Metacritic reviews

This is as challenging as movies come, alluding to everything from philosopher Thomas Hobbes to the history of Western music.

An indelible statement on loneliness and spiritual thirst.

While Tarr's newest epic, Werckmeister Harmonies, isn't intended for the shopping-mall crowd, it is more viewer-friendly and will please adventurous moviegoers.

Werckmeister Harmonies may be Tarr’s masterpiece.

A stunning feature -- another hypnotic meditation on popular demagogy and mental manipulation.

The pacing is slow, but the film is entrancing and earns a permanent place in the viewer's mind.

Mysterious, poetic and allusive, The Werckmeister Harmonies beckons filmgoers who complain of the vapidity of Hollywood movie making and yearn for a film to ponder and debate.

A work of bravura filmmaking.

The film could easily be reduced to a parable of post-Communist Eastern Europe, but the allegory digs deeper into the very order of things, exemplified by 17th-century musicologist Andreas Werckmeister's arbitrary imposition of a "tempered" tonal system over naturally occurring tunings.