Critic Jonathan Rosenbaum wrote this appreciation of Lovers of the Arctic Circle in the Chicago Reader: "Medem's fourth feature is a love story spanning 17 years-from the time Otto and Ana first meet, as children in a Spanish school yard, to their improbable reunion in the wilds of northern Finland when they're 25. But the film starts at the end rather than the beginning, and like the names of the two characters, the story can be read backward as well as forward. That story is told by Otto and Ana in alternate bursts, inflected mainly by how Otto views Ana and vice versa, skipping back and forth in time....(S)hot in eye-filling 'Scope and never difficult to follow as a narrative...it postulates reality as both recognizable and intractable, full of coincidence as well as contradiction, simultaneously in your face and out of reach....Part of what excites me about the film-apart from its fluid, poetic style-is the way it evokes the radical rhyme effects, temporal disjunctions, and crisscrossing destinies of Alain Resnais..."