Anchored by Asensio's fearless and gripping performance, Most Beautiful Island directs an unflinching point of view toward an often invisible population.

| Aug 24, 2018

Spanish actor Ana Asensio multitasks as star, writer-director and producer of this arresting feature, a gritty, ominous thriller that's winning awards on the festival and independent film circuit.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Dec 1, 2017

This profoundly silly exploitation thriller posits the existence of a sinister New York gambling den where gorgeous but penniless immigrants go to die.

| Original Score: 1/5 | Dec 1, 2017

The plight of America's dreaming paperless, in devastating diptych.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Nov 30, 2017

It's amazing what difference it makes when a female director is depicting disturbing scenes of women being tormented or victimised.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Nov 29, 2017

The second half is chilling and well directed, culminating in a high-wire act of a finale.

| Nov 16, 2017

It's a tense movie, made both more personal and more unnerving by Asensio's insistence on staying with her protagonist, as the tension of her situation works us into a lather.

| Nov 3, 2017

Most Beautiful Island may take a while to get going, but once it does, you'll be eager to see what Asensio does next.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Nov 3, 2017

A modest but effective writing-directing debut for Ms. Asensio, who also stars.

| Nov 2, 2017

At a lean eighty minutes, Most Beautiful Island has little extraneous material in it, and Asensio spins a suspenseful web that delivers a truly shocking - and strangely satisfying - revelation.

| Nov 1, 2017

Many genre movies in which bad things happen to women end with them fighting back, but here, as people surely would in real life, they just take the money and run.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Oct 28, 2017

The story Asensio spins is delicate and threatening, like a spider's web. The suspense woven through the third act is nauseating, and a bit sublime.

| Mar 20, 2017

"Most Beautiful Island" earns whatever trust audiences have put in its unproven storyteller ...

| Mar 20, 2017

A short, stressful, and utterly spellbinding debut that transforms the immigrant experience into the stuff of an early Polanski psychodrama, Ana Asensio's Most Beautiful Island is a worthy winner of the SXSW Grand Jury Prize for best narrative feature.

| Original Score: B+ | Mar 16, 2017

Despite some missteps, there are enough strengths to mark this as a promising debut.

| Mar 16, 2017

The pivotal scenes may be fictionalised, but the prickling, precarious threat is clammily authentic and inspired by the experiences of the film's writer, director and star ...

| Mar 15, 2017

May have worked better as an installment of a horror anthology series, but it's certainly engaging and should keep you asking questions.

| Mar 14, 2017

An intriguing and slow-burn reinvention of survival horror.

| Mar 14, 2017