[Cria Cuervos] is nothing if not fragmentary and allusive in venturing on to the fraught terrain of childhood sensibility.

The jumble of family snapshots accompanying the opening titles functions as a correlative for Saura's mosaic approach as well as introducing a key visual theme….

The linking of imagination and memory is the movie's stock-in-trade to the extent of permeating its structure. For while the action has a contemporary setting, it is in effect taking place in the past tense, since the narrative is punctuated by episodes in which a grown-up Ana comments directly to camera about her childhood (not, she says emphatically, a paradise of innocence) from a vantage point some twenty years in the future—a time which for the audience can exist only in the imagination…. [The device of using the same actress to play Ana's mother and Ana as an adult] admits alternative interpretations: on...