The Playlist by Carlos Aguilar

"Prayers” stands as a continuation of [Huezo’s] brilliance and expands it to a storytelling format with distinct tools for engagement, yet the impact is just as searing. Huezo’s ardor for humanistic examination loses no fire in this metamorphosis.

CineVue by Christopher Machell

Prayers for the Stolen is fundamentally an account of powerlessness, of the insidious ways that forces act invisibly, immeasurably, and often horrifically on those with the least ability to resist them.

The Observer (UK) by Wendy Ide

It captures the wary, precarious nature of a community that relies financially on the same forces – the rampaging drug cartels – that also terrorise it. Huezo taps into the intense vibration between young female friends who treasure each other above all else.

Variety by Jessica Kiang

The film may be called “Prayers for the Stolen,” but it is much more a heartbroken lament for the circuits that are broken when the stealing happens, and for the spaces the stolen leave behind.

The Hollywood Reporter by Sheri Linden

As a portrait of a besieged community carrying on as best it can, the film is keenly observed, its character observations lucid and engrossing.

Screen Daily by Wendy Ide

Huezo’s picture, which is loosely adapted from a novel by Jennifer Climent, is distinctive in its child’s-eye-view of this most abnormal of normalities.

Little White Lies by Marina Ashioti

Huezo’s background as a documentary filmmaker is clear in the way this debut narrative feature so solemnly and matter-of-factly observes a community that exists beyond this fictional ‘slice of life’ representation.

The Guardian by Peter Bradshaw

A complex, subtle, tender and heart-rending story of a young girl’s upbringing in a village menaced by the drug cartels and people traffickers.

RogerEbert.com by Sheila O'Malley

Of all of the things Tatiana Huezo captures in Prayers for the Stolen, her first narrative feature, the terror of the night is most unnerving.

IndieWire by Susannah Gruder

Told through the lens of three girls as they grow up in a rural town in the Guerrero mountains, Huezo’s film is a murky, mesmerizing look at what it feels like to come of age in a place where young women have a target on their backs, and where the adults are as powerless as the children.

Slant Magazine by Keith Watson

There’s a haunting beauty to Tatiana Huezo’s depiction of the gradual cross-contamination of childhood innocence and criminal aggression.

The New York Times by Beatrice Loayza

The film swings back and forth from scenes of pastoral bliss to brutality, generating a narrative that, while unfocused, is nevertheless anchored by the tender and wounded performances by its adolescent cast.

Los Angeles Times by Robert Abele

The result is a film made of loosely connected scenes, the best ones floating between observation and storytelling, not unlike a dream.

Movie Nation by Roger Moore

A movie that progresses at this rate gives you a lot of time to pick over what it’s really getting at.