reviews

Fantasy like we like our movies to be, a cinematic phantasmagoria of a dream version of the past, lush, rich, ridiculously romantic…

Strangely, delicately weird but not entirely satisfying.

There is magic here, and I don’t mean merely the magic of stage conjurers, like the character this wonderfully mysterious and dreamy film turns on. There is movie magic, of the type that reminds you why you fell in love with movies in the first place.

It’s such a warm and pleasant and human and *humanist* little film that it seems a tad rude to suggest that *Quinceañera* isn’t all it needs to be in order to be a film worthy of wholehearted praise and recommendation.

I can’t remember the last time I laughed so hard — I’m talking soda-comin’-out-my-nose-hard laughter. A lot of it was the laughter of surprise, of the I-canNOT-believe-they-just-did-that kind.

You embrace this film wholeheartedly, because after it gets the initial smacks of satire out of the way, it becomes genuinely heartfelt, full of raw emotional power in a way that isn’t about satire…