Close Your Eyes is exactly what I’d hoped for, which is to say, it left me nearly speechless.

| Apr 17, 2025

So, rather than make this film about "saving" Julio, Erice makes it about Miguel waking up to the magic of his own artistic possibility through him. It's about reconciling past and present, memory and reality.

| Original Score: 8/10 | Jan 17, 2025

... a malleable, elusive meditation on memory and legacy.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Dec 19, 2024

Movies and mortality are linked throughout the engrossing three-hour drama.

| Original Score: B+ | Oct 25, 2024

If this turns out to be Erice’s final film, it will be a fitting capstone to a fascinating, enigmatic career—but let us hope that it is not.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Sep 30, 2024

A gift from the cinema gods, and a spot of refuge in this otherwise sparse movie year.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Sep 27, 2024

At 83 years old, and with only four feature films to his name, Erice has an unparalleled ability to evoke mood, time, and place with a light, yet poignant, touch.

| Original Score: 4.5/5 | Sep 26, 2024

In his first feature in more than 30 years, Víctor Erice has made a great, stirring film about death and memory.

| Sep 23, 2024

Erice exhibits a fine eye for compositions and for sound alternating with silence. Events unfold deliberately, quietly, suspensefully over almost three hours running time. The performances are mesmerizing...

| Sep 19, 2024

Graceful and accomplished as it is, the 84-year-old Erice’s belated return arguably requires more patience than it provides reward, particularly when a cryptic fadeout leaves central questions hanging.

| Sep 17, 2024

This is an 84-year-old man looking back on what could've been and projecting it onto a fascinating story. Hang with it, it's worth it.

| Sep 16, 2024

Too much of the rest of the film is old men whining about cinema’s decline. Although I feel this sense of loss as acutely as anyone, I’m tired of this attitude in the older generation. Just go to the movies.

| Sep 16, 2024

“Close Your Eyes” is a sad, delicate, powerful and beautiful gift to film fans.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Sep 12, 2024

Victor Erice looks back at what’s lost and gained in Close Your Eyes.

| Sep 11, 2024

To say that “Close Your Eyes” is reflective of Erice’s own cinematic arc would be both true and false, but it is an oblique, hypnotic sojourn into the emotional darkness of a filmmaker’s heart.

| Sep 6, 2024

Erice's elegiac effort is poignant, wrenching, beautiful and most of all sensitive to the currents created in our lives by cinema.

| Original Score: A- | Sep 5, 2024

[T]his mystery tale and exploration of memory certainly leaves us pondering the interplay of life and art, in addition to a few other things.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Sep 5, 2024

After all, people come and go, but cinema lives forever. Thank goodness that Close Your Eyes falls in the latter camp...

| Original Score: A | Sep 4, 2024

With its connections to the director’s earlier work and life, Close Your Eyes is a brilliant achievement that plays like the summa of Erice’s career, which has always ruminated on cinema as the nexus where art, identity, and memory converge.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Sep 3, 2024

Close Your Eyes lets audiences appreciate objects making life bearable or the past tangible through tremendously powerful filmmaking and performances.

| Aug 29, 2024