Critic Reviews

I Carry You With Me is an emotional powerhouse that had me and the other moviegoers crying our collective eyes out.

Ewing joins a generation of filmmakers who are using every piece of cinematic grammar available to communicate the emotional core of their stories and characters, fusing the impressionistic liberties of drama with more visceral truths to startling and potent effect.

In Ewing’s hands and as anchored by two superb performances, Iván and Gerardo’s romance gets scaled up to an epic, a searing saga of the undocumented experience in which love is the binding force.

What’s tender in the film is tinged with sadness. Documentary footage of Iván and Gerardo is in harmony with absorbing performances by Armando Espitia and Christian Vasquez. And these disparate pieces under different leadership wouldn’t come together as masterfully if not for Heidi Ewing’s exceptional vision.

Though the subject of immigrants from persecuted minorities fleeing their homelands is topical, what elevates I Carry You With Me above most social dramas is its finespun, artisanal quality.

I Carry You With Me poignantly captures the ache, the beauty of the characters’ love, and the pieces that get left behind in pursuit of something new.

I Carry You With Me is an act of memory, of romance, and of friendship all in one — a movie that takes the kind of undocumented immigrants’ saga we think we know and recasts it in a dreamy, bittersweet light.

This is an intimate epic, imbued with a warmth and a tenderness that radiate from both behind and in front of the camera.

Turning time and memory into an elliptical portrait of what it means when borders become barriers, I Carry You With Me, the first narrative feature from the documentary filmmaker Heidi Ewing, trades distance for empathy.

It is a gorgeous film, and one that deserves to be seen on a giant screen as much as that other only-in-theaters release this weekend, F9. And even when I Carry You With Me becomes so lost in its aesthetic that you worry it’s losing focus, this impressionistic approach doesn’t take away from what is an intimate, extremely personal story of two men fighting to build a life with each other.