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HERMIA & HELENA

Matías Piñeiro Argentina, 2016
FilmCritic.com.au
The films of [Piñeiro] have, in scarcely a decade, swiftly become as internally networked and interrelated as those of Garrel throughout his life. The same ensemble of actors, the suite of variations on Shakespearean themes and situations, the playful interweavings from Rohmer and Rivette … it can veer toward cinephilepreciousness and even pretention, but here the level of inventiveness is kept high and fresh. An absolute delight, with some truly surprising and satisfying deviations.
December 22, 2017
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Part of the charm of Hermia & Helena is in the way it freely and randomly plays with form, employing luxuriantly slow dissolves, unexpected snatches of superimposed text, and even a black-and-white film-within-the-film. At times, this makes up for the occasionally awkward performances; Piñeiro is too sincere to write characters who speak exclusively in zingers, and yet his dialogue is delivered as breathlessly and flatly as the badinage of an early Whit Stillman movie.
May 25, 2017
The New York Times
All of these touches make "Hermia & Helena" a peculiar film, one both steely and delicate. It is also an often amusing look at the contemporary mating mores of this fair city, with Poulson's portrayal of a nonchalantly sleazy womanizing hipster milquetoast particularly resonant. But the film belongs to Muñoz. She's the kind of performer (like Setsuko Hara, the Japanese actress to whom the film is dedicated) you can't take your eyes off, even when she doesn't seem to be up to much of anything.
May 25, 2017
There are a few different potential films within Hermia & Helena — a Shakespeare adaptation, a tale of romantic relationships, a tale of family — but the totality proves a sunny and affable literary collage.
May 24, 2017
The movie's first hour, like the Scott Joplin rags that fill its soundtrack, is a delicate miracle of lightness and melancholy. But when Camila and her father quietly subject one another to a long cross-interrogation, the film's stakes shift under us. We realize that for the length of the movie we've been watching someone haggle—and contradict herself and double back—over how her life should run.
May 3, 2017
The movie is as clever and erudite as Piñeiro's previous Shakespeare-inflected comedies—small films with elements of Rohmer, Rivette, and Borges.
April 24, 2017
At first, Piñeiro's latest feels like a dance with more mainstream conventions, but these romantic comedy tropes are consistently subverted through eclectic stylistic visual choices (an X-ray image of swaying trees interrupts a reunion between two lovers), and by the prickly characters themselves, who refuse to settle into any recognizable groove. After all, this is a film of nomads, and their desire to continue moving keeps us on our toes.
April 17, 2017
Fascinated by the beauty of movement and language, Piñeiro applies the theme of translation to the fabric of his narrative, allowing his weightless, intimate style to blossom. A meticulously staged and scripted late-film confrontation between Camila and her estranged father (Dan Sallitt) is an unassumingly moving encounter that portends an exciting new chapter in Piñeiro's career.
November 4, 2016
Piñeiro's quiet virtuosity, which binds the movie's relentless energy to intimate discoveries, is giddily thrilling.
October 11, 2016
Despite the playful, self-aware hubris of Piñeiro's overall project, tackling not just one of Shakespeare's comedies but the lot of them, the plays are thoroughly subsumed into the heady thrill of narration that characterizes the director's work.
October 9, 2016
It's very likely the most nimble film playing at the festival, and to me represents the most exciting thread that current independent arthouse cinema has to offer, films made by those preternaturally aware of their surroundings in both life and art, and in creating works that contribute to both.
October 7, 2016
Meandering as it is, Hermia and Helena has a deliberate pace unusual to Piñeiro, gradually working toward a climactic scene between the protagonist and an enigmatic figure from her past (played by indie filmmaker Dan Sallitt). This is easily Piñeiro's most somber film to date, and though the broadening of his emotional landscape, as well as the sharpening of his narrative strategy, seems out of character, both represent a major step forward and signify even greater things to come.
September 23, 2016