Critics reviews

There is a tinge of whimsy and sentimentality to the film, but Bardem gives his best performance for some time: acidly droll, fiercely pessimistic and effortlessly commanding every scene that he's in.

The reason Mondays In The Sun is so marvellous is that it empathises with the unemployed and does not try to belittle them, or make them look small.

Painted mostly in drab browns and greys, ‘Mondays in the Sun’ doesn’t let much light in. Keenly characterised and daubed with dry humour, the film refuses to sentimentalise economic emasculation or underclass futility – it engineers only the smallest of triumphs for these stymied friends, for whom getting through each day has just started to feel, troublingly, like stubborn habit.

It's a film of vivid moments and images, but the narrative, almost of necessity, is static. And so, alas, midway, "Mondays in the Sun" becomes as dull as a day with nothing to do.

Mondays in the Sun is cleanly and intelligently scripted, filmed and acted. Bardem (Before Night Falls, The Dancer Upstairs) is particularly impressive, and appealing. The film treats a serious social issue in a serious manner.

Bardem injects a shaggy, compassionate humor throughout, aided by a wry and moving ensemble cast and co-writer/director Fernando León de Aranda's eye for the offbeat.

It is intensely involving at the outset, but it faces an insoluble problem: The story, like the characters, has no place to go.

The movie often feels meandering and anecdotal... But this slow, episodic film is held together by the galvanic presence of Javier Bardem... an actor who seems able, by adjustments of posture and demeanor, to transform himself physically from one role to the next.

Aranoa’s storytelling is full of fire and nuance, and his striking, heartbreaking, mutedly hopeful film exhibits the spirit of its Italian neo-realist predecessors.

The moral integrity of “Sun” is apparent in every scene, the script carefully looking at the social absurdities which have led these men, no better or worse than average, into their present mess.

A bittersweet comedy about men facing unemployment led by a barnstorming central performance from Javier Bardem, Mondays In The Sun (Los Lunes Al Sol) looks like another decisive critical and popular hit for one of Spain's most hotly tipped new young talents.