CNET Networks Entertainment GameSpot | GameFAQs | SportsGamer | Metacritic | MP3.com | TV.com
Home | About Metacritic | About Metascores | What's New | Wireless Versions | Discussion Forums | Advertising Inquiries | Contact Us | RSS
Metacritic.com: We Deal With Criticism
     Help
> Switch to Advanced Search  
Film Video/DVD Music Games TV

Film

Upcoming Release Calendar
Weekend Box Office
Film Awards & Top 10s By Year
All-Time High Scores
All-Time Low Scores
How Metascores Are Calculated
Discuss Film In Our Forums

 

Wide Releases

sort by name sort by score

Stars indicate the most critically-acclaimed movies.

 

Limited Releases

sort by name sort by score

83 Alexandra
80 Band's Visit, The
76 Beauty in Trouble
47 Bella
80 Bigger, Stronger, Faster*
59 Blind Mountain
55 Bra Boys
60 Brick Lane
70 Caramel
49 Children of Huang Shi, The
83 Chop Shop
83 Chris & Don. A Love Story
78 Counterfeiters, The
52 Diminished Capacity
64 Dreams with Sharp Teeth
73 Duchess of Langeais, The
84 Edge of Heaven, The
52 Elsa & Fred
79 Encounters at the End of the World
62 Expired
64 Fall, The
51 Finding Amanda
57 Flawless
86 Flight of the Red Balloon, The
63 Foot Fist Way, The
60 Fugitive Pieces
45 Full Grown Men
55 Glass: A Portrait of Philip in Twelve Parts
69 Go-Getter, The
74 Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson
63 Gunnin for that #1 Spot
68 Heartbeat Detector
34 Holding Trevor
68 Honeydripper
55 Irina Palm
69 Jellyfish
60 Jihad for Love, A
68 Kabluey
62 Kiss the Bride
63 Kit Kittredge: An American Girl
82 Last Mistress, The
38 Life Before Her Eyes, The
70 Love Songs
64 Married Life
30 Meet Bill
33 Miss Conception
53 Mister Lonely
74 Mongol
52 Mother of Tears, The
52 My Blueberry Nights
71 My Brother Is an Only Child
84 My Winnipeg
61 On the Rumba River
69 Operation Filmmaker
61 OSS 117: Cairo - Nest of Spies
83 Paranoid Park
72 Priceless
51 Promotion, The
55 Quid Pro Quo
29 Red Roses and Petrol
79 Reprise
71 Roman de gare
xx Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired
56 Sangre de mi sangre
51 Savage Grace
76 Shotgun Stories
66 Son of Rambow
70 Standard Operating Procedure
62 Stuck
72 Surfwise
81 Tell No One
56 Then She Found Me
xx Thoda Pyaar Thoda Magic
71 To the Limit
54 Tracey Fragments, The
70 Trumbo
72 Tuya's Marriage
83 U2 3D
56 Unknown Woman
86 Up the Yangtze
79 Visitor, The
62 Wackness, The
37 War, Inc.
64 Water Lilies
66 When Did You Last See Your Father?
55 Without the King
72 Woman on the Beach
64 XXY
67 Year My Parents Went on Vacation, The
75 Young@Heart

Stars indicate the most critically-acclaimed movies.

 



Printer-Friendly Version Email This Page Discuss In Our Forums

Crimen del padre Amaro, El
Samuel Goldwyn Films

Crimen del padre Amaro, El reviews
Critic Score
Metascore: 60 Metascore out of 100
User Score  
8.0 out of 10
based on 29 reviews
Read critic reviews
How did we calculate this?
based on 15 votes
Read user comments
Rate this movie

MPAA RATING: R for sexuality, language and some disturbing images

Starring Gael García Bernal, Ana Claudia Talancón, Sancho Gracia, Angélica Aragón, Luisa Huertas, Ernesto Gómez Cruz, Gastón Melo, and Damián Alcázar

The scandalous story of a young priest, Father Amaro (Bernal), assigned to a church in a small village in remote Mexico, who falls in love with a teenage girl, Amelia (Talancon), who then becomes pregnant with his baby, and asks for his help in getting an abortion.


GENRE(S): Foreign  
WRITTEN BY: Vicente Leñero
Eça de Queirós (novel)
 
DIRECTED BY: Carlos Carrera  
RELEASE DATE: DVD: April 22, 2003 
Video: April 22, 2003 
Theatrical: November 15, 2002 
RUNNING TIME: 120 minutes, Color 
ORIGIN: Mexico / Spain / Argentina / France 
LANGUAGE(S): Spanish (with English subtitles) 

Title translates into English as "The Crime of Father Amaro"

What The Critics Said

All critic scores are converted to a 100-point scale. If a critic does not indicate a score, we assign a score based on the general impression given by the text of the review. Learn more...

100
Christian Science Monitor David Sterritt
Excellent acting, intelligent screenwriting, and dynamic filmmaking give this Mexican production a forceful emotional and intellectual charge.
Read Full Review
88
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.
Read Full Review
88
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.
Read Full Review
83
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.
Read Full Review
80
Washington Post Desson Thomson
May be morally tangled, pessimistic, lurid and foreboding, but it's also humanistic.
Read Full Review
75
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.
Read Full Review
75
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.
Read Full Review
75
Charlotte Observer Lawrence Toppman
Carrera directs with a light touch, letting the screenplay speak for itself.
Read Full Review
75
San Francisco Chronicle Edward Guthmann
Conveys the character of this tiny, insular community through richness of detail.
Read Full Review
75
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.
Read Full Review
70
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.
Read Full Review
70
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.
Read Full Review
70
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.
Read Full Review
63
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.
Read Full Review
63
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.
Read Full Review
63
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.
Read Full Review
63
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.
Read Full Review
60
Salon.com Stephanie Zacharek
Ends up being nothing more than a stifling morality tale dressed up in peekaboo clothing.
Read Full Review
60
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.
Read Full Review
60
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.
Read Full Review
50
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.
Read Full Review
50
Dallas Observer Gregory Weinkauf
Competent if unremarkable tragedy.
Read Full Review
50
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.
Read Full Review
50
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.
Read Full Review
50
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.
50
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.
Read Full Review
50
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.
Read Full Review
40
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.
Read Full Review
38
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.
Read Full Review

What Our Users Said

Vote Now!The average user rating for this movie is 8.0 (out of 10) based on 15 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.

Frank O. gave it a7:
Felt like two different movies; first half being local politics and the church; 2nd half the relationship between Father Amaro and Ana character. Publicity, trailer and DVD description misleading about the overriding theme of story.

Alma L. gave it a10:
Very Good!

enrique i gave it a3:
This movie is very pathetic and just as another siege to the Roman Catholic Church (after the Da vinci code). well, sorry, i have first read the book DVC and watched this movie. It is pathetic in its futile attempt to backlash the Holy Church, but I admire the over all impact of the movie. Thank you.

Jesse M. gave it a 10:
I have to say, as a movie director and a script writter, i have to give this creation of art a 10!!! so many things to say about the film so little time, Carlos Carrera man i hope i get a chance to work with you some day, i think we could come up with an outstanding film, this film in general has to be one of the best films i have seen throught my 10 years of studying film. The way Carlos made us feel sorry for El padre amaro throught the film, in which he really is a bad guy.... well to you fans out their....i think Carlos did a hell of a job putting this film together. and vicentte i cant forget you man, i god of script writters...good luck in the future films....and i hope your flame doesnt die off!! keep up the good work!!! much love.peace out!

Aldo A. gave it a 10:
The movie is great, specially the cinematography. Some people didn't like it because of the critic to the church, and I think that's the reason of its losing the best foreign movie oscar...

Maria H. gave it a 9:
This film goes against all ethics, both at home and at church. I heard much controversy around the film because of it's content. Nevertheless, this film is educational on many levels. I liked it because of it's eye-openning and mind twisting content.

Miguel R. gave it a 10:
Simply some of the best Mexican work ever. As "Amores Peros" and "Y tu Mama Tambien" Gael Bernal makes and incredible role with some of his best work yet.

Read more user comments...

Discuss this movie in our forums

Return to top of page
Home | FILM | DVD/VIDEO | MUSIC | GAMES | TV | Forums | About Metacritic metacritic.com

Popular on CBS sites: World News | Fantasy Football | Amy Winehouse | Baseball | E3 | Batman | Firefox 3 | iPhone 3G

About CNET Networks | Jobs | Advertise

© 2008 CNET Networks, Inc., a CBS Company. All rights reserved. | Privacy Policy | Terms of Use