Opiniões dos críticos

Lowery fills “The Green Knight” with such astounding visions... [and] These moments of visual poetry, using images in the place of lyrical language, evoke a realm of magic and of living fantasy that make the world of Gawain alluring, enticing, bewitching, seductive, inspiring. Yet that world comes off as no mere fantasy but as a synecdoche of the world of our own, here and now.

Everything in The Green Knight is freighted with portent, and because Lowery is working in such a stridently symbolic register, he’s also all but daring the audience to call his allegorical bluff... but in the same way that Lowery torqued A Ghost Story’s moony his-and-her romance into a study of millennial insecurity and impermanence, The Green Knight peels back layers to reveal a present-tense social critique.

The Green Knight’s attempts to blend a young man’s personal reckonings and psychic confrontations with Lowery’s go-for-broke stylings feel less virtuously enigmatic than flat and disjointed in their opaque graspings at profundity.

It is scary, sexy, and strange in ways that American films are rarely allowed to be...

It is a strange film from the start, riddled with the sparks that have animated Lowery’s work from the beginning of his career. One of his angles on this story is the power, the danger, of stories in themselves — as the movie makes clear early on.

Lowery, a master of spooky atmosphere and metaphysical mummery... starts the movie with horror-movie sound effects, spells and flames and tremors of spooky portent. As seriously as he takes the spiritual and moral significance of the story that follows, he is also clearly having fun with it and with us.

In essence, Lowery’s film takes an age-old text and transposes into it an eminently contemporary subject: the failson, the son of privilege who, when confronted with the pressures of adulthood, ends up frozen in adolescence. Lowery spells out the film’s themes of ambivalence and fear explicitly in a final-act fake-out... that retroactively resolves most of the film’s most tantalizing riddles.

It’s the movie Lowery was born to make, a dreamy piece of high fantasy that bombards the viewer with visual delights, skimps on all but the most essential dialogue, and turns an age-old tale into something to be puzzled over anew.

The Green Knight is about someone who keeps waiting for external forces to turn him into the gallant, heroic figure he believes he should be. But at the film’s heart is a lesson that’s as timeless as any legend — travel as far as you like, but you’ll never be able to leave yourself behind.

Hypnotic from its fiery start to its gut-punch of a finale and polished with a hint of heavy metal that makes the whole thing shimmer in the darkness like a black light poster in the basement of your friend’s parents’ house, “The Green Knight” might ride into theaters on 600 years’ worth of unsettled history, but Lowery makes it feel brand new by re-saddling it as a personal story about someone who’s just trying to become the kind of man he can live with, even if it kills him.

In “The Green Knight,” Gawain’s pilgrimage is illustrated by a series of fussily composed vignettes that hint at mysteries that Gawain and his movie’s creators are only superficially interested in. And while parts of this movie are certainly attractive... none of them is so compelling as to transcend writer-director David Lowery’s confining presentation of his archetypal characters.

Lowery (A Ghost Story, The Old Man & the Gun), in addition to fleshing out the story, puts his stamp all over it so confidently that the results could be annoying, if they weren’t so enchanting.