The Green Knight Review

Lowery takes an Arthurian poem most people know only as a summary and makes it slow, strange and genuinely medieval in a way film almost never manages. Gawain is no hero here; he is a young man with a famous uncle, no story of his own and a hangover, and the beheading game he accepts on Christmas Day is a bet that he will become somebody in the year he has left. The film is a series of encounters rather than a plot, and each one is built to strip something away: a battlefield scavenger, a ghost in a spring, a fox, a lord and lady who know exactly what they are doing.

Andrew Droz Palermo shoots in fog, low sun and a green that seems to be lit from inside the frame, and the slow rotation over a bandit ambush is the best single shot of the year. Dev Patel plays cowardice honestly enough that the ending lands. It is deliberately opaque and will lose anybody who wants the poem explained. Taken on its own terms it is extraordinary.