Critics reviews

I am not surprised that The Fast Runner has been a box office hit in its opening engagements. It is unlike anything most audiences will ever have seen, and yet it tells a universal story.

The somewhat confusing first 30 minutes demand patience, but once the drama kicks in, The Fast Runner holds you easily in its spell. A good story is a good story.

Though never boring, the movie is a fairly long slog through the snow. It requires a major time investment for a return that's palpable but modest -- the satisfied sense of having had an authentic experience.

The Canadian Inuit saga The Fast Runner (Atanarjuat), directed by Zacharias Kunuk, is one of the most enthralling three hours you’ll ever spend at the theater. No, make that one of the most enthralling two-and-a-half hours: the first 30 minutes make you think you’re in for a ceremonial ethnographic slog.

By any measure, The Fast Runner is a passionate, remarkable film, a big story told with a respect for its bigness by a filmmaker gifted at incorporating his culture’s mysteries into universally appealing art.

Robustly acted by its Inuit cast, Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner succeeds as a mythic drama of good versus evil, in which the desires of an individual have to take secondary importance to the harmony of the group.