60
Achieves a rare depth and intimacy in its portrait of dreams fulfilled and shattered.
What are people saying?
What are critics saying?
80
The New York Times by Dave Kehr
It remains a documentary at heart, full of astonishing glimpses of human resiliency that have nothing to do with artfulness and everything to do with patience, persistence and sympathy.
70
Noteworthy for its detail and evenhandedness.
50
What's fresh for these people is, frankly, old news for anyone who has seen even one or two documentaries on similar subject matter.
80
Becalmed or bobbing along, they remain balseros -- but then, as this engrossing documentary suggests, so are we all.
80
Brilliantly edited from well over 100 hours of tape, the final two-hour film recalls Michael Apted's 7 UP series.
90
Los Angeles Times by Kenneth Turan
The creators of the magnificent Balseros stayed involved with its subject, a group of Cuban boat people who made it to the United States, for a full seven years. If you put in that kind of time, you witness life happening in front of you in all its compelling, confounding drama. What could be better than that?
50
Balseros doesn't fully measure up to Michael Apted's work because of the dingy quality of its video-to-film transfer, as well as flaws inherent to a project that started as one type of documentary and ended up as another--namely, that the filmmakers didn't ask enough of the right questions in the first two installments to make the third fully connect.
75
Well-done documentary.