Resuscitating reviews I wrote at festivals that Patreon’s crap search engine wouldn’t previously have delivered because the titles weren’t in the subject line. The film(s) in question will generally have just opened theatrically in New York City when these posts appear.
Romería (Carla Simón): 51/100 [AFI Fest ’25]
One of those films that you quickly intuit is autobiographical, simply because anyone inventing the story from scratch would have endeavored to make it more interesting. To be fair, I've seen Summer 1993, to which Romería serves as a sequel of sorts (in that both are heavily based on Simón's life), hence knew some of the background...but I'd still argue that there's insufficient variety in this film's logy first hour, which sees the Simón alter ego meet many, many blood relatives for the first time (or for the first time since she was an infant) and quietly reflect upon how her life might have been different had her parents not both died of AIDS when she was young. And for me, at least, there's a repellent quality to the character having been renamed while still clearly being on Simón's own trajectory—the plot engine here involves acquiring a legal document that'll allow "Marina" to attend film school, and she spends the whole movie shooting camcorder footage. (I have the same issue with Hogg's Souvenirs. Fiction or memoir, pick one.) Just when I'd given up, however, Romería takes an unexpected, welcome swerve into magic realism, with Marina encountering her long-dead parents (in the physical form of Marina herself and her cousin, which makes all the nudity and sex in this part a tad creepy but never mind) and somehow witnessing their young lives, which are depicted as significantly less alluring than Mom's diary entries (played by Simón's mother's actual diary entries) suggested. Didn't make the first hour-plus retroactively less enervating, but pushed it just barely from thumbs down to thumbs up.