The movie’s first-time feature director, Tomás Gómez Bustillo, periodically pokes us from unpredictable angles, making us laugh, or at least smile ...

| Jan 22, 2025

Despite being a first-time filmmaker, Bustillo has the steady directorial hand of a seasoned veteran.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jan 17, 2025

Tomás Gómez Bustillo’s dramedy transported me to those strange nights [when I was a kid going to Holy Week processions in Tegucigalpa, Honduras] where the worlds of the dead and the living seemed to become one.

| Original Score: A- | Jan 17, 2025

... A lucid and fun story about the heavenly aspirations that sometimes hide the most earthly accomplishments. [Full review in Spanish]

| Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 15, 2024

This is a deadpan satirical comedy with eventual poignance and lyricism, a true original.

| Jul 18, 2024

The broader theme of these playful tricks and double meanings is the human need for fictions—those poetic lies which are somehow able to circumvent the dullness and meaninglessness of the world, to bring it into spiritual unity. In

| Original Score: A- | Jul 17, 2024

A triumph. An original and moving fable with elements of magical realism that explores faith, legacy, and the smallest miracles that sometimes go unnoticed. [Full Review in Spanish]

| Original Score: 4/4 | Jul 10, 2024

As you hear the film’s last notes ring out as the sunlight comes pouring through the window of this thing we call life one final time, you’ll only wish you too could go back through and get the chance to wander just a little bit longer.

| Original Score: 8/10 | Jul 6, 2024

Certain moments lend Chronicles of a Wandering Saint the feel of Renaissance paintings, pairing vibrant and cool colors with an encompassing emphasis on interplay between light and shadow.

| Original Score: 9.2/10 | Jul 5, 2024

Bustillo’s wit is minimalist without being precious, and although some scenes are not far removed from deadpan Jim Jarmusch absurdity, Rita’s plight becomes more reflective and thoughtful than you initially expect.

| Jul 5, 2024

There are many laugh-out-loud moments to cherish. If you believe in heaven and hell, or more particularly if you don’t, you’ll get new insights from this exercise in theater of the absurd.

| Jul 5, 2024

Chronicles of a Wandering Saint is a high-concept, humorous look at the miracles that exist in life and death, and an urgent attempt to have its audience embrace the present moment and everything that it is.

| Jul 3, 2024

Needless to say, this is hardly your father’s “faith-based” dramedy. To call it a religion-pilled film at all would be to misdirect, as it’s far more interested in consequence, and how much influence one’s community can have on their identity.

| Original Score: B | Jul 3, 2024

Chronicles of a Wandering Saint is sweet, funny, deadpan, and magical. A tale about love after life and the mysteries of the day to day being just as profound as those of the divine.

| Original Score: A | Jul 3, 2024

Even if you might get a hint of the film’s final destination before it arrives, the way Bustillo achieves his aims will leave you with a warm glow.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jun 30, 2024

Chronicles of a Wandering Saint crafts a contemplative wonder that sticks with audiences after the credits roll midway through and after the final scene fades to black.

| Jun 29, 2024

This is a very funny film. One that's probably at its funniest when staging a death scene. It's equal parts melancholic in its tale of rekindled love and absurdly fantastical in its bureaucratically pragmatic idea of the afterlife.

| Original Score: 8/10 | Jun 28, 2024

Argentinian director Tomás Gómez Bustillo makes his feature debut with a simultaneously amusing and affecting tale about the things that matter most, in the here and now and forevermore.

| Jun 28, 2024

[T]he film becomes a gently comedic examination of what really matters in life.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jun 28, 2024

Bustillo is too much of a people-pleaser to let the poetry of his visuals speak for themselves, but he’s also skilled enough to ensure that those abstractions effectively deepen the all-too-digestible meaning of the story they exist to refract.

| Original Score: B | Jun 27, 2024