Grisi’s film is cinema at its rawest, most beautiful and contemplative, even if many of its plot aspects are woefully thin and overstretched.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Aug 9, 2024

a beguiling, beautiful movie, which Grisi’s passion for this subject makes ache with authenticity, but this passion never translates to anger. He just seems disappointed.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jul 4, 2024

Utama is a stark reminder that climate change haunts the land and the earth. A poignant film that expresses that land and cultures are important and not easy to let go of.

| Sep 8, 2023

Utama is not an easy watch. Why would it be? The topics it covers are as sad as it gets. But it is not a miserablist indulgence either. There is great joy and life here too.

| Mar 28, 2023

See it just for the photography by Bárbara Alvarez and the masterful way it’s integrated with the music and sound by first-time filmmaker Alejandro Loayza Grisi. The family drama on the desert landscape is sublime.

| Mar 13, 2023

In a way, Utama is a perfect portrait of the present moment where a mounting climate disaster, coupled with a stormy economic system, threatens all but the most privileged.

| Dec 8, 2022

Grisi has an incredible eye - the way he captures the barren landscapes almost recalls Carlos Reygadas (or to reach back further - John Ford), but it also leaves us wondering what a filmmaker like Reygadas could have done with this material.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Dec 3, 2022

Alejandro Loayza Grisi isn’t interested in story or action here, he's interested in the enormity of seemingly small lives.

| Original Score: B+ | Dec 2, 2022

The fusion in Utama of beautifully orchestrated images and warm, convincing performances invites its audience to immerse itself for 90 minutes in a way of life that is not only inaccessible to westerners but endangered. It’s well worth it.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Nov 29, 2022

Letting go can often be the hardest thing to do and although Utama allows itself the odd flourish of magical realism, it is in the underlying truth of these experiences that the film hits home the hardest.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Nov 29, 2022

If you only see one film about Bolivian llama farmers this year, make it Utama.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Nov 22, 2022

An elegiac, minimalist fable, Utama is about many things: global warming, survival, our connections to each other, our priorities.

| Original Score: 8/10 | Nov 22, 2022

Operating under the principle that an ominous cough heard in the first act must go off in the last, Utama turns out to be a fairly tedious harangue...

| Nov 21, 2022

'Utama' is not exactly what one would call a subtle or particularly complex piece of storytelling. Nor does it need to be.

| Nov 21, 2022

A gentle and superbly shot film.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Nov 21, 2022

Alejandro Loayza Grisi’s feature debut [is a] stark parable.

| Nov 19, 2022

Though thematically weighty, the story is almost wishfully simple in execution. It’s proud and hushed, performed with rough-hewn starkness by nonprofessional actors José Calina (Virginio) and Luisa Quispe (Sisa).

| Original Score: 3/4 | Nov 17, 2022

This striking film suggests there are elements to the world beyond our understanding, and that even in the most formidable places, home is a home.

| Nov 10, 2022

Unfortunately, this slice of life story is becoming the norm rather than the exception in our real life world apocalypse.

| Original Score: B | Nov 9, 2022

Writer-director Alejandro Loayza Grisi assembles this in a documentary style, creating a sharp evocation of the local culture. It's a gorgeous slice of life with properly momentous undertones.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Nov 8, 2022