WillSushyMedia This movie was so-so. It had it's moments, but wasn't the greatest.

Catangro After playing with our expectations, this turns out to be a very different sort of film.

Lidia Draper Great example of an old-fashioned, pure-at-heart escapist event movie that doesn't pretend to be anything that it's not and has boat loads of fun being its own ludicrous self.

Edwin The storyline feels a little thin and moth-eaten in parts but this sequel is plenty of fun.

jmvscotland I get it! I really do. The whole Dostoyevsky "Crime and Punishment" thing. But, just because a novel runs to 700 odd pages doesn't mean a film maker has to stretch a movie loosely based on the novel to over four hours.I make it a practice not to review a movie on here, or even to give it my own score independent of the score on IMDb, unless I've watched it from beginning to end. To provide myself with that ability was a major undertaking in the case of this movie; Norte etc is glacially slow moving and unutterably boring for the whole of its turgid four hours and ten minutes.Scenes stay in shot for interminable periods with no dialogue and not a flicker of movement. I felt no sympathy for, or connection with, any of the characters, except the lady who had to sell vegetables to feed herself and her family and for her husband who was convicted of a crime he didn't commit.I couldn't possibly have cared less for any of the other characters and I have to say that some of them drove me quietly nuts. The acting was patchy at best and laughably bad at times from some of the characters, especially the guy who killed the pawn broker/usurer (and didn't she just beg to be dispatched?)I paid good money for the Blu-ray of this pretentious and tedious lot of rubbish; it is most definitely NOT a movie I will ever watch again. Perhaps I can find someone on life support that I can give it to.

Mina Radovic Norte: Hangganan ng Kasaysayan (Norte, the End of History) clocking in at 250 minutes is utterly breathtaking in scope and visually remains a staggeringly beautiful, poetic masterpiece. On a symbolic level, it is a transcendent story of exploration, self-discovery and redemption, realistically portraying the strength, and equal fragility, of the human condition. The film elaborately investigates the relationship between man and his socio-political circumstances - in this case the extreme poverty of the Philippines in correlation with brutal capitalism on the rise. Most importantly however it explores the spiritual relation between humanity and God.Lav Diaz pushes the boundaries of the medium with this tour de force, visually and thematically, leading us on a long, contemplative journey of discovery. Through his deeply intimate approach and glorious camera-work he represents human frailty at its most basic, acting as a resolute, poetic meditation on the human condition.Diaz's cerebral masterwork is nothing short of high art, proving him to be one of the true visionaries working in contemporary world cinema.

Luca-Aversa Personally, I would like to edit this film into a much shorter version simply because some scenes are understood and don't need to be repeated. Apart from that, this is a very powerful film with a very powerful message/premise.I have never see a film who's main character's journey is so unpredictable yet so inevitable.Slowly slowly, it all adds up in the end.I believe this director's usual work is longer that 4 hours. I don't think I could go through that again, but I hope that the director finds a way to reach a larger audience with the same powerful messages in a shorter space of time (maybe 2 1/2 hours?).

bootlebarth Fabian, a pretentious, pseudo-intellectual leads a small adoring clique of fellow law students. Imitating Raskolnikov in 'Crime and Punishment', he brutally murders Magda, a heartless money- lender, and her teenage daughter.For unexplained reasons Joaquin, a poor man with a young family, is convicted of the crimes and sentenced to life imprisonment.Fabian gives the deprived wife some money and asks his friends to do what they can for Joaquin. He then rapes his god-fearing sister and slaughters a dog to round off the nasty, sadistic episodes that punctuate what passes for a story. The film ends with him taking a canoe ride.How can this implausible, unresolved plot occupy 250 minutes of screen time? No problem, just point a camera at something and let it roll while next to nothing happens. Scenes go on and on for no obvious purpose. They can be repeated knockings on a door with cries of 'Fabian, are you in there', to lighting and smoking cigarettes, to plodding along paths, to observing landscapes. More than four hours could have been edited to, say, 90 minutes without any significant loss of material.What director Diaz has produced is a semi-motion picture, a mildly intriguing but generally tedious variant of the wham, bam, thank you ma'am school of frenetic film-making with eternally swooping and sliding cameras and cuts every few seconds.Diaz changes the appearance and tempo slightly with fuzzy landscape shots, probably taken from a drone with an inexpensive camera, and some jerky hand-held footage that could have been borrowed from Lars von Trier.Almost at the end, Diaz cocks a snook at his audience with a ludicrous levitation scene.Norte, despite its faults in pacing and plotting, is not short of striking visual images. If they had all been reduced to about a third of their displayed length and allied to a plot that made some sense, a watchable film might have been the result.