Popular reviews

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  Review by Shaswata Ray ★★★★★ 6

  98/100
  
  Filmed over a span of 10 years, running over a period of 10 hours, illuminating the unseen face of a nation spread across its past, present and projected future, this is Evolution of a Filipino Family. This is Lav Diaz. This is cinema at its most potent, mined to its extremes and exploited like never before, fixing a hard gaze on the neglected and abused―the lowest strata of civilized society―like nothing has ever dared to.

  Even if the film starts off by following a farming clan trudging along the fields under a glaring sun, it is soon made clear that the 'Filipino family' in the title refers also to the history of the larger nationwide family, made up of…

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  Review by Darren Carver-Balsiger ★★★★½ 11

  Why is it that really long films tend to be so good? I think it's because they tend to be comprehensive and take the time to properly explore their themes and ideas. Any director who expects their audience to sit and watch a film for so long clearly assumes their audience expects to be challenged intellectually and emotionally. Lav Diaz knows this more than most, judging by his love for long cinema. Evolution of a Filipino Family is such a long film that 3 hours in you still have the length of Sátántangó to go. It is a singular experience to say the least. It is so incredibly slow, as the camera often doesn't move and often nothing will happen…

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  Review by SupremeLemon (지존레몬) ★★★★ 13

  Kinda impressive that it took Lav Diaz over ten years to work on a 10+ hour-long film about a farm family struggling to survive in a turbulent Marcos Era Phillippines that lasted a decade, but did you know it took 12 years to make Boyhood?

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  Review by Neil Bahadur ★★★★★

  This is what I call a family drama

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  Review by CinemaShadow ★★★★★

  Epic in every imaginable way, Lav Diaz's Evolution of a Filipino Family examines the fifteen years of martial law in the Philippines imposed by former President Ferdinand Marcos. At the center of the movie is the Gallardo family, who eke out a marginal existence farming a dour strip of land. In their barrio, the imposition of martial law coincides with a wave of guerrilla activity and a rise in crime and general lawlessness. As their fortunes decline, the family begins to fall apart. Shot in black and white and relying almost exclusively on natural sound, Evolution was made over an eight-year period and like other Diaz films talks about the larger historical and political situation through the tribulations of an individual or a family. As astonishing achievement.

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  Review by Puffin ★★★★ 5

  Thus is the conflict of slow cinema at its most fully embraced. The criticisms are rooted in making the film more compact, more accessible, and easier. There may be people who go to Evolution of a Filipino Family, looking at the film like it's an item off a checklist, or a bragging right. Not to say it can be neither of these things; it can actually be both if you're a cool kid who brags about having watched a Lav Diaz movie. But you shouldn't be going into this movie and acting all surprised when it won't meet you in the middle. It doesn't care if you're bored. It doesn't care if you're confused. It stays the same for those…

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  Review by LinusMxx ★★★

  An intimate Filipino epic shot and created over the course of nine to eleven years, Lav Diaz's Evolution of a Filipino Family is the longest film I've ever seen in my whole life just yet, with a runtime of 643 minutes (10 hours and 43 minutes to be exact). This is also my first film from Lav Diaz and it's funny to think that I chose his longest film as my first introduction to his overly lengty slow burn filmography.

  In its almost 11-hour runtime, we get to see the struggles and collapse of a particular poor Filipino farming clan that was meant to represent our very own country, the Philippines, and the ultimate downfall of its identity during the…

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  Review by Ken Suzuki ★★★★★

  Lav Diaz's Evolution of a Filipino Family is a 10-hour poetic and meditative portrayal of a poor family that merges fiction, documentary, and surreality together and thoroughly and profoundly explores its themes of politics, class inequality, and as well as an inseparable relationship between past and present. The film is deeply emotionally and psychologically exhausting as the endless pain is relentlessly presented to us, and the long shots strongly express the exhaustion of farming all day under the hot and shining sun in order to earn enough money just to stay alive daily, and also, of climbing mountains, excavating and finding gold all day just to make a living.

  Lav Diaz was raised on the southern island of Mindanao and…

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  Review by Sudhakar Kumar ★★★★★

  To call Lav Diaz’ 10 hour 25 minute film ambitious is an understatement.
  

  Cinema is the greatest mirror of humanity’s struggle. You see this alternative world, but you’re part of it. Everybody is part of it. This is our world.
  ---- Lav Diaz

  The film shows the birth of Lav Diaz’s now famous style: very long takes in a very long film to tell a very social story that is very moving.

  Diaz covered the period of 1971 to 1987 in his film. It was a decisive period in the Philippines. It was the time of Marcos’ dictatorship, and the time of the People’s Revolution in 1986. Its length might seem intimidating at first but its intimate and powerful look…

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  Review by joakim dreams of peace ★★★★★ 3

  "We’re labeled ‘the slow cinema’ but it’s not slow cinema, it’s cinema. I don’t know why…every time we discourse on cinema we always focus on the length. It’s cinema, it’s just like poetry, just like music, just like painting where it’s free, whether it’s a small canvas or it’s a big canvas, it’s the same. Cinema shouldn’t be imposed on."
  - Lav Diaz

  It took me a while to finish the Filipino maestro's longest film, the 640 minutes long mammoth masterwork Evolution of a Filipino Family, and now I'm left completely paralyzed. No one captures the flow of time as masterfully, touchingly and painfully as Lav Diaz & Béla Tarr. It's not "slow" cinema; it's life.

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  Review by DungeonSkramz ★★★★★ 2

  The perseverance required to watch an 11-hour drama is nothing compared to the years of persevering through poverty and authoritarian rule. A people's struggle, one with the integrity to not give in to higher powers, capturing the mundanities, stillness, and despair we trudge through on a daily basis. Like harvesting a field of crops, we were there every step of the way, because giving up was never an option. Cinema at its most human.

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  Review by Ford H ★★★½ 2

  Evolution of a Filipino Family is quite a commitment, even by slow-cinema standards. I'm honestly not sure I'd recommend this film, even to people who live and die by Satantango, which is similar in length (well, by 3 hours) and also in that it follows the lives and hardships of peasants. Evolution is obviously a different film that takes place in a different country and is made by a different director, but they are easy to compare because both require a tremendous amount of your time and patience.

  The imagery in Evolution is decent at times (it switches between film and video camera footage), but it did not draw me in as much as I wanted, and the sound quality…