The Pearl Button's reviews
Media reviews
Los Angeles Times
By turns lyrical, impressionistic and profound, the documentary 'The Pearl Button' requires patience but offers stirring rewards.
Indiewire
'The Pearl Button' is a vivid, essential portal to understanding not only the heritage of a nation, but also the art of nonfiction cinema.
The Playlist
Guzmán's essential thesis seems to be that, in turning its back on the ocean, modern Chile lost a crucial part of its identity. But he also puts forward the extraordinary idea that the water has a memory, and that if you listen closely enough, you can hear the voices of the disappeared.
New York Times
A master of voice-over and metaphor (the title alone has an amazing payoff), [Mr. Guzmán] sifts through essential truths and draws links between Chile?s past and present inhabitants.
The Hollywood Reporter
It is the director?s extraordinary intuition about the synchronicity of history, geography and the physical universe ? a mysterious relationship that has nothing to do with cause and effect ? that gives the film and its predecessor their undeniable power.
El Mundo
The director runs with a poetry flint lips of an ancient wound. Perfect in its transparency; blinding in their grief. And always clairvoyant.
The A.V. Club
A haunting mediation on water replacing its predecessor?s preoccupation with stars and dirt.
Fotogramas
The poetic register using by Guzmán is wonderful, more hypnotic images of quasars, planets, waves, seas and glaciers of Patagonia, is pure Malick.
Variety
What ?Nostalgia for the Light? did for the desert, The Pearl Button is meant to do for water, but the deft melding of past and present that characterized Patricio Guzman?s earlier film becomes muddied here by the Natural Science 101 voiceover and an unsatisfying bridge between two rather disparate subjects.
The Washington Post
'The Pearl Button' may not answer all the questions it raises, yet it is an absorbing experience ? at least for anyone with a taste for beauty over insight.
Festival Internacional de Cine de Lanzarote