Critics reviews

[Bastian Escobar] may just be the find of this year's BFI London Film Festival.

Eimbcke leans heavily on the videogame as both an audiovisual motif and a heuristic device... However, Flies overall feels a bit like an aesthetic step back from the director’s previous film Olmo.

[The] keenly observant and well-acted film reminds us we all need some love.

By simply showing Cristian and Olga reacting to similar challenges and seeing one another afresh, Eimbcke delivers a humbly poignant film that affirms his lineage with the great children’s auteurs like Lamorisse and Truffaut.

Moscas is exceptionally well thought out. The story line has the simplicity and focus of a fairy tale, while the black-and-white cinematography by María Secco captures the urban locations with superb compositions and exposures.

[Flies] is a finely crafted drama about loneliness, childhood perception and the small invasions of everyday life. A film that works with quiet precision, but never quite finds the courage to let its own unrest fully erupt.

[Flies is] a movie whose relatively simple means of communication give it a disarming emotional directness... Eimbcke doesn’t shy away from sentimentality, but the emotional honesty and unfailingly light touch of his work prevent it from becoming saccharine.

If “Flies” is familiar in many senses, it’s too warmly and honestly felt to feel formulaic, and while its young lead Bastian Escobar is winsome as can be, the film is colored by a deeper melancholy that staves off cutesiness.

Directed in sharp-edged black-and-white with seemingly effortless precision by Fernando Eimbcke... [Flies is] a film of few words and many resonating images.

Deadpan enough to avoid the risk of cosiness, [Flies]... emits touches of warm, fuzzy feeling but plays them with precision and perfect timing... [It is] somewhat runs out of buzz by the end, but as long as Eimbecke keeps the drollery downbeat, it’s immensely likeable.

[The] film's quietly magical glow comes from the filmmaker's steady command of tone and material.

There’s always the danger of precocious children to appear as twee, especially when they’re central narrative figures, but newcomer Bastian Escobar is quite exceptionally naturalistic... In part this is due to Eimbcke’s script, co-written by Vanesa Garnica.