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Critics Consensus: Deliberately paced yet hypnotically absorbing, The Pearl Button offers a poetic look at the wonders of the natural world -- and humanity's place among them.
Critic Consensus: Deliberately paced yet hypnotically absorbing, The Pearl Button offers a poetic look at the wonders of the natural world -- and humanity's place among them.
All Critics (43) | Top Critics (10) | Fresh (40) | Rotten (3)
This haunting Chilean documentary is more poetry than journalism as filmmaker Patricio Guzman compares the fate of the indigenous people of Patagonia with that of the disappeared of the Pinochet regime.
Another philosophical and cosmic historical documentary.
This is history of a personalized and meditative sort, and you ought to give it a chance.
By turns lyrical, impressionistic and profound, the documentary "The Pearl Button" requires patience but offers stirring rewards.
Ultimately, the material starts to feel thin, with Guzmán attempting to cover everything in less than 90 minutes.
Patricio Guzman, who chronicled the military coup against Salvador Allende in his documentary trilogy The Battle of Chile, has begun, in old age, to process his political experiences through stunning personal essay films.
Guzmán's predilection for naïve wide-eyed wonder weighs down his recent films, never eclipses the most striking feature of his work: the way in which dreamy musings and far-fetched speculations coexist with toughness, prickliness, and matter-of-factness
A fascinating journey through Chile's troubled past.
The most recent documentary by Patricio Guzmán explores and faces the past and the presen of Chile, looking at the heavens and turning down, towards the earth. Or, in this case, to the sea. [Full review in Spanish]
Chilean documentarian Patricio Guzmán delivers a stunning companion piece to his 2010 film Nostalgia For The Light, continuing his exploration of the effects of Augusto Pinochet's ruthless dictatorship.
Time and again, Guzman generates profound meanings from simple concepts.
This documentary holds every card in the pack, from geology to anthropology to the history of tribes and tyrants, and plays them like a master.
The rambling nature of Guzmán's poetic digressions makes this film frustrating despite his sensitive intentions, and so it seems more like a mixed bag of cheesy esoteric assertions about water and random musings on indigenous people, dictatorships, pearl buttons and supernovas.
Super Reviewer
First film I viewed at the Melbourne International Film Festival of 2015, a beautifully shot and composed documentary, focusing on the primitive Chilean water landscapes and culture along the country's boarder/coast. A lot of great insight into the mystical understanding of this culture as well as how long it has survived up til modern times. Its big essential viewing on subjects I wouldn't have ever known, especially about Chile's past dealt with dark and intimidating historical stories that are really fascinating.
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