Leap Year Reviews
Top CriticNothing about Leap Year plays out exactly like you expect, and Rowe prefers to send you home with enigmatic questions instead of clear-cut answers.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
"Leap Year" might be too much for some audiences, but it is a potent and surprising work.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
The Ooh Tray
... A satisfying psychosexual drama, even-handed in its criticism of both bucolic and metropolitan society.
CultureCatch
Del Carmen's sort of the shadow version of Anna Magnani. Emotionally frail, slumbering, and nearly inarticulate, yet hungry, seething, and Earth-Motherish. A powerful performance in one of the most explicit and shocking films of the past several years.
Full Review
| Original Score: 8/10
It's a gripping, mysterious use of no-budget cinema at its finest, and an intimate character study with surprising emotional power.
To Rowe's credit, this isn't just a movie about sex. It's a compassionate study of human loneliness.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
A haunting portrait of loneliness in its starkest state.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/5
Film-Forward.com
It's not because of the amount of sex and nudity that the word "daring" comes to mind in describing Mónica del Carmen's performance, a combination of subtle vulnerability and abandonment.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
Shocks only with its candor and complete lack of dramatic manipulation.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/5
AV Club
Leap Year lets actions speak louder than words, and the actions here are shockingly explicit.
Full Review
| Original Score: A-
Like peanut butter and chocolate or Catholicism and guilt, few things go together better than sex and violence...
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/5
There are trifling signs of freshmanship, but also a steady observant eye, and in the end Leap Year bears heartbreaking witness to hopeless depression, isolation, and the failure of sex as few movies ever have.
Slant Magazine
Something wicked this way comes in Michael Rowe's Leap Year, a character study of outstanding subtlety and fierce aesthetic exactitude.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
Shadows on the Wall
From Mexico, this bold and yet subtle film is so bracingly realistic that at times we begin worrying about the central actress.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/5
Empire Magazine
A tough but humane and affecting watch.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/5
Guardian [UK]
It's an intense, powerful and at times deeply painful movie, a serious exercise in sexual politics, and Mónica del Carmen as Laura gives an outstanding, brave performance.
It shows what you can do when emotional understanding and storytelling craft become the ruling factors in a project, filtered through performers who can truly do the material justice.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
Daily Express
A disturbing debut feature from Australian playwright Michael Rowe that is reminiscent of the Roman Polanski classic Repulsion.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
Financial Times
Proves, if you were beginning to doubt, that people still make good grown-up films.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
