Lee Eisenberg Even though the discovery of one's burgeoning sexuality is a common theme in cinema, "La niña santa" ("The Holy Girl" in English) still bears watching. Teenage girl Amalia has two experiences in a dilapidated hotel that will change her life forever: an exploration of her sexuality with her friend Josefina, and a microaggression from a doctor.The significance of Amalia's Catholic schooling was ambiguous. The movie makes clear that Amalia thinks that she has to save the doctor from this inappropriate behavior. What I couldn't quite figure out was whether the movie treated her Catholicism as a virtue or a problem. In the end, what's important is the focus on the contrast between sexual vulnerability and sexual power. Having seen this movie, I hope to see more movies by Lucrecia Martel.

peteduhon Beer is not needed for this movie but rather awareness. Awareness for the sublime and an understanding of subtle expressions of art. The director, Lucrecia Martel, captures the plight of a young girl's unfortunate lost of innocence elegantly. La Nina Santa, also involves two best friends and their dealings with the opposite sex and religion. One of the girls deals with someone of her own age and the other girl deals with someone old enough to be her father. Interestingly, the older gentlemen(smile) who is must come to terms with dealing with a younger girl also must face the fact that the girl's mother takes a liking to him. There is a minimalist and mystic approach to this film, in other words, do not expect easy answers or easy solutions but rather you are looking out of a window and gazing at a situation that involves people and their belief systems.

ncberman Looking at some of the other user comments, I realize that many sought to extol the purported virtues of this film, professing Lucrecia Martel's artistic brilliance and method for capturing personality and conflict as demonstrated in this, her "ouevre," but as far as I'm concerned, these people must be blind, if not also deranged. This movie is abysmal. It's inert, without direction and a true chore to finish. The first hour and a quarter scarcely set the stage, with the duration moving no quicker or more palatably, and I'm more than patient with artistic efforts that appear to want for plot, but this was pointlessly plot less and otherwise utterly bereft of potentially other redeeming features. The bulk of the acting is mediocre to average, Martel's writing without flair or innovation, and the camera work and editing pretty much boring. Why Almodovar was willing to put his name on this work (and I'm convinced that it was his name and no more, based on the wretchedly lobotomizing slowness of the story, bloviating banality and clear absence of captivating content) is beyond me. And I would like to clarify that this dreadful film school fare should not even be included in the same paragraph, let alone be the subject of any direct comparison (unless it is a profoundly disparate one) to any of the following: Amores Perros or any of Inarritu's work, any actually-Almodovar-created work, the Cuaron Bro.s' Y Tu Mama, Salles' Motorcycle Diaries or Central Station, Meirelles' City of God or even the pretty but anticlimactic Carrera's Crimen del Padre Amaro. And I actually think that the scene settings, character list and cast had real possibility and promise: Mia Maestro (as the young Catholic teacher leading and incessantly lecturing the group of girls in choir practice in sanctimonious catechism-worthy restraint and denial of any sensation or sexual awakening, whom Amalia's friend Jose(fina) claims to have seen making out with a clandestine lover) is pretentiously chaste and overtly uptight but so comely and foreseeably coquettish that I would killed to have seen her character more developed or perhaps the explicit aforementioned trysts; María Alché is sufficiently intriguing, complex and coy that far more could have been done with her, apart from the dilapidated swimming pool and sneaking up on the tragically-boring Carlos Belloso/Dr. Jano; and, well, that's about it. Oh, I almost forgot, I will give Martel this: speaking from the somewhat limited experience as the son of a pathologist and a nurse, Martel DOES manage to capture how deliriously boring and maimingly monotonous a medical convention can be (otorhinolaryngologists no less, their motto would rightly be "fun with phlegm"), particularly when held in a craphole motel (think Leaving Las Vegas' witty "The Whole Year Inn"-cum-"The Hole You're In") and further exacerbated by a tediously planned dramatization of how to conduct a patient interview (a device Martel must have found brilliant since she devotes exponentially more time to this than anything else). Please, if you take nothing else away from my admitted logorrhea, synthesize this: this movie is awful, Martel likely a hack worthy of condemnation rather than scatologicaly-founded praise, and above all else, I implore you, DO NOT WASTE YOUR TIME!

asc85 This film received such critical raves, that I decided to rent it on DVD. What a huge mistake. This isn't even mediocre...it's horrible. The first hour of the picture wasn't even necessary. The "story" (and I use that term loosely) takes shape in the last 45 minutes or so. And then I waited for the ending to possibly make sense of this crap and they just roll credits?! Here's some more good adjectives to describe this film: excruciating, over-rated, and pretentious. One of the worst movies of 2005, and knowing how bad 2005 was, that's saying a lot. The only thing that makes me feel better is seeing other User Comments on IMDb ripping into this film as well.