"Possibly the most surreal documentary ever filmed. The restored print propels this into a realm of “reality” that’s nearly hallucinogenic. What a snappy dresser! A must for any accordion enthusiast."

"Like Orlando, I wrote poetry. In my adolescent fantasy I read this book and believed it was a hallucinogenic, interactive biography of my own life and future. For me, this trifle of phantasmagoria has always been a practical manual. A tourist guide to human experience, the best of wise companions. At least, it was my first: a message in a bottle from an imaginary friend."

"Set in the Amazonian rain forest. It’s gothic and funny and strange and profound and outrageous. A female “Heart of Darkness.” Marina, a 42-year-old research scientist from Minnesota goes in search of her formidable old mentor, who has disappeared researching the women of a certain Amazonian tribe who stay fertile into their 80s from eating the hallucinogenic bark of a magical tree. As well as everything else, it’s an exploration of what it is to be a woman who’s getting older. And it makes that particular state seem more wonderful than it usually seems"

"I had an instant soft spot for Ari Aster when he treated anaphylaxis (in “Hereditary”) as the terror that it really is, whilst some other contemporary directors sadly still think someone’s face swelling up is hilarious. “Midsommar” really goes to places untraveled. I heard a lot about its folk-horror roots along with similarities to “The Wicker Man,” but I keyed much more into its cathartic wail borne out of grief. I remember seeing a video of the performance artist and musician, John Duncan lying naked on the floor and letting out an extraordinarily protracted primal scream and the dark heart of “Midsommar” lies somewhere within that realm for me. The film is brimming with the explosive power of grief and it’s one of the starkest examples I can think of in modern cinema. My first reaction when seeing all that verdant grass was the almost invisible menace of ticks — an anxiety that Aster quickly acknowledges. The fear of tick-borne encephalitis is not unusual in both Sweden and Hungary where the film was shot and in some askew and unintentional way, I could imagine seeing the film alternately as a fever dream of someone who had been afflicted by the disease during a meadow ritual. Of course, the front of house is hallucinogenic folk horror, but maybe I bypassed that due to my lack of knowledge, which led to a more primal and simplistic interpretation. I was also blown away by the presence of Björn Andrésen, whom I remember from Visconti’s “Death in Venice.” Aster’s film buff credentials are really to the fore here even though I’m aware that nobody sadly uses the term “film buff” anymore. The ghosts of Bergman, Jancsó and Paradjanov circle the film."