Crimen del padre Amaro, El

Christian Science Monitor David Sterritt

Excellent acting, intelligent screenwriting, and dynamic filmmaking give this Mexican production a forceful emotional and intellectual charge.

Philadelphia Inquirer Carrie Rickey

A feverish melodrama about an idealist who, in following his heart and his bishop's orders, leads himself into temptation and his parish into hypocrisy.

Boston Globe Wesley Morris

Bernal, with his sweet man-boy looks, makes Padre Amaro's portrait of corruption all the more flabbergasting in its irony.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer Sean Axmaker

Carrera's direct, unadorned style has none of the searing imagery or cinematic imagination of "Y Tu Mama," but it bristles with passion, anger and a palpable sense of betrayal.

Washington Post Desson Thomson

May be morally tangled, pessimistic, lurid and foreboding, but it's also humanistic.

New York Post Megan Lehmann

Commendably, Carrera steers clear of preachiness in his exploration of a timely and relevant issue, and Bernal's transformation from naive priest to tortured adulterer to hard-nosed careerist is riveting.

ReelViews James Berardinelli

Not an indictment of the Catholic Church as a whole, but a thought-provoking look at what can happen when decent individuals are seduced by the power of their position.

Charlotte Observer Lawrence Toppman

Carrera directs with a light touch, letting the screenplay speak for itself.

San Francisco Chronicle Edward Guthmann

Conveys the character of this tiny, insular community through richness of detail.

Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert

It's more of a melodrama, a film that doesn't say priests are bad but observes that priests are human and some humans are bad.

TV Guide Maitland McDonagh

Roundly condemned (though not banned) by Church officials in Mexico, the film became a smash hit -- probably in part because the public wrangling gave it an enormous publicity boost.

Village Voice J. Hoberman

Carrera's filmmaking is more workmanlike than stylish, but Padre Amaro is richly character driven and, for all its insolent, grotesque humor, straightforwardly humanist in its psychology.

Time Richard Schickel

Carrera's handsome film offers a richly detailed portrait of a church not so much corrupt as morally lazy after centuries in command of an overwhelmingly Catholic country.

Baltimore Sun Chris Kaltenbach

Would have been better served if Carrera had spent a little more energy developing his story and less on emphasizing his message.

Chicago Tribune Michael Wilmington

Carrera's style is hard-hitting, lucid and technically superior (if unimaginative). El Crimen del Padre Amaro eventually moves and stirs you, even if it often resembles those steamy Mexican TV dramas/soap operas called telenovelas.

Miami Herald Marta Barber

Had the film been more balanced, it would have added a new star to the recent wave of remarkable Mexican cinema.

The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Staff (Not credited)

How does it all play up here in colder and more secular climes? In a word -- melodramatically.

Salon.com Stephanie Zacharek

Ends up being nothing more than a stifling morality tale dressed up in peekaboo clothing.

The New York Times Stephen Holden

A suds-filled political melodrama that bashes the Roman Catholic Church in Mexico with a contempt that verges on hysteria, could be accused of many things, but timidity is not one of them.

Los Angeles Times Kenneth Turan

The remarkable things about the new film, adapted by Vicente Leñero and directed by Carlos Carrera, are how smoothly it has been transposed to today's Mexico and how far good acting and skillful directing have gone toward tempering those melodramatic roots.

Entertainment Weekly Owen Gleiberman

The real crime is the way that the movie turns Gael García Bernal, the hot-tempered, Roman-lipped costar of ''Y Tu Mamá También, into a backwater Freddie Prinze Jr.

Dallas Observer Gregory Weinkauf

Competent if unremarkable tragedy.

The Onion (A.V. Club) Keith Phipps

However much the film may mirror the truth, dramatically it feels like a cheat. It omits the human spark that would make it work as a film, rather than a collection of dramatized issues.

Variety Dennis Harvey

Respectably crafted to avoid lurid excess, feature is nonetheless a bit potboilerish in its pileup of sexy, violent, duplicitous circumstances that plague the consciences of latter-day clergymen.

Wall Street Journal Joe Morgenstern

The tone is that of a telenovela -- soap-operatic at heart -- even though the film was adapted from a 19th-century novel.

LA Weekly Ernest Hardy

The tragic ending they tack on to the film reinforces the same fear-mongering notion of cause and effect that gives the Church its power to abuse and exploit, and the film winds up muffling its own powerful protest.

Austin Chronicle Marjorie Baumgarten

At two hours, the movie goes on too long and resolves too little -- even though it provides some interesting moments along the way.

Chicago Reader J. R. Jones

Amaro is so lacking in gravitas that there's no opportunity to explore the intense emotionality of the church in Latin America --which is the source of its temporal power.

New York Daily News Jack Mathews

Father Amaro comes off as another pedophile in a frock. You'd have to hose this guy down if he were driving a school bus.