Thomas Sotinelon funereal films in Le Monde (Google translation):
"Maybe it's age, but I spend my life at funerals. At least in Cannes, whenever I go watch a film. If this trend toward the funereal film (two ceremonies alone in Fatih Akin's Auf der anderen Seite / The Edge of Heaven, this morning) catches on, one could easily imagine the Festival exchanging l'Oréal for la maison Borniol ["the supermarket of death"; check out the lyrics to the song] as a sponsor. There have been cremations, inhumations, and ceremonies to mourn a disappearance. Plus two abortions.
"This morning, Hanna Schygulla, who stars in Fatih Akin's film, said that thinking of death makes one more alive."
Wendy Ide in The [London] Times Online:
"The Pope's Toilet [El Baño del papa by Enrique Fernandez and César Charlone] is set in 1988, in Melo, a small Uruguayan town on the border with Brazil. The economy depends on the smuggling of consumer goods precariously balanced on bicycles. But when it is announced that the Pope is due to visit the town, bringing with him an estimated 50,000 devotees, the community scents the chance of a windfall. Some make mountains of sweet pastries to sell to the hungry hordes. But Beto decides to build a public toilet next door to the modest shack he shares with his long-suffering wife and daughter.
"Again real life intervenes, but The Pope's Toilet's appeal is that it allows its desperate community a glimpse of optimism. The audience loved it."
At GreenCine Daily, David Hudson quotes Richard and Mary Corliss referring to Sergio G Sanchez's El Orfanato / The Orphanage:
"[O]nce in a while, a film that's not on our liturgical calendar gains a must-see reputation. … It's as if we learned that a cup of café au lait at some backwater dive was the Holy Grail. Gotta have a sip from that."
Olivier Seguret discussesCarmen Castillo's (above) 2h40m autobiographical-political documentary Calle Santa Fe / Santa Fe Street (screened in the Un Certain Regard sidebar) in Libération (Google translation. Now, make sure to ignore the "Chile idiot tears" heading; the original reads "Chili con larmes" — the "con" is Spanish for "with," but Google provided a quite polite translation of the French word for "asshole"):
"She used to be a historian, but it's that very history, the big one, the tragic one, that turned her into a filmmaker, more specifically a documentarian — even though it would take her more than thirty years to muster the strength to film the closest and most painful of histories: her own. Thus, Carmen Castillo returned to Chile, the country that witnessed her birth and that failed to see her die on Oct. 5, 1974, on Santa Fe Street, which crosses a popular Santiago district. She was pregnant, fell into a coma, lost all her blood. When she woke up, at the hospital, the child she had carried was dead and so was the father: Miguel Enriquez, head of the recently formed clandestine resistance to Pinochet's dictatorship …"
The Orphanage is an excellent film. Not like other horror movies. It's very touching story.