Critics reviews

Alonso has much to say with Eureka – about indigenous cultures, capitalism, history, and progress. However, his deliberately disjointed narrative, the anonymity of his characters, and his oblique approach to storytelling make it difficult to distill his message.

occasionally beautiful, occasionally beguiling, and occasionally confounding... [Eureka] is a movie best received in a relaxed frame of mind. Because much of it is a slow burn, if there’s indeed a burn at all.

“Eureka” [is] an intriguingly languorous, visually audacious drama... [that] feels a bit misshapen.

Eureka is always a fascinating watch, full of ideas swimming around your head long after you leave the theater.

This shape-shifting picture from experimental Argentinian director Lisandro Alonso is a formally inventive exercise... Unfortunately, for all its daring, Eureka is often stultifyingly slow.

For all its daring, Eureka is often stultifyingly slow. An interminable static shot of someone sitting glumly in a corridor lasts so long that time slows down, life loses all meaning and, one by one, your brain synapses start to atrophy.

[Eureka] leaves me more irritated than intrigued, bored rather than hanging in anticipation. The meditative quality and sense of mystery are familiar and welcome; but this time his narrative opaqueness, and a stubborn refusal just to get on with it, impede one’s immersion.

[Eureka] is immersive and enchanting even when it is bleak, and Alonso keeps reminding us that there are more things in Heaven and Earth than are dreamt of in any philosophy. It is a film which tears away comforting forms and fictions only to instil wonder.

More radical than Jauja, Eureka is not just an anti-western, but a decolonised western, putting Indigeneity front and centre, and forging a new, liberated form that transcends genre and, indeed, the deeper Western tradition that harks back to Ancient Greece in terms of dramatic convention.

While the connection between the first two segments is obvious—the past and present of the Western—the third segment is culturally and geographically divorced from what came before. Deliberately opaque about its themes, “Eureka” challenges audiences to decide how all three narratives connect.

Heady, intoxicating... Of all the practitioners of so-called “slow cinema,” [Alonso] excels at making even the most anti-dramatic actions riveting.

Old tropes and motifs notwithstanding, Alonso’s latest is his most ambitious: a tripartite film... its scope is ecumenical, its geography massive... The second part fuses the observational flair of [the director's] earliest works... with the supernatural vein of a reverie à la Jauja, and the alchemy between these two registers makes for a mesmerizing experience.