and modernity.

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Source: http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/beyond_the_hills_2012/

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