Critics reviews

It's certain respects one of Diaz's most classical efforts, a national epic with a surprisingly direct narrative organization. Although Lullaby is not without its problems, it is certainly one of Diaz's finest films. The fact that it represents a highly deliberate, at times even awkward, lurch toward straightforward declamation of subjects that Diaz has previously treated in more poetic or mystical terms only shows an artist working to find new forms adequate to contemporary needs.

Diaz visibly enjoyed the adoration he received—all deserved, for he had achieved something that seemed almost impossible. He had made it into an A-level-festival competition without compromising his ethics, morality, or aesthetics—and with one of his greatest works so far, to boot.

A Lullaby is a remarkably complex film, and navigating its rambling paths really is like hacking your way through dense foliage, occasionally arriving at a clearing where, to your surprise, you run into people that you hadn't sighted for a couple of hours. The fact that Diaz here plays with so many registers – historical, political, metaphysical and the further dimension of fictional borrowing – makes A Lullaby about as multi-dimensional and allusive as a film can be.

It literally takes hours to figure out what all the characters are up to, how they relate to one another, and, in some cases, even put a name to a face... Relying much more on the power of his spectacular images than in the dialogue-heavy early sections, Diaz creates continuously extraordinary tableaux, pitting his characters against nature's monumental insurmountability and endowing their journey with epic momentousness.

While it is worth noting that the movie feels significantly shorter than [482 minutes], it remains a punishing sit, as though Diaz's default strategy for translating the pain of hundreds of years of Filipino strife is to make his viewers fast in relative darkness for an entire day. Lest it seem as though I am dogmatically opposed to the Diaz brand of cinematic method viewing, I have nothing but love for his 480-minute Melancholia, one of the twenty-first century's high masterpieces...

Cinema shows another world, a different world, says the man who, in 1896, first showed the Lumières' cinematograph in the Philippines. These lines are spoken 120 years later in Diaz's majestic A Lullaby to the Sorrowful Mystery... That different world of the Lumières is precisely what A Lullaby envisions: the previously untold, unseen history of the outskirts of the 1896 Philippine Revolution. This movie's other world is the world, but one without such images, sounds and movement—until now.

As aesthetically dazzling as this picture is, with hypnotic compositions carved through meticulous mise-en-scene, there are certain conventional lines which — when crossed — must warrant good reason... Whether it's a romantic notion to think of art as a saving grace or not is a fundamentally fascinating intellectual debate, but there's another relevant question that can be put more bluntly: must art be so hard to endure?

Round and round they go, as Lav Diaz's lumbering spiritual-political epic ultimately proves them both right: This eight-hour-plus mourning cry for the lives and liberties lost to the 1896 Philippine Revolution may rep a sincere spillage of its creator's soul, but it's also a work of stony, audience-opposed self-indulgence.