"Bracing, intimate, involving...Achieves sharp potency."
-- Dennis Harvey, Variety

"Alejandro Adams' Around the Bay is a true find...[a] quiet, beautifully realized story. Every single moment of the story rings true, aided by uniformly excellent performances..." -- indieWIRE

"I thoroughly enjoyed Around the Bay...the camerawork, the stylistic choices, the whole look of the film. It was poignant and engrossing. [The director has] pulled off something difficult, a chamber drama in the sunshine. [Around the Bay is] a very fine film, which stays with me."
-- Phillip Lopate

"Evocative and lovely...thoroughly enthralling and technically masterful. There are moments of such spare beauty in this film that they register in the body like pebbles dropping into the deep waters of grief. Alejandro Adams articulates the dysfunction of a fractured family with eloquent precision and exact focus. The effect is polished and lapidary, but not without warmth and hope." -- Michael Guillen, Twitch

"Though Around the Bay is an intimate film, this is no small story. This remarkably talented [director] makes a compelling story out of well-chosen images and unsaid, unheard or overheard words. Adams shows that he's that rarity among beginning filmmakers. He is someone who understands all the tools of the cinema. Adams exhibits superb control of his actors. Voldseth's first-rate performance and Adams' direction match the much-praised exposure of soul-barrenness in There Will Be Blood, with none of the attendant melodrama."
-- Richard von Busack, Silicon Valley Metro

"Adams is deft enough--via a Leigh dramaturgical luckiness, a Dogme aloofness, a quietly uncollected Cassevetes determination, he is a name-dropping choose your own adventure--that any meta-critique of cinema as a Platonic arbiter of otherwise genuine flickers of those seemingly untappable gestures of broken humanity becomes a means rather than an end. This is fine, indulgent cinema. I was shaken by the final strokes of Around the Bay..." -- M. Leary, Film-Think

"The visual storytelling was terrific shot-to-shot. The photography was uniformly excellent. There's a delightful interplay between narrative clarity and ambiguity. It makes for very challenging, almost confrontational, viewing." -- Brian Darr, Hell on Frisco Bay

"The direction of Alejandro Adams is reassuringly muscular--it makes its presence felt but is always pushing the story forward rather than preening...Adams plays with the soundscape sensitively and sparingly, and as part of an arsenal of other directorial weapons, to drive home his point about the fragility and failures of communication and, conversely, the surprisingly tough and sinewy nature of familial ties." -- Amber Wilkinson, Eye for Film

"It really drew me in. I was moved. There is a clarity to the proceedings that's hard to define, but that lodges the film in your brain. The film's ending...is as powerful as any moment on film I've seen in recent years." -- Nick Rombes, Digital Poetics

"A marvelous and intriguing character study. What a wonderful little film. It would be worth several more viewings, as you are rewarded by pondering its fascinating nuances." -- Steve Rhodes, Rotten Tomatoes

"Sparse and utilitarian, Alejandro Adams' low-key drama gets right to the point, then tells its dysfunctional family story without pyrotechnics. This sort of story depends on the acting, and Adams' cast delivers." -- Lincoln Spector, Bayflicks