Sand Dollars

Co-directed by husband-and-wife filmmaking team Israel Cárdenas and Laura Amelia Guzmán, Sand Dollars has an assured, light touch.

Guzmán and Cárdenas present this tropical island as both Anne's romantic refuge and Noelí's exploitative landscape, a beautiful, enchanting -- and realistic -- Eden where snakes are merely snakes.

Ms. Chaplin, in one of her most touching screen performances, imbues Anne with a world-weary melancholy that makes your heart sink.

Remarkable sensitivity and exacting verisimilitude are just two of the many selling points for Sand Dollars.

Playing out against a dreamy Caribbean backdrop, Sand Dollars is indeed about dreams, unpicking those of a gracefully aging lady and her young lover with a trembling delicacy and attentiveness.

Shot solemnly, the film feels a little cold and distant. However, among other things, it's worst seeing just to enjoy the view, the culture and the music the Dominican Republic has offer. [Full review in Spanish]

Gently moving with raw performances by Geraldine Chaplin and Yanet Mojica and a quietly powerful and haunting ending that compensate for lack of depth in the screenplay.

This is a film filled with longing that, appropriately, leaves us yearning for more.

It's a film with a restless motion, a film about people in transit (on motorbikes, on foot, in life), in which the question of whether to stay or whether to go, and if so where, takes on a special, existential resonance.

It respects and plumbs the feelings of all three main characters while surfacing the economic, ethnic, cultural, and gender power imbalances in their relationships.

A drama that sometimes can be mistaken for reality. [Full review in Spanish]

The movie lacks rythym, it's repetitive and all over the place, it stops the narration falling in love with itself and at the end it tries to pull off a Nouvelle Vague ending that's really predictable. [Full review in Spanish]