80
Araby stays so grounded in acutely observed behavior, while still sufficiently elliptical in its storytelling methods, that it successfully avoids getting up on any particular soapbox.
What are people saying?
What are critics saying?
80
The New York Times by Glenn Kenny
Thanks to Mr. de Sousa’s superb performance, the movie often convincingly portrays not just the exploited condition of laborers such as Cristiano, but the nagging sadness of life itself.
58
The A.V. Club by Ignatiy Vishnevetsky
The film is far less than the sum of its possibilities.
88
Slant Magazine by James Lattimer
A carefree life on the move is steadily and exquisitely overtaken by melancholy in writer-directors João Dumans and Affonso Uchoa’s Arábia, the portrait of a meandering journey fueled by song, anecdote, and landscape that zeroes in on the pressures of contemporary Brazil almost in passing.
91
The Film Stage by Leonardo Goi
Judiciously gritty in its specifics, Araby’s scope is ecumenical.
70
A soundtrack of folk/country classics takes the edge off, but make no mistake: This is a beautiful bummer, giving voice to someone who’s barely a number, but only to remind us that most of us are OK not thinking about numbers at all.
100
The Hollywood Reporter by Neil Young
An intriguingly structured, multilayered road movie in which an ordinary working-class dude looks back over a nation-wandering decade of his life, this second collaboration by the writer-directors is a cumulatively engrossing and ultimately very moving work of clear-eyed political intent.
90
Los Angeles Times by Robert Abele
A migrant worker’s journal opens up a world for a disaffected teenager, and us, in Araby, a beautifully turned Brazilian movie that carries on as if a social-cause documentary and a folk song confessional had entered into a poignant embrace.