Close Your Eyes
Film Movement | Release Date: August 23, 2024 CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION
85
METASCORE
Universal acclaim based on 22 Critic Reviews
Positive:
19
Mixed:
3
Negative:
0
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Critic Reviews

Critic scorePublicationBy date
100
Los Angeles TimesCarlos AguilarAug 31, 2024
Using a style of elegant lyricism, which enshrines tiny moments into glisteningly miraculous turning points, Erice lets the exchanges between the people he’s conceived play out without the need to advance the plot. Read full review
100
The New YorkerJustin ChangAug 21, 2024
I can imagine many a moviegoer entering the theatre knowing nothing of Erice and his work, and getting caught up in the gentle grip of his filmmaking. Miguel’s journey may sway to a leisurely, elegiac art-film beat, but that rhythm barely conceals the pulsing machinery of a detective story. Read full review
100
RogerEbert.comGlenn KennyAug 21, 2024
The movie’s senses of cinema are never present for self-consciously clever, self-referential reasons. Rather, they’re deeply intertwined with considerations of age and mortality. Read full review
100
Little White LiesDavid JenkinsApr 8, 2024
What begins as an apparently modest, small-scale drama, ends in a moment of ethereal beauty, for both characters and viewers. Read full review
100
New York Magazine (Vulture)Bilge EbiriMay 25, 2023
Erice’s fourth feature is a stirring tale about memory, identity, and friendship, and it feels deeply, almost alarmingly personal. Read full review
90
ColliderChase HutchinsonAug 23, 2024
It’s a breathtakingly melancholic film infused with mourning, journeying its way through subtly painful yet often poetic conversations about searching for something lost that may never be found. That only makes all the discoveries it makes that much more stunning to behold. Read full review
90
Wall Street JournalZachary BarnesAug 22, 2024
Now age 84, Mr. Erice has made what is unmistakably an old man’s movie, and I mean that as a high compliment. Close Your Eyes moves with the serious, searching energy of a great artist through a cold and cloudy sea of memory, loss, grief and regret, pausing in the patches of warmth it finds in longtime friends and humble pleasures. Read full review
90
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)Saffron MaeveAug 22, 2024
Though this intricate scenario neatly develops upon its director’s catalogue, Close Your Eyes still feels singular and prodigious – a film that works just as well for those unfamiliar with Erice, moving with the viewer to unveil its secrets. Read full review
90
VarietyGuy LodgeOct 18, 2023
Erice’s first feature in 31 years — and only his fourth overall — arrives as something between a desert oasis and a mirage: a shimmery, nourishing culmination of ideas and ellipses in a career so elusive as to have taken on a mythic quality, to the point that his latest feels almost dreamed into being. Read full review
90
The Hollywood ReporterJordan MintzerMay 25, 2023
Slowly but deliberately paced, the movie builds to a crescendo in a closing act where a movie itself — a real movie shot and projected on celluloid — plays a pivotal role, resuscitating forgotten lives and memories as only the cinema can do. Read full review
88
Slant MagazineCole KronmanSep 13, 2023
Where once Victor Erice's films defined the unknown as a life not yet experienced, Close Your Eyes interprets it as a life already lived, slowly dissolving into memory. Read full review
85
The Film VerdictDeborah YoungJul 10, 2023
An atypically told, but typically big-issue film from revered Spanish maestro Victor Erice, Close Your Eyes is a passionate and engaging reflection on art, memory, identity and recapturing time past. Read full review
83
The A.V. ClubJacob OllerAug 30, 2024
Throughout its examination of memory, identity, passion, and, of course, the movies themselves, Close Your Eyes is senescent cinema, defined by its maker’s age and by its preoccupation with how your priorities ebb and flow as you grow old. Read full review
83
IndieWireDavid EhrlichOct 18, 2023
In some respects, it feels like the most nakedly personal film the now 83-year-old has ever made. In others, it feels like the only film he’s ever made. Or maybe all of them. Read full review
83
The Film StageDavid KatzMay 26, 2023
Erice and co-writer Michel Gaztambide satisfyingly resolve the primary mystery while letting possible accompanying details and circumstances swim teasingly in our minds. Read full review
80
Rolling StoneDavid FearAug 26, 2024
You don’t have to know about Erice’s own backstory to appreciate this mournful, seeking work about life, art, loss, and the space where they all overlap. Read full review
80
The Irish TimesTara BradyApr 12, 2024
The script, by Erice and Michel Gaztambide, tarries for singsongs, dinners and poignant conversations about cinema and the self. Read full review
80
Time OutAnna BogutskayaJun 12, 2023
Close Your Eyes builds up slowly, deliberately, allowing ample breathing room to supporting characters who were, once at least, elemental in Miguel or Julio’s lives so we can paint a picture of who they are as artists and as people. Read full review
80
The GuardianPeter BradshawMay 25, 2023
It is a mysterious, digressive, long and baggily constructed film possessed of a distinctive richness and humanity, all about the balance between memory and forgetting which we all negotiate as we come to the end of our lives. Read full review
60
The New York TimesManohla DargisAug 22, 2024
Close Your Eyes has its virtues, certainly, including some pleasurably loose interludes at the beachfront compound where Miguel lives. These have a delicate, unforced quality that creates pinpricks of light in a movie that, as it struggles to engage meaningfully with the past, sinks into ponderousness. Read full review
60
The Observer (UK)Wendy IdeApr 14, 2024
It’s a beguiling drama that contrasts the mirage-like quality of hopes against the more tangible solidity of regrets. But while there’s a melancholy magic to it all, the spell is stretched rather thinly over the long running time. Read full review
60
Screen DailyLee MarshallMay 25, 2023
Close Your Eyes finally builds a head of emotional steam in its last half hour, while exploring questions of identity and what remains when memory has gone. Read full review
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