It works decently when it adopts the formal properties of silent film, but I have the feeling that it is a dark fable adorned with facileness and that it lacks emotion in its folkloric notes on Spanish culture. [Full review in Spanish]

| Original Score: 6/10 | Mar 19, 2025

It's not just the people who look great. Most of these compositions look like photographs in an art gallery, yet manage not to forfeit their cinematic immediacy.

| Mar 17, 2021

if you are an adventurous moviegoer able to fully surrender yourself to a full-on sensory experience then this is very likely one film that will completely sweep you away.

| Original Score: 3.5/4.0 | Sep 3, 2020

Blancanieves is a strange piece of work, but a precious one, however, so even if it lacks ambition, its integrity and beauty are to be treasured.

| Mar 23, 2020

A visual spectacle cloaked in a beautiful melancholy, Blancanieves is filmmaking at its finest and a true masterpiece.

| Nov 27, 2019

The kind of rare cinematic treat that makes the heart beat faster at the recognition of something truly magical in the way that only movies can provide.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Aug 6, 2019

Berger has managed to take a tale as old as time and enchant us to the point where we're not only invested in the characters, but there's tension and mystery as well.

| Jul 24, 2019

The recent rediscovery of silent film is unfortunately more of a casual awakening than a complete rebirth, although Blancanieves may be the finest example of it yet.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Feb 26, 2019

Filmed in glamorous black and white, all dialogue furnished via intertitles, the movie is less a pastiche than The Artist and, at least initially, it's not as precious.

| Feb 22, 2019

Blancanieves is a welcomed deviation from the conventional follow-the-dots tale of the Snow White legend in comparison to the usual standby layers of big-budgeted sprinkled CGI fireworks effects.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Nov 18, 2018

The pleasure resides as much in the layers upon layers of references to film history, to Spanish history, to fairytales, to Hollywood entertainment, as it does in its story of a little girl who loses everything.

| Jul 31, 2018

... this is not a bad film; it's just not a very good one.

| Sep 18, 2017

Loving, willful anachronism... silent black-and-white fairytale Blancanieves-"a local film for a global market"-retells the familiar tale against a backdrop of bullfighting and flamenco in 1920s Seville, with intermittent roosters and dwarfs.

| Jun 13, 2015

It's like watching a gorgeous tragi-comic opera written by Dickens and co-directed by Fellini and Almodovar.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Dec 8, 2014

The film is exquisitely shot and Macarena Garcia is achingly gorgeous as the fawn-eyed Carmen/Snow White.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Dec 8, 2014

A Spanish take on Snow White that picks up where The Artist left off and shows the full elegance of silent filmmaking.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Dec 8, 2014

No film this year will look as swooningly beautiful, its deep-focus monochrome vividly rendered by the cinematographer Kiko de la Rica, and not many will sound as good, either, thanks to a score by Alfonso de Vilallong.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Dec 8, 2014

Blancanieves is a truly stunning motion picture, the kind of movie that makes you glad the movies exist.

| Original Score: A- | Dec 8, 2014

Shooting in crisp black-and-white and with sparse dialogue (on title cards), Berger creates gorgeous scenes that evoke not only the silent era but early '30s horror (including a reference to Tod Browning's Freaks that's oddly endearing).

| Original Score: 3/4 | Dec 8, 2014

Berger plays Blancanieves like a game, very carefully monitoring the mood and heightening it or lowering it as needs be.

| Dec 8, 2014