Brian Hagerty The favorable reviews give a misleading picture of this disappointing mess. Yes, the visuals are nice, including repeated arty closeups of horses' eyes with reflections in them as well as lovely pictures of the Icelandic landscape. But the plot, if you can call it that, is both minimal and silly. In particular, some of the key events in the movie make absolutely no sense. Here are my main complaints (spoilers ahead):(1) The movie opens with a funny story line in which a local gentleman rides his mare to a female neighbor's house for tea. (Later in the movie, they inexplicably choose to have sex for the first time in a valley during a horse roundup where everyone else can see them.) As he is riding away, the woman's stallion breaks loose and mounts the mare with the rider on it (the picture on the movie poster). He then rides the mare home and shoots her. Umm, okay, maybe he didn't want that stallion to breed with his mare, but would he really kill her? Why not just kill the foal after it's born if you really think it's useless? (And people later compliment the stallion after it's gelded, so it's not like it's some crappy horse.) Surely you could breed the mare again. I am not an expert on horse breeding, but killing the mare seems like an insane reaction to an unwanted pregnancy.(2) A local drunk rides a horse into the ocean to meet up with a Russian boat leaving port. At first you think, oh, what a risky way to steal a horse. But he is not stealing the horse. He leaves it standing in a temporary platform dangling from the ship while he boards it to pick up two bottles of very strong alcohol from the Russians, who warn him against drinking it straight. He doesn't seem to give them anything in return, and there is no explanation of why he can't get alcohol an easier way (alcohol is expensive in Iceland, but couldn't he just make his own moonshine?). He then rides the horse back to the mainland. Of course, he drinks the alcohol straight from the bottle despite the Russians' warning, and then he dies of alcohol poisoning. This is yet another story line with cool visuals and a nonsensical plot.(3) A random Spanish-speaking guy is biking through the countryside and gets a crush on a Norwegian girl who is herding some horses. He asks if he can join the riders and they say sure, why not? As he is riding with a group that is driving a herd of horses ahead of them, he falls behind because he is an inexperienced rider and he can't get his horse to speed up. The rest of the riders abandon him, and he gets lost. (There is no world in which a group of riders would leave a strange foreigner behind in Iceland on one of their horses.) It starts snowing, and to survive, he kills the horse and climbs inside of it (like Luke Skywalker climbing into a tauntaun in the Empire Strikes Back). Oh, and he kills the horse with a single blow from a pocket knife, then uses that same pocket knife to cut the horse open well enough to fit inside it. Sure. The next morning the group that abandoned him finds him and pulls him out of the horse.Could one of these inexplicable, pointless story lines be excused? Maybe. But three of them? And it's not like we get some other great payoff to make up for this silliness. (There are a couple more story lines, but they aren't worth summarizing.)In short, some of the visuals are good, and if you like Icelandic horses, you might enjoy just watching the horses. But as a movie, this is pretty terrible.

Martin Bradley The one thing that Iceland has no shortage of, apart from ice that is, is scenery and director Benedikt Erlingsson makes great use of it in this strange tale that supposedly describes man's relationship with the horse but which lapses into the surreal often enough for us to wonder if Erlingsson has something else in mind. Indeed, after the scenery, it is the horses who are the real stars here, though if you are a horse lover, the few scenes where they are killed and mutilated by the good folk of Iceland, should give you pause, (though the humans don't come out of it too well, either). It's more like something you might get from the likes of Roy Andersson while on holiday and it's quirky enough to be of more than passing interest. It's also quite short.

DoctorHver Awful movie with no plot, This movie simply doesn't deserve any of the compliments or awards it has been getting. This movie lacks the most important fact, a plot and story. Nothing happens during the entry run-time, that are 81 min I will never get back. The lowest point in this film was the semi-beastiality porn sequence. I mean whats entertaining or fun about that? If you enjoy those kind of things you might as well Google for beastiality porn on the internet instead. But keep in mind that I condemn such a behavior so you do so at your own risk. Conclusion, If this film is supposed to be the saving grace of Icelandic film industry you might as well kill it. There is nothing else you can say about this film.

maurice yacowar The Icelandic film Of Horses and Men should properly be called Stories of Horses and People, director Benedikt Erlingsson told the Palm Springs Film Festival audience. The film is structured like an episodic Icelandic saga.In the last shot a wide expanse of life radiates out of the central hub, a pen of newly rounded up mustangs. That's a coda to the stories that relate human to equine life. Indeed each episode begins with an image of a human or his work reflected in a horse's eye. The opening titles use a white horse's close-up hide as the backdrop. An ear perks to the music. Later the music will fade in and out of the hoof beats.In the first episode a man is humiliated when the snappy white mare he is riding is mounted by a black stallion — the man still aboard. Feeling emasculated, the man shoots his mare and lovingly buries her. Because the stallion's owner desires that man she castrates the stallion. In the last episode she will finally get her stud, even if she has to warn him to hold on to his horses. In fact, to her brown mare who's jumpy. After the roundup the man finds another white mare, so his romantic adventure shows only gain.In some episodes the horses are clearly smarter than the men. One man rides a horse into the sea to buy vodka from a Russian boat — then drinks himself to death on the pure alcohol he was given. In a spat over a fence one man is killed and another loses an eye.On the other hand, a Swedish girl proves her mettle by single-handedly rounding up six runaways and the blind drunk. The young Mexican who admires her joins a riding troop and survives a blizzard by killing and gutting his horse, then burrowing into its carcass. In these stories the human and the horse are in harmony. For more see www.yacowar.blogspot.com.