The film is about the hustle and the humanity lost in surviving in between trying to live a better life. It’s a beautiful meditation on friendship and a stark reminder of the tremendous lengths people will go to get out of a dire situation.

Full Review | Original Score: A | Jul 28, 2025

'To a Land Unknown' is not as stressful as living through the 430 BC Athens plague, but this movie is light years away from a pleasant holiday jaunt to the Parthenon.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | Jul 18, 2025

This is the world as it is, Fleifel seems to be telling us. What it could be is left up to our own moral imagination.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Jul 18, 2025

Chatila’s the emergent protagonist in the script by Fyzal Boulifa, Jason McColgan and director Fleifel, and in the compelling, un-showy performance by Mahmood Bakri, the story’s escalating tensions never feel actor-engineered.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Jul 18, 2025

Thodoris Mihopolous' 16mm cinematography, which manages to be both careful and spontaneous, makes some of To a Land Unknown's contrivances go down smoother.

Full Review | Jul 17, 2025

To a Land Unknown is a familiar crime story, but its cultural and historical background frames the characters in a remarkable amount of complexity.

Full Review | Jul 16, 2025

Stripped away off all privileges, a shell of a human remains, a carcass, and that glimmer of hope that keeps one going is the driving nucleus of the lyrical and timely To a Land Unknown.

Full Review | Original Score: 8/10 | Jul 15, 2025

The sobering note on which the movie ends recalls a stone-cold classic from a sadly long-gone era of moviemaking. The homage actually functions as a token of this movie’s integrity and heartfelt sadness.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Jul 15, 2025

For all its slick taut style, the film remains deeply humane and empathetic. Coming from a documentary background, Fleifel brings a neorealist rigor to the story, weaving in vivid textures and the occasional bit of humor.

Full Review | Jul 14, 2025

These two young actors are just extraordinary.

Full Review | Jul 11, 2025

Gripping and uncompromising but ultimately sympathetic at the same time, which is a tough balance to strike.

Full Review | Jul 11, 2025

To a Land Unknown presents the cousins’ ordeal as something no person should have to go through, something unnatural and surreal and Kafkaesque.

Full Review | Jul 11, 2025

To A Land Unknown, with its intimate gaze at stateless survivors, wraps its incisive observations about moral compromise in a tight story of crime gone wrong.

Full Review | Original Score: B+ | Jul 11, 2025

Sabbah’s performance is the linchpin as a result. He’s the film’s moral compass. Bakri’s portrayal is so hardened and myopic [since] has no future without Reda’s innocence because he’s already sacrificed his own.

Full Review | Original Score: 8/10 | Jul 11, 2025

To a Land Unknown finds new and increasingly perilous, as well as unsettling, ways to escalate problems for ... our protagonists.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Jul 11, 2025

I can confidently describe To a Land Unknown as essential viewing, yet it is one I fear will disappear in the currents of whatever's popular, as ephemeral as everything and everyone in the film is.

Full Review | Original Score: 9/10 | Jul 10, 2025

It’s a drama rooted in the experiences of countless stories that get lost amid shots in the dark for a better life elsewhere.

Full Review | Jul 10, 2025

To a Land Unknown is stylistically simplistic but very powerful in its themes, exploring the moral dilemmas of two refugees trying to escape Athens.

Full Review | Original Score: 9/10 | Jul 10, 2025

In his sharply crafted and acted anti-thriller about Palestinian refugee cousins in Athens, Mahdi Fleifel evokes the American lowlife criminal dramas of the late-sixties and early seventies in a contemporary refugee tale.

Full Review | Original Score: A | Jul 10, 2025

Fleifel begs the viewer to never look away; to fully sit with the weight of responsibility and rootlessness that has been saddled upon its characters, who grow increasingly desperate the more pressure is placed upon them.

Full Review | Original Score: 8/10 | Jul 10, 2025