Critics reviews

What Mascaro has created is unique: an intriguing mash up of magic realism, futurist satire and comedy. If the narrative takes one turn too many in the last third of the film, it’s still a wild ride down the river of dreams.

[A] trippy lo-fi sci-fi... Weinberg’s defiant performance anchors the wild ride. Mascaro, inspired in part by his grandmother’s late-life artistic awakening, treats ageing not as decline but as transformation.

Filled with strange, tropical wonder and beguilement, The Blue Trail is one of the more unique film outings you’ll be ­gifted with this year.

While the idea behind Tereza’s second journey makes sense on paper, her fulfillment of dreams inspired by her first journey seem pushed together without reason, as if Roberta and Tereza are completing a checklist.

[The Blue Trail] contrives to transform and liberate its elderly heroine with a series of encounters and vignettes; it is a film about escape and maybe the film itself escapes generic classification, though it’s a problem that disparate ideas and characters are left undeveloped.

Lacking threat or a more incisive comment about recent swings to and from repressive politics in Brazil, Mascaro’s dystopia is more feelgood and lightweight than it might have been... By the final scenes, the story’s engine has sputtered out, but there’s pleasure in trailing your hand in the water and enjoying the drift.

Mascaro’s social critique flits between visual absurdity and stark grounding. Though narratively upfront, the exploration of ageism is particularly enlightening for its forward-looking direction, without a sentimentally reflective air.

A vibrant, picaresque journey in Wonderland... [The Blue Trail] is an urgent, hypnotic voyage into the flesh and brains of a character whose fate is all but sealed.

A rebellious, empathetic adventure... The camera observes Weinberg’s Tereza with a sensual tactility that I haven’t seen lavished on any actor over 70 who hasn’t spent her golden years at the plastic surgeon. “The Blue Trail” doesn’t shoot her exploitatively, just affectionately.

An enormously moving exploration of the last chapter in a woman’s life... What helps make “Blue Trail” soar beyond its roots are Guillermo Garza’s vivid, Academy-ratio cinematography and Memo Guerra’s hauntingly wounded woodwind score.

While The Blue Trail is more contained than [Mascaro's Neon Bull or Divine Love], it bears a similar electric undercurrent mixing lush, rural landscapes interrupted by neon-lit demimondes. Memo Guerra’s score collides with DP Guillermo Garza’s sumptuous visuals.

The Blue Trail is less than 90 minutes and makes its way through its low-stakes journey fairly quickly, but that’s to its benefit: it’s a short story about a woman’s minor late-in-life epiphanies and finding herself, and it keeps things moving at a sprightly pace that conveys how quickly one has to wrap things up when the end is in sight.