End of the Century

Like 'Sliding Doors' with added subtlety and soul, this swooning love story spins the idea of 'what if?' into something deeply romantic.

The film is like finding one of Proust's madeleines tucked inside a short story by Borges, where it keeps vanishing and reappearing.

It balances what is with what might have been and what could still be, and, although the result is maybe a bit less substantial than Castro intended, there is a certain literary elegance in the way he sketches it out.

Castro excels in showing how ostensibly small discoveries, like a gutting line in a book or a song that gives perfect shape to a moment, can be bright markers in life, signifying a beginning, a middle, or an end.

Overall, this is elegant, transcendent work, both modern and nostalgic.

[T]his seductive drama, written, directed and edited by Lucio Castro in his feature debut, carves its own niche as an intimate, time-jumping look at life and love's fortuitous twists and turns.

With bold and exciting artistic choices, first-time director Lucio Castro creates a steamy mystery about two men who meet on the streets of Barcelona.

Castro asks some hard questions for the audience to ponder about those brief moments that could have become real things, real relationships, had we the maturity to allow it for ourselves.

It is the lemniscate toppled over, the infinite seen sideways -- the top and the bottom, here in all its explicit double entendre, reciprocated

The characters are likable and the film is heavy on the eroticism, but with a script light on dialogue and a hyper-realistic style we end up only partially caring for its subjects.