Futuro Beach is part of a welcome wave of European and South American films that center on gay characters, yet deal with universal themes and offer a certain sensibility that would please any art-house enthusiast.
What are people saying?
What are critics saying?
Slant Magazine by Clayton Dillard
It masks depleted drama under a progression of long takes, various music cues, and a three-chapter structure that grows successively tedious.
The Hollywood Reporter by David Rooney
Karim Ainouz has always been more attentive as a filmmaker to the creation of atmospheric and emotional texture than to story or character, and that bias inhibits this visually seductive drama from fully engaging beyond the aesthetic level.
RogerEbert.com by Godfrey Cheshire
Ultimately, Futuro Beach is a film about displacement and identity, love and its costs. Its considerable satisfactions, though, come mainly from the way the story is told, which spells nothing out, and in fact is so reticent that the viewer is constantly drawn into the creation of meaning.
Its visual and sonic verve more than compensate for some overworked symbolism.
The New York Times by Jeannette Catsoulis
Balancing its abstract storytelling with commanding visuals (by the gifted cinematographer Ali Olcay Gözkaya), Futuro Beach explores liberation and reinvention, the tug of familiarity versus the allure of the foreign.
Los Angeles Times by Martin Tsai
If director-co-writer Karim Aïnouz has set out to depict soulless gay lives, he has more than succeeded.
The images are gorgeous, but they’re gorgeous in a void; unlike in The Silver Cliff, the intended connection to the people who inhabit them is missing. Possibly Aïnouz let autobiographical impulses lead him astray. Or maybe he’s an avant-garde filmmaker at heart.
Village Voice by Steve Erickson
Futuro Beach is as strong on texture as narrative. It's full of sensual images.
Time Out London by Trevor Johnston
Futuro Beach is realised with such undeniable visual panache that the sheer beauty of the coastal landscapes or the moody images of urban isolation cast their own spell. But without much emotional connection to the central couple, it’s all a bit academic. Exquisitely lovely, confoundingly dreary.