...takes place within a child’s imagination, even as it’s tethered to the difficult, dangerous realities of adulthood.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Dec 13, 2024

To my mind, Spirit of the Beehive plays more like the film one-shot director Charles Laughton would have made had he moved to Spain, traded German Expressionism for magical realism, and made another film as miraculous as 1955's Night of the Hunter.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Aug 23, 2024

Sublime... essential... childhood, dreams, storytelling, the oneiric force of filmmaking itself... Erice’s visual style is stately and serene, yet his imagery delineates a concrete world and the potential within that space for potential unbounded.

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

The film reveals the necessity of monsters. When they appear in life or cinema, they present a platform against which we can better know ourselves.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Mar 8, 2022

[Ana] Torrent guilelessly captures the terror and wonder of imagination's possibility that so informs childhood experience.

| Jan 11, 2021

Erice clearly intended this as a discourse on the septic influence of Franco's reign on Spanish civilian life.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Oct 31, 2019

Spirit of the Beehive is the sort of slumbrously sensitive item that tends to give art films a poisonous reputation... seems to believe in the infinite evocative power of long, ponderous, static takes.

| May 9, 2018

... is not a form of evasion, but a form of knowledge, an abrupt and precocious learning about the mysteries of life. [Full review in Spanish]

| Dec 27, 2017

There is another world that underlies this one: a world of darkness, silence, open space and enormous forces moving in the distance.

| Aug 24, 2017

Lyrical and magestic, Erice's film is one of the most compelling fables about haunted childhood.

| Original Score: A | Jan 18, 2013

Sensitive, beautifully-wrought.

| Mar 26, 2009

A most exceptional vision of the inner life of a child just learning about the darker complexities of life.

| Original Score: 10/10 | Oct 6, 2008

Considered by many as one of the key Spanish films of the Seventies.

| Original Score: A | May 7, 2007

...a graceful, lyrical masterpiece wound around one of the most natural and engrossing performances by a child actor we've ever seen.

| Sep 17, 2006

A haunting, atmospheric film that focuses on a young girl's obsession with the Frankenstein monster.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Aug 30, 2006

filmmaking art of the highest caliber.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Jul 23, 2006

It's a film that transports us back not just to the sights and sounds of childhood but to a core of sweet innocence and sometimes ignorant bliss.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/4 | Jul 6, 2006

Erice meant his film as a sly social commentary, but his opinions are so well enveloped in the film's dreamy coming-of-age tapestry that moviegoers worldwide (especially younger ones) have embraced it.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Jun 8, 2006

This is a modest marvel of grace and framing that unfolds with the patience of a cloud and is driven more by wonder than pure emotion.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | May 26, 2006

Those who haven't seen it since the '70s may find themselves amazed all over again by its lyrical potency and grace; those who have never seen it may wonder how it can be that a film this great isn't shown somewhere all the time.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/4 | Mar 31, 2006