Nico and Dani

Boston Globe Jay Carr

The film is rightfully carried by Nico and Dani and under Gay's artful helmsmanship it's carried with remarkable sympathy and believability.

Los Angeles Times Kevin Thomas

An exceptional coming-of-age film--subtle, humorous, compassionate, acutely perceptive.

Washington Post Michael O'Sullivan

Touching, funny, unflinching and true.

Miami Herald Rene Rodriguez

The movie ultimately turns out to be less about sex than it is about the point in a friendship where two people decide they will both be better off if they part ways.

Philadelphia Inquirer Desmond Ryan

Honest, sensitive and keenly observant.

Portland Oregonian Kim Morgan

Delivers the oft-trod subject of boys' sexuality with intelligence and freshness.

Chicago Tribune Robert K. Elder

While Nico and Dani presents itself as a no-frills coming-of-age tale, its soundtrack seems lifted from a teen comedy like "American Pie."

Baltimore Sun Chris Kaltenbach

A more honest version of "Summer of '42."

New York Daily News Elizabeth Weitzman

Director Gay deals so honestly with the boys' emotions, it's almost a revelation when compared to Hollywood fabrications.

Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert

American teenage movies tidy things up by pairing off the right couples at the end. In Europe they know that summers end and life goes on.

Mr. Showbiz Kevin Maynard

Nico and Dani merely retells a not uncommon tale without significantly enriching it. It's just too familiar to play as poignantly as it would like to.

Austin Chronicle Marrit Ingman

That rarest of creatures: a coming-of-age dramedy whose (nearly) teenage stars are natural actors, whose direction is unforced, and whose sexual themes are treated with candor and humor.

TV Guide Ken Fox

Breezy, surprisingly poignant Spanish film.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer Sean Axmaker

Rambling and easygoing, Nico and Dani is a modest but frank look at adolescent lust, both heterosexual and homosexual.

San Francisco Chronicle Edward Guthmann

Sweet and harmless -- a beach movie in more ways than one -- but it doesn't run awfully deep.

Christian Science Monitor David Sterritt

The acting is amiable but the story isn't much deeper than the callow main characters.

LA Weekly Chuck Wilson

Filled with the kind of frank, nonsensational sensuality that eludes American filmmakers, this movie proves again that the most interesting cinema about teenage life -- gay and otherwise -- is being made far from our provincial shores.

Village Voice Dennis Lim

The movie avoids grand conclusions, and its restraint heightens the clarity of the perspective shifts that constitute a rite of passage; Nico and Dani is a modest chronicle of a summer during which everything had to change so that everything could stay the same.

The New York Times Stephen Holden

Amazingly, Cesc Gay's delicate but unblinking film Nico and Dani succeeds in capturing and sustaining the fragile emotional climate of curiosity, fear, innocence and prurience that surrounds adolescent sexual experimentation.

New York Post V.A. Musetto

A movie more interested in shocking than in entertaining.

Film.com Henry Cabot Beck

Everyone will be indifferent, as indifferent and uncaring as the characters the film portrays.