Thanks to Lujan, it's very funny.

| Jun 18, 2015

An unexpectedly droll tale about a funeral, "Nora's Will" demonstrates the power of some people to reach beyond the grave.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Sep 15, 2011

This is a very wise film, without any stench of didacticism: Through it all, the abiding power - like the strong force of an atomic bond - is not love exactly, but relationship, the net that wraps us all together and holds us fast.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Mar 24, 2011

Lujan does what only the best actors can -- infusing the slightness not with actual substance but at least with the idea of substance, with a road map to where the writer could have located it. In Nora's Will, his performance points the way.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Mar 4, 2011

Chenillo is a smart filmmaker, but the film is too tidy. Maybe next time out, she'll really get her hands dirty.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Mar 4, 2011

In her feature film debut, Mexican writer/director Mariana Chenillo has woven a genuine charmer, tartly funny and irreverent yet warm and poignant, a testament to enduring love.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Mar 3, 2011

The tone is tricky, sliding along a tightrope of farce and wistfulness, but Lujn especially walks it like a pro, his ruined leonine face registering cynicism, shock, and the embarrassment of grief.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Dec 2, 2010

Chenillo doesn't have a galvanic visual style but her film is filled with small, observant moments when the humanity of these people peeps through the low-key shenanigans. It's a bittersweet farce.

| Original Score: B | Nov 22, 2010

A fantastic first feature from rising director Mariana Chenillo. Watch for her.

| Original Score: A- | Nov 10, 2010

Though this is her first feature, writer-director Mariana Chenillo displays great sureness of touch behind the camera.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Oct 28, 2010

One of those modestly scaled foreign-language films destined to draw mature adult viewers who rarely go to the movies.

Full Review | Oct 28, 2010

Nora's Will commendably dares to view suicide as an agent of familial cohesion, but it simplifies its most fecund conflicts to the point of characterizing fodder.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Oct 18, 2010

Ms. Chenillo continually tries to lighten the mood with laughter, sometimes by underlining the differences between the unsmiling Orthodox Jewish and more freewheeling Christian interlopers. The comedy and tone both falter.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | Oct 15, 2010

Nora's Will is the warm and funny feature debut of director-writer Mariana Chenillo.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Oct 15, 2010

It's a surprisingly understated movie that poignantly posits death as a therapeutic force for the living.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Oct 13, 2010

Throughout, writer/director Mariana Chenillo and Lujn carefully unwrap Jos's defensive postures to reveal a hard center of unresolved emotion, shown finally.

| Oct 12, 2010

When a loved one leaves us through suicide, Chenillo suggests, we're often left with unanswered questions. But Nora has taken pains to eliminate all mysteries.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Sep 24, 2010

It's a sly, small film that shies away from too much gravity at all the right times.

| Original Score: B | Jul 30, 2010