Russell Crowe, Jennifer Connelly, Ray Winstone, Anthony Hopkins, Emma Watson, Logan Lerman, Douglas Booth, Nick Nolte, Mark Margolis, Kevin Durand, Leo McHugh Carroll, Marton Csokas, Finn Wittrock, Madison Davenport, Gavin Casalegno, Nolan Gross, Skylar Burke, Dakota Goyo, Ariane Rinehart, Adam M. Griffith
Curator Review
Verdict
Noah is a bold, unruly biblical epic that treats Genesis like the start of a fever dream: part disaster movie, part family melodrama, part environmental parable, part psychological breakdown. Its ambition, imagery, and willingness to get weird are the main attractions, even when the storytelling feels clumsy or overstuffed.
Best for
viewers who like ambitious, divisive auteur blockbusters
fans of apocalyptic spectacle with a philosophical edge
people interested in dark reinterpretations of religious material
audiences who enjoy big swings more than tidy plotting
Skip if
you want a reverent or straightforward Bible adaptation
you dislike heavy-handed symbolism and odd tonal shifts
you need characters to feel consistently grounded and sympathetic
you prefer clean, conventional studio epics
Overview
Noah is one of those movies that feels more interesting than it is elegant. Darren Aronofsky turns a familiar story into something feverish and strange, using the flood narrative as a vessel for obsession, guilt, stewardship, and the violence baked into survival. The result is a biblical epic that keeps slipping into psychological thriller, family tragedy, and end-of-the-world spectacle.
Worth noting
What makes it worth discussing is also what makes it divisive: the movie is committed to its own bizarre logic, from the apocalyptic imagery to the rock-angel creatures and the increasingly grim moral choices. It has real visual force and a serious thematic pulse, but it can also feel overdetermined, melodramatic, and oddly inert in stretches.
Bottom line
If you’re open to a major studio film that behaves like an art-house provocation, there’s plenty here to admire. If you want a clean, devotional, or emotionally seamless retelling, this will probably test your patience.
Top Letterboxd reviews
Ellie ✨ (2★) · 1883 likes
me 15 minutes in: [pauses, goes into the next room]
mum: hello
me: hi. are there rock monsters in the bible?
her: rock monsters?
me: yes.
her: in the bible?
me: yes.
her, with - i assume - the entire fifteen years she took me to church flashing before her eyes: no.
me: i feel like they might turn out to be angels?
her: rock monster angels.
me: maybe?
her: no.
Nathan Rabin (4★) · 1404 likes
From the director of BLACK SWAN and REQUIEM FOR A DREAM comes some REALLY fucked up shit.
Ruslan Mavrodinov (5★) · 669 likes
Rather than delivering a straightforward adaptation of the famous Biblical tale that would appease most ultra-religious purists, Aronofsky has crafted a madly audacious and awe-inspiring hybrid of a dark psychological thriller, a gritty family melodrama on steroids, a fantastical sci-fi disaster epic, an environmental cautionary tale and a challenging philosophical parable that poses deep, timeless questions with its themes of morality and sin, faith and hope, revenge and forgiveness. A work of wild ambition, striking artistry and dramatic intensity, Noah… more Rather than delivering a straightforward adaptation of the famous Biblical tale that would appease most ultra-religious purists, Aronofsky has crafted a madly audacious and awe-inspiring hybrid of a dark psychological thriller, a gritty family melodrama on steroids, a fantastical sci-fi disaster epic, an environmental cautionary tale and a challenging philosophical parable that poses deep, timeless questions with its themes of morality and sin, faith and hope, revenge and forgiveness. A work of wild ambition, striking artistry and dramatic intensity, Noah… more
Wesley R. Ball (1★) · 511 likes
My favorite part of the Bible was when the giant rock people appeared to help Noah build his ark. And the part where he tried to kill his family because the crazy invisible sky man told him to? Classic.
pd187 (4★) · 434 likes
nobody remembers but 2014 when this came out glenn beck went around for a month calling it "the babylonian chainsaw massacre"