Even the Rain (Meme La Pluie) Reviews
Top CriticBollaín and Laverty offer a cutting, self-critical analysis of their medium while finding an honest and effective perspective on history...
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
A film within a film within a film, Even the Rain holds up a hall of mirrors to the Third World and invites us to look in.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
The most outstanding performance comes from Aduviri, an indigenous Aymara from Bolivia, who was nominated for the Best Newcomer award at Spain's Oscars, the Goyas.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
Director Iciar Bollain remains such an extraordinary director of actors that in every scene some surprising nuance counters the literalism of the script.
Despite the whiff of a Hollywood ending, "Even the Rain" is a refreshing import.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
An ambitious mix of politics, religion, art, and human drama.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
Telling an old story in a new way and infusing what might have been a dry political polemic with poetry, passion and unlikely warmth.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
The performance by Luis Tosar as the producer is confident and sturdy. Gael Garcia Bernal, as the director, is wimpy and not clearly defined, but that's in the nature of the character.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
When a film opens with a dedication to the late Howard Zinn, a proudly radical historian, you know you're in for a spell of progressive, populist storytelling.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
There are, inevitably, a couple of riveting moments mixed in with the agitprop.
Full Review
| Original Score: B-
Senes of Columbus's arrival and of his imperialist and religious sloganeering, and of the carnage he wreaks, have a grandeur and a force reminiscent of Terrence Malick films. The segments about the chaotic water riots have a documentary immediacy.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
Shuffling ideas from "Fitzcarraldo" and "Dances With Wolves" yields the cinematic equivalent of a term paper for Imperialism 101 in "Even the Rain."
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
"Even the Rain" is that irresistible thing - a movie about the making of a movie - combined with a bit of a history and a political message.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
"Even the Rain" does have its pretensions, along with its ambitions, but it also illustrates film's power.
A splendid film about a movie crew blindsided by the real world.
Director Icíar Bollaín mixes Even the Rain's various storytelling modes with an obviousness that ultimately negates enlightening intellectual or emotional discovery.
A powerful, richly layered indictment of the plight of Latin America's dispossessed that cunningly parallels the Spanish conquest of the Americas with the 20th-century spread of capitalism, Iciar Bollain's fifth feature is her most ambitious and best.
