Broken Sky (2005)

Critic Reviews

• Kevin Thomas, Los Angeles Times

  [Director] Hernández's approach makes all the difference, trusting the camera to reveal the ebb and flow of emotions that sweep over all three men.

• Frank Scheck, Hollywood Reporter

  An endurance test notable mainly for its evocative cinematography and the well-toned bodies of its young male leads.

• V.A. Musetto, New York Post

  I could have gone out for dinner, come back and missed little of importance.

• Nathan Lee, New York Times

  Boy meets boy like youve never seen in Julián Hernándezs sex-drenched, extravagantly minimalist epic.

• Melissa Levine, Village Voice

  Without dialogue, we don't know who the characters are, so we can't care about what they do.

• Deborah Young, Variety

  The pic's torturously slow pace turns an earnest effort into a tedious aesthetic exercise.

• David Noh, Film Journal International

  This thing crawls over a torturous 140-minute running length, with teenage love given a dire gravitas which verges on the absurd.

• Don Willmott, Filmcritic.com

  It's hard to know what fetishes/obsessions/issues are at work here, but they do yield interesting moviemaking.

• S. James Wegg, JWR

  After such a triumph with A Thousand Clouds of Peace (Mil Nubes de Paz Cercan el Cielo) the second installment in Julián Hernández's apparent "Cielo" series is a sluggish disappointment.

• Ted Murphy, Murphy's Movie Reviews

  I have jokingly described BROKEN SKY (EL CIELO DIVIDIDO) as the gay, Mexican version of THE BREAK-UP, although to be fair, this film at least has more sympathetic characters. ... But, at 140 minutes, [it] goes on far too long.

• Tim Grierson, L.A. Weekly

  A film dripping with melodrama and pretension.

• Ken Fox, TV Guide's Movie Guide

  Hernandez's exquisite romance works on an emotional, as well as intellectual, level.

• Keith Uhlich, Slant Magazine

  I suspect the film's frank, at times glorious rendering of queer sexuality will inspire more than a few closeted youths to brave life out in the open.

• Boyd van Hoeij, european-films.net

  Love-making in Hernández' film is not a physical act but an emotional state expressed through physical action. Certainly not multiplex fare, but definitely one of the year's best films.

Read all 14 critic reviews