Metacritic reviews

Janet McTeer displays Amazonian power while Jennifer Jason Leigh tears into her role as a high maintenance creature with a ferocity that leaves little room for her usual acting tics.

It's an excellent fusion of subject and style.

It doesn't make the slightest effort to cater to conventional appetites. But the more you appreciate what they're trying to do, the more you like it.

Distinguished less by its elements of melodrama and psychodrama than by its intense acting and the vivid immediacy of Levring's powerful imagery.

To some, this will seem the height of aesthetic experimentation; to others, the most unendurable arty hogwash.

Isn't very pretty despite its extraordinary look. In fact, the film is downright queasy and unsettling.

Simultaneously gritty and cerebral.

wWhat doesn't entirely succeed as convincing psychodrama makes one hell of an acting exercise (it's great fun to see great actors purposely mangle the Bard's immortal words), and Levring's cast -- McTeer in particular -- run with it.

A deeper problem in The King Is Alive is an almost total absence of spontaneity.

Either you like your movies to be, well, movie-like: imitations of life, with musical accompaniment and artificial lighting and tracking shots and looped dialogue; or you like them to be re-creations of life, sans the artifice. The King Is Alive clearly falls into the latter camp.