Avis Metacritic

While the stirring visual fluidity of “The Unknown Country,” her first fiction feature and a kindhearted triumph, provides further arguments pointing to Malick likely being an influence, what distinguishes Maltz’s approximation to that style of evocatively loose filmmaking is that it’s grounded on the personal victories of real individuals. Based on that, she forges eclectic narrative devices for a tone poem with substantial dramatic meat on its bones.

Even in the moments where it can feel a little rough around the edges, the portrait being painted is a breathtaking and unrestrained one. It all comes together to ensure that, in the long cinematic history of American road movies, The Unknown Country carves out an indelible legacy of its own all the way to its final series of shattering shots.

Gladstone manages to sell every emotion, moving from despair to wonder as the journey continues.

You don't watch the movie. You experience it through your senses.

There is a giant world out there, and Maltz’s first narrative feature is a rich and moving ode of the people we encounter along the way, as well as the roads not taken.

The Unknown Country proves to be a road trip unlike any other.

The quiet but stirring effect is a dreamscape of eye-opening geography, existential longing and the enduring workaday.

Sometimes, The Unknown Country may be more a feeling than a movie, but that’s more than satisfactory. Attentive and artful, Maltz is a talent to watch, and in Gladstone, she’s fortunate enough to have a star (and guide) whose presence binds us to all this soulful roaming.

Gladstone carries the picture as a reactor — to the stories she hears from this waitress, that grandfatherly distant relative, the bride-to-be. But even those reactions are subdued.

The film’s gentle detours into the real-life stories remind us that it is the people met on the road that so often make the trip memorable.