65
Metascore
15 reviews · Provided by Metacritic.com
- 100Chicago Sun-TimesRoger EbertChicago Sun-TimesRoger EbertThe film exists as an unforgettable experience, but not as a comprehensible one.
- 80Time OutTime OutInventively composed, beautifully photographed and boasting lakes of blood, shoe fetish action, mystical iconography and dwarf pantomime – often in the same scene – it’s by turns mesmerising, grotesque, surreal, satirical, rousing and impenetrable.
- 75Chicago ReaderJonathan RosenbaumChicago ReaderJonathan RosenbaumMore enjoyable for its unending string of outrages than for its capacity to make coherent sense.
- 75Chicago TribuneMichael WilmingtonChicago TribuneMichael WilmingtonOne of the classic midnight movies of the Pink Flamingos -- Rocky Horror era, star-director Jodorowsky's metaphysical western about a violent wanderer plays like an especially gun-crazy Sergio Leone saga filtered through several layers of radical European/Latin American cinema and Christian and Buddhist mysticism. Zero cool in its day, it remains a striking film oddity. [16 Feb 2007, p.C4]
- El Topo is a good deal more interesting and a good deal less hung up on its own pretensions than all my most intelligent friends had led me to believe.
- 67The A.V. ClubNoel MurrayThe A.V. ClubNoel MurrayEl Topo is never boring, but neither does it hit the trippy heights of something like The Saragossa Manuscript, or the best of Luis Buñuel and Federico Fellini. And with its emphasis on one virile stud's journey to manhood—with women grasping at his cloak—El Topo isn't just drippily New Age-y, it also offers the kind of stealthy paternalism common to the counterculture.
- 60The GuardianAndrew PulverThe GuardianAndrew PulverThere is a tenous narrative logic - in which Jodorowsky himself, dressed in cowboy black, must gun down four desert-dwelling killers - which gives the film a measure of watchability. But it's hardly deep.
- 60Jodorowsky's is perhaps a prodigious, certainly a prodigal talent. What is most bothersome is not his chaotic cosmology but his coldness. He is so obsessed with allegorical meaning that El Topo misses any kind of full human resonance. It is instead a vivid if ultimately passionless passion play.
- 40TV Guide MagazineTV Guide MagazineThe pacing and action sequences are staged in a manner reminiscent of a spaghetti western and are quite good, but the allegories are too much and too many.