69
Metascore
8 reviews · Provided by Metacritic.com
- 90Village VoiceAlan ScherstuhlVillage VoiceAlan ScherstuhlIf beauty and revelation is your bottom line, Anthony Powell's rhapsodic Antarctica: A Year on Ice will prove a grand time at the movies.
- 80Los Angeles TimesKenneth TuranLos Angeles TimesKenneth Turan"Antarctica" is successful because it operates on two complementary levels, the epic visuals whose grandeur can stagger you and the small-scale personal stories of the people who live and work down there.
- 75San Francisco ChronicleWalter AddiegoSan Francisco ChronicleWalter AddiegoIn all, it’s an absorbing, straightforward look at a truly alien environment. The film could be nicely paired with Werner Herzog’s “Encounters at the End of the World” (2007), a much more idiosyncratic view of Antarctic strangeness.
- 75Portland OregonianMarc MohanPortland OregonianMarc MohanDespite all the camaraderie, natural beauty and exotic weather, though, you couldn't pay me enough to live there, especially not when there's a movie like this to show me what I'm missing.
- 75Washington PostMichael O'SullivanWashington PostMichael O'SullivanYes, it features some of the most rapturous footage of calving glaciers and ice floes — alternately freezing and thawing — that you’re likely to have seen (much of it captured on equipment designed and built by the filmmaker). But it is the simple glimpses of ordinary life in an extraordinary place that are the most stirring moments in the film.
- 70The New York TimesNicolas RapoldThe New York TimesNicolas RapoldThe extremes of Antarctica: A Year on Ice might seem routine to fans of nature documentaries, but the photographer and director Anthony Powell produces some dazzling imagery in his droll study of isolation way, way down under.
- 63Boston GlobePeter KeoughBoston GlobePeter KeoughPowell never achieves the absurdist, uncanny poetry of that scene in Herzog’s film where a “demented” penguin marches into oblivion, but he does arouse wonder at nature’s sublimity.
- 38Slant MagazineClayton DillardSlant MagazineClayton DillardAnthony Powell's vision as a filmmaker is frustratingly limited to an information-style presentation that doubles as an enthusiastic advert for the transcendental qualities of the terrain.