Beautiful, interesting, incredible cinema.

See what’s playing

Critics reviews

BARCELONA

Whit Stillman United States, 1994
Unlike the postmodern vision of traditional film genres shared by such contemporaries of his as the Coen brothers or Quentin Tarantino, Stillman turns to comedy not as a debased, tired, or parodic form in need of reinvention but as itself a means of sincere reconciliation and renewal. Following Stanley Cavell, Stillman embraces romantic comedy as a philosophically grounded genre driven toward a Shakespearean restoration of order and community.
April 19, 2016
Read full article
[Ted's] seriousness may seem out of touch with the modern world—a fact that Stillman's films are so good at satirizing—but it comes from a deeply felt thesis about one's sense of obligation to learn what it means to be a good person, regardless of religion, social class, gender or culture.
April 19, 2016
What makes Barcelona the least of the three films in Criterion's new box set (a relative criticism; they're all terrific) is its treatment of the female characters. One major problem is that Stillman, for some reason, chose not to cast Spanish actresses as the Spanish women... Even had these roles been cast more authentically, though, they'd still be fundamentally ornamental.
April 16, 2016
Stillman takes those ideas—of political alliances and sympathies—seriously, and suggests... that the political ideas in question pack major consequences for the lives of individuals. But he also knows that they're not deterministic in the lives of individuals, that the historical stakes and the intimate ones, the long-term scope of ideas and the immediate desires that drive people, are utterly dissimilar, askew, even contradictory. And that's why] ...the romance that drives it is so subtle and so complex.
August 6, 2014
Barcelona gets funnier with each viewing, thanks to the precision of the phrasing (none more amusing than Nichols' insistence on dating "plain or even rather homely girls"). The film also becomes more poignant with time, due to its portrait of relatively benign foreign-policy disputes, and of two capable young men destined for an imminent move into the ill-defined purgatory of middle management.
April 29, 2002
it's harder to like or care about Ted and Fred as much as their younger (and therefore more forgivably deluded) counterparts in Stillman's earlier Metropolitan, and the story's sudden shift into life-and-death melodrama in the final reel is a little clumsy. But the film looks good, the performances are sharp and droll, and there's more than enough originality here to confirm Stillman as a distinctive, beguiling talent.
January 25, 1995
Considering how successfully [the Americans] seem to colonialize all the young Spanish women in sight, regarded by heroes and movie alike as obliging pieces of furniture, one subtext seems to be that Europeans are basically first-draft Americans hungrily awaiting stateside revision. Still, this is fairly amusing stuff—brittle, fresh, and impudent—if you can stomach all the upscale arrogance.
July 1, 1994