In the Summers
In the Summers
6.593%
On a journey that spans the formative years of their lives, two sisters navigate their loving but volatile father during their yearly summer visits to his home in Las Cruces, New Mexico.
Kevin Ward reviewedJuly 2, 2025
Two sisters spend their summers with their father Vincente at his home in Las Cruces, New Mexico while they spend the rest of the year in California. The film spans from the girls’ childhood to young adulthood, but only glimpsed in vignettes of various summers with their father. It captures the messiness of parent-child relationships which I’m sure gets exacerbated by 9-10 month absences. At times, the girls have their father on a pedestal, other times they’re completely let down by him. The truth in almost every case is that when we reach adulthood we see our parents with a very different lens than we had growing up. At some point we find acceptance of the fact that they’re just flawed human beings like the rest of us. Winner of the Grand Jury Prize for dramatic film at Sundance and while I didn’t love some a aspects of it that delved a bit much into the melodramatic, it was an otherwise understated family drama and a great film on which to close out my Sundance 2024. Sasha Calle, Lio Mehiel and Residente all give excellent performances.