I think the phrase "among the best movies I've seen __________ (this year, week, month etc.) should be retired. It is not a particularly bad statement but it is too overused and an intelligent person like Dana Stevens at Slate.com should be able to able to find a better way to say she liked the movie, The Maid, in her piece.
Honestly, the review went a little over my head. I am not a film auteur so I have no idea who Luis Buñuel and the Dogme 95 movement are and on another day I may have been disgruntled by rampant intellectualism of the review, but intellectuals need to know what movies to see too, right? To each their own I guess. The actual problem with the review is that it took Ms. Stevens two paragraphs to summarize the movie. There are too many irrelevant details in it for me to care after the middle of the first paragraph. I understand that movie may be complex and have a lot of minutiae, but just tell me that and let me see it for myself.
In my opinion the reviewer should have spent more time on telling me about the performers, the director, the cinematographer, really anything that would tell me why this is a good movie and shouldn't have been a good book instead. The weak final paragraph that does talk about the actors can't even focus on that and swiftly dives back in to telling me about the plot. It even goes so far as to tell me about what to expect in the final scene.
Once again Slate does not provide a compelling review. Even taking into account that I should really stop reading reviews from Slate.com, this review falls short, ironically, because of its length. It takes a lot of time to tell me nothing. Or nothing I needed to hear. But maybe I am just not smart enough to get it.