A nuanced, authentic portrait of adolescent ennui and maturation that treats pre-teen emotions with a Jim Jarmusch-ian brand of detached sympathy and bemusement.

| Original Score: B+ | Dec 27, 2006

The fullness of Duck Season is in direct proportion to its smallness; its modesty makes it bloom.

| May 12, 2006

Effortlessly nonchalant in its observations of kids and the way the world looks to them.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Apr 21, 2006

Often dull dialogue and marginally interesting characters.

Full Review | Original Score: C+ | Apr 6, 2006

Eimbcke makes the most of his enclosed space and eager cast to string together a series of droll vignettes that eventually add up to a satisfying and touching story.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Apr 1, 2006

Devotes itself to youthful inertia.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Apr 1, 2006

A quiet, loopy gem, Duck Season is a goofball celebration of old friends, new beginnings, adolescent freedom, and baked goods laced with a little something extra.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/4 | Mar 24, 2006

Not much happens in Duck Season, but it's never dull: Eimbcke, a Spanish filmmaker making his feature debut, finds just the right note with his young actors and fills his film with telling detail.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Mar 24, 2006

Give Duck Season a chance. Sit on your watch for the first 20 minutes and see what happens. Eimbcke's gentle persuasion will reward your patience for weeks to come.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Mar 24, 2006

A film so small and understated that it was nearly over before I realized how much I was going to miss these characters once their story had been told.

Full Review | Mar 20, 2006

Duck Season hits every one of its modest marks and then some. It's the kind of movie to send you out looking at strangers on the street with newfound appreciation and something close to love.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Mar 18, 2006

Not very much really happens in Duck Season, but in its rich details, it remembers how absorbing and endless every single day can seem when you're 14.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Mar 18, 2006

The film's calm and witty visual rhythm offers a rueful awareness of time passing and of time wasted, in ways that people tend not to appreciate fully until long after they've wasted it.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | Mar 18, 2006

The beauty of Duck Season is its insistence that profound human experiences can arrive slowly, in incremental packages, scattered over the course of an average Sunday.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Mar 17, 2006

Director Fernando Eimbcke, in an extraordinary debut, never expresses contempt for his characters. By examining their inner lives with compassion and respect, he inspires us to do the same.

| Mar 16, 2006

a modest, beautifully proportioned peek into the lives of four uncertain young characters who aren't yet fully formed.

Full Review | Original Score: B+ | Mar 15, 2006

Summing up Duck Season is a simple enough affair, but hardly does justice to this ironic, carefully crafted comedy, the latest indication that Mexican cinema is going through one of its spasmodic periods of renaissance.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/4 | Mar 11, 2006

Though his camera rarely moves, Duck Season director Fernando Eimbcke and his cast capture teen ennui in an entertainingly universal way.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Mar 10, 2006

It's about the kind of kids who could never sit still enough, unfortunately, for a movie that perfectly captures the frustrations, longings, obsessions and torments of the awkward years before manhood.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Mar 10, 2006

Eimbcke attempts to give this story a melancholy overlay, but its main interest is in its confirmation that teenagers are pretty much the same everywhere.

| Original Score: B | Mar 10, 2006