Things that bothered me about this movie (contains spoilers)
I, like the person who made the comment on the main page, wanted to like this movie too. It had all the ingredients for an interesting, thought-provoking and romantic drama, but fails to deliver to me for reasons including:
1. Everything happens too fast and/or something happens then it cuts to something else too quickly, as though either the script was too short, they had to cut lots of things out from the final version and/or they were just trying to compress too much stuff into a short period of time e.g. after Mary arrives at the house, instead of showing how her relationship with her 2 charges develops over a period of, what seems like, a few weeks, they just put a montage of shots together and you're just supposed to know that they're getting along, then not long after her charges' brother arrives.
2. The relationship between Mary and Francisco is way too underdeveloped. Somehow you're supposed to know from Francisco giving Mary lots of smouldering looks, her looking at him once during one of Mila's lessons, and avoiding eye contact with him when she tells his father about the priest's inappropriate behaviour, and them dancing together once in the square, that they're falling in love with each other. Francisco's looks do obviously, though, show he's attracted/fascinated by Mary, but the way she behaves towards him, especially at the party, are pretty neutral and don't really show there's much romantic feeling there; it's only when her friend realises she's in love that the viewer knows for sure that there's some feelings on Mary's part too. Even in those Madrid scenes where they visit the angel statue, and the scene where they are sitting on the bed, there still seems to be a lack of any real chemistry or passion between the two, but I'm not sure if it's the fault of the script, the actors or both.
3. Frances McDormand's character, "Agatha" Conlon, admits to Mary that she has a "crush on her" at the after they've biked to the seaside scene, but, again, the movie doesn't really develop how/show that Conlon has feelings for Mary or even hint at her sexual orientation, other than to make her seem a bit left field of the other Irish women e.g. her wanting to watch a bull fight.
4. I'm not sure if this was in the original story, but I wish they could have hinted at what Mary was going to do once she got back to Ireland. It doesn't seem like she'll end up marrying the man she's engaged to, but it would have been nice if they could've said/shown more what she learnt through her experiences in Spain and how she was going to apply them to her life now, rather than the cliched "I knew I'd never see [the guy she loves] and his family again etc." bit.