How the Garcia Girls Spent Their Summer: Critic Reviews

The film is sensitively told and appealingly bittersweet, though the story at times meanders and loses its way.

With equal measures of discretion and honesty, Riedel directly addresses the sensuality of all three women, achieving an almost startling sense of intimacy in scenes that range from mesmerizingly intense and gently comical.

Like Blanca and her friends, walking languidly down the street, then spontaneousy grabbing a shopping cart for a ride, Reidel plays with the rhythm of her enjoyably unhurried tale.

Unlike so many of her peers who depend on music to do everything but deliver the dialogue, [director] Riedel isn't afraid of silence; early in the film there's a solid minute of noiselessness as the camera lovingly pans the town, establishing the story's

Writer-director Georgina Garcia Riedel makes inventive use of the wide-screen format in this gentle, poetic 2005 comedy.

While there are rewards to sticking with this tempest-in-teapot saga of sexual awakening across three family generations of Mexican-American women, its pacing is leisurely to the brink of stasis.

Ms. Reidel also deserves credit for depicting the possibility of finding love at all ages, something that larger and more mainstream movies so often shy away from showing.

Another victory for a first-time, full-length feature filmmaker with a curious, inventive eye and an unsparing point of view.

Stylistically, the film takes risks before veering into an odd sort of studied artiness.

Pena has a great role and delivers her best performance since Lone Star in 1996.

Riedel reveals herself to be a novice filmmaker, especially in the pacing of most scenes.

A lovingly crafted portrait of a kind of life not often seen on the big screen.

Although the story is overly familiar, Riedel's evocation of small-town life rings true.

It's a smart little film, although there are some odd cinematographic moments --- curious, at best. And at two hours plus, the movie runs at least 20 minutes too long.

This is a movie with wonderful, strong performances from three very talented women.

Leisurely paced but lovely and touching.

If your taste is for movies off the beaten path, run out and see this one before it disappears.

With the Garcia Girls, Riedel will take the right audiences someplace this summer.

Riedel's film is a breakthrough achievement and a hopeful sign of more to come.

A tenderly spun tale of female sexual desire traversing three generations of Latina women north of the border, the movie is crafted glowingly from a woman's point of view, and with supreme sensitivity, dignity, warmth, sadness and humor.

Garcia Riedel is affectionate toward her characters to a fault - cameras linger as they walk down the street or make other prosaic moves, dragging the already sluggish story's pacing even more -- but she does get some lovely behavior out of each actress.

Rookie writer-director Georgina Garcia Riedel's helming hand is both unsure and all over the place and she enervatingly spins this slight, could-have-been-charming conceit over two hours.

Bless me father for I have fornicated, and loved it!

Three generations of Garcia women trying to spice up their lives with sex during a hot and boring summer.

Writer-director Georgina Garcia Riedel's feature debut is so good for so long that it breaks the heart to watch the film lose its way.