Critics reviews

I'm quite bewitched by how debut director Jazmin Lopez moves her camera here. Gerry and The Loneliest Planet are Leones' obvious stylistic and narrative cousins, but while the film shares a similar structural identity with those precedents (a steadicam wandering along with characters lost in an open natural environment), there's a particular energy in the camerawork that is all its own.

Jazmín López, making an estimable feature debut, reveals the group's destination slowly, teasing out the mystery step by seemingly indifferent step, filling in the blanks with scraps of dialogue and a cleverly malfunctioning tape recorder. At once a fairy tale, a puzzle film and a metaphysical mystery, "Leones" owes a debt to Gus Van Sant in its appreciation for young beauty, its sense of its terrors and its fluid moves.

Jazmín López's gorgeously photographed debut revels in metaphysical quandaries and maximum mind-fuckitude.

Leones charts a psychological progression from blissed-out meandering to a palpable sense of placelessness, which can only be ruptured by a shriekingly operatic (not to say literal-minded) plot twist any genre aficionado will smell from a mile away.