ThiefHott Too much of everything

Connianatu How wonderful it is to see this fine actress carry a film and carry it so beautifully.

WillSushyMedia This movie was so-so. It had it's moments, but wasn't the greatest.

Nicole I enjoyed watching this film and would recommend other to give it a try , (as I am) but this movie, although enjoyable to watch due to the better than average acting fails to add anything new to its storyline that is all too familiar to these types of movies.

Lee Eisenberg Even though the discovery of one's burgeoning sexuality is a common theme in cinema, "La niña santa" ("The Holy Girl" in English) still bears watching. Teenage girl Amalia has two experiences in a dilapidated hotel that will change her life forever: an exploration of her sexuality with her friend Josefina, and a microaggression from a doctor.The significance of Amalia's Catholic schooling was ambiguous. The movie makes clear that Amalia thinks that she has to save the doctor from this inappropriate behavior. What I couldn't quite figure out was whether the movie treated her Catholicism as a virtue or a problem. In the end, what's important is the focus on the contrast between sexual vulnerability and sexual power. Having seen this movie, I hope to see more movies by Lucrecia Martel.

chaos-rampant As far as I'm concerned, the film is an outstanding achievement in cinematic narrative, I'm tentatively including it as one of the very best I have seen. A lot of viewers have complained about the slumbering, monotonous tone and the filmmaker's insistence to not explain her vague story, which capped off by the high-handed gesture of the ending—the only note off for me—can give the impression that this is another in a long list of 'artsy', fashionably minimal film festival fodder. Fair points, but consider something else.The story is fairly simple, a Catholic girl looks to save the soul of a middle- aged doctor.I'm not sure if Lolita was consciously the template, indeed the film differs in obvious ways—the doctor makes covert sexual advances, but he is a sincerely troubled man, and from her end the girl perceives these to be a sign from god that this man has strayed and needs saving. There is family dysfunction as background and a lot of religious talk on the divine plan. But there is something deeper Lolitaesque, more in a while.Okay so the basic means of expression are in Altman's mode of narrative drifting, but with the difference of a static camera and the drift carried through in the movement of bodies and sound. If you read up on what the filmmaker has to say, she reveals stumbling on to this in an interesting way, not via film school but intimate observations of family. She seems like an alert, curious mind who likes to observe, the basis of everything.The film begins in a shapeless, rumbling state, and only gradually establishes a few things; the place is a hotel, a doctors' convention is scheduled to take place, the man is married with kids, the girl's mother is divorced. It only begins to acquire shape when both the girl and her mother take an interest in the sullen man. Ordinary so far.Here's where it gets really cool.The notion is that there is a a sign which female intuition picks up, the sign kicks off a story of connection, but for obvious reasons the story cannot be consummated in the open, it has to be submerged, disguised for busy, prying eyes. (the hotel residents' as well as our own)But now look at all these different things going on. A man in the shop window who creates invisible sounds and draws a crowd enthralled at the mystery of his creation, the remote sounds of hunters' gunfire which alarm the girl in the woods to something horrible, the talk of an invisible godvoice, the mother's unexplained persistent earbuzz. Both the mother and the doctor have acted in plays (the doctor as a doctor!), and a doctor- patient re-enactment before an audience is proposed to the mother by the taciturn doctor. And the most revealing, another doctor is caught in mischief with a young girl, which foreshadows shame and public embarrassment.The core scene that perfectly encapsulates what this is all about, is when we discover how the man in the shop window has been producing his peculiar sounds—a theremin, calligraphic hands drawing from thin air the shape of sound, something out of nothing, which is a stunning metaphor for the urges that overtake us in life.So as characters move through the world, they draw illusory currents in the air which on the topmost level acquire dramatic shape that reveals soul. It is this that masterfully recalls Lolita and in a far deeper way than either of the two film adaptations—a story which is both the story and faintly reveals the haze of urges (sexual, spiritual) of hidden inner selves as they shift and shiver behind their acceptable roles in that story.Each of these things amazes. I was in awe of a few.Together, they suggest one of the brightest, most intelligent voices in film these days, one of perhaps only three working right now for me. What's keeping her back? For my taste, the unoriginal camera. She just hasn't yet discovered her own calligraphic eye that will set her apart, though I'm sure that is in her future. For all I know, she has found it in her next film.I wish her the best of luck. In the meantime, see this and contemplate on the rich tapestry she has woven.

Javier Marin It's really hard to enjoy a movie in which nine out of ten characters speak so softly, whispering and grumbling without any sense. I cannot be engaged in a story built exclusively with environmental and symbolic elements and no suspense at all. I do not want to listen anything about the same old debate concerning catholic education and sexual repression (may be 20 or 30 years ago). I suspect this movie is out of season and out of Martel's range. The '60 and '70 were really good but I am not interested in remakes. Despite the above listed complains, I think Martel is talented but may be she still has to find her own voice. I liked "La Ciénaga", the other Lucrecia Martel's effort. It was less pretentious and more entertaining. In summary: this is a boring, pointless, old-fashioned film. I have watched this kind of story before, better written and executed by many directors, v.g.: Luis Buñuel, Carlos Saura and Peter Weir (Please take a look at "Picnic at the hanging rocks") only to name three of them. All in all it deserves a 3/10.

ncberman Looking at some of the other user comments, I realize that many sought to extol the purported virtues of this film, professing Lucrecia Martel's artistic brilliance and method for capturing personality and conflict as demonstrated in this, her "ouevre," but as far as I'm concerned, these people must be blind, if not also deranged. This movie is abysmal. It's inert, without direction and a true chore to finish. The first hour and a quarter scarcely set the stage, with the duration moving no quicker or more palatably, and I'm more than patient with artistic efforts that appear to want for plot, but this was pointlessly plot less and otherwise utterly bereft of potentially other redeeming features. The bulk of the acting is mediocre to average, Martel's writing without flair or innovation, and the camera work and editing pretty much boring. Why Almodovar was willing to put his name on this work (and I'm convinced that it was his name and no more, based on the wretchedly lobotomizing slowness of the story, bloviating banality and clear absence of captivating content) is beyond me. And I would like to clarify that this dreadful film school fare should not even be included in the same paragraph, let alone be the subject of any direct comparison (unless it is a profoundly disparate one) to any of the following: Amores Perros or any of Inarritu's work, any actually-Almodovar-created work, the Cuaron Bro.s' Y Tu Mama, Salles' Motorcycle Diaries or Central Station, Meirelles' City of God or even the pretty but anticlimactic Carrera's Crimen del Padre Amaro. And I actually think that the scene settings, character list and cast had real possibility and promise: Mia Maestro (as the young Catholic teacher leading and incessantly lecturing the group of girls in choir practice in sanctimonious catechism-worthy restraint and denial of any sensation or sexual awakening, whom Amalia's friend Jose(fina) claims to have seen making out with a clandestine lover) is pretentiously chaste and overtly uptight but so comely and foreseeably coquettish that I would killed to have seen her character more developed or perhaps the explicit aforementioned trysts; María Alché is sufficiently intriguing, complex and coy that far more could have been done with her, apart from the dilapidated swimming pool and sneaking up on the tragically-boring Carlos Belloso/Dr. Jano; and, well, that's about it. Oh, I almost forgot, I will give Martel this: speaking from the somewhat limited experience as the son of a pathologist and a nurse, Martel DOES manage to capture how deliriously boring and maimingly monotonous a medical convention can be (otorhinolaryngologists no less, their motto would rightly be "fun with phlegm"), particularly when held in a craphole motel (think Leaving Las Vegas' witty "The Whole Year Inn"-cum-"The Hole You're In") and further exacerbated by a tediously planned dramatization of how to conduct a patient interview (a device Martel must have found brilliant since she devotes exponentially more time to this than anything else). Please, if you take nothing else away from my admitted logorrhea, synthesize this: this movie is awful, Martel likely a hack worthy of condemnation rather than scatologicaly-founded praise, and above all else, I implore you, DO NOT WASTE YOUR TIME!