Metacritic reviews

The film is named after the two characters from a Midsummer’s Night’s Dream, Camilla works at translating Shakespeare into Spanish, and this plays like an analogy for Piñeiro’s films in general: an attempt to reconfigure the Bard into modern times and his very modern, niche cinematic ideals.

Filming cityscapes and intimate gestures with avid attention, adorning the dialogue with deep confessions and witty asides, Piñeiro conjures a cogently realistic yet gloriously imaginative vision of youthful ardor in love and art alike.

It may be Piñeiro’s most inspired and thrilling work to date, exhaustive in its means of keeping the viewer off balance and yet rich in its emotional implications.

By positioning Shakespeare within a chatty tale of young adulthood — and giving it a feminist slant — Piñeiro proves the vitality of the material without becoming subservient to it.

The film belongs to Ms. Muñoz. She’s the kind of performer (like Setsuko Hara, the Japanese actress to whom the film is dedicated) you can’t take your eyes off, even when she doesn’t seem to be up to much of anything.

There are a few different potential films within Hermia & Helena — a Shakespeare adaptation, a tale of romantic relationships, a tale of family — but the totality proves a sunny and affable literary collage.

Part of the charm of Hermia & Helena is in the way it freely and randomly plays with form, employing luxuriantly slow dissolves, unexpected snatches of superimposed text, and even a black-and-white film-within-the-film.

Only in an extended sequence late into the proceedings...do we get a sense that Pineiro has tried to move outside of his comfort zone and does the film really become affecting.

With its tricksy timeline and waifish subplots, the film feels unduly stretched even to reach its modest length, while our dramaturgy-fixated protagonist is slow to stumble into a compelling arc of her own.

Hermia & Helena’s touch-and-go approach weakens the movie’s key expression of being a relatable story about being lost during your late 20s/early 30s.