Mexico
Tom Birchenough
You can almost feel the dust on your skin in Spanish director Diego Quemada-Diez’s debut feature The Golden Dream. It’s the dust of the precarious journey from Central America towards the US, undertaken by four teenage Guatemalan kids intent on finding a better life north of the final border. And of the gritty immigrant experience of jumping train after train, and struggles with the authorities, where each new stage presents new challenges, and more acts of betrayal than of kindness are to be found along the way.We are introduced to the protagonists only gradually. Juan (Brandon Lopez) looks Read more ...
emma.simmonds
With this year's Cannes Film Festival in full swing, the winner of last year's Best Director prize gets a belated UK release. Heli is the third feature from the Spanish-born, Mexican-raised Amat Escalante, following Sangre (2005) and Los Bastardos (2008). Set in a ravaged town in rural Mexico, Escalante's film shows a country enslaved by the drugs trade, its authorities corrupted and its people living in poverty and fear. By combining compositional magnificence and hard-to-watch content Heli gives us beauty intermingled with beastliness.Heli finds children growing up far too fast, while the Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The career of Rodrigo Sanchez and Gabriela Quintero is an anomaly. It’s heartening that such curveballs occur, with artists taking an alternative, individual route to success. To those with any rock’n’roll romance left, it’s a sign that, even in these ADD., Tweet-trending, homogenous times, there are still unexpected ways for atypical acts to sustain a career. The pair were metal-loving Mexican teens who became virtuoso acoustic Dublin street buskers, leading to an Irish hit album and, eventually, a global career that’s seen them working on Hollywood blockbusters. Appealingly, they fit no pop Read more ...
David Nice
John Adams’ millennial conflagration of musical poems about childbirth, destruction and the divine made manifest not only served as a seasonal farewell and a transcendent epilogue to the Southbank’s year of 20th-century music The Rest is Noise; it also stood pure and proud as a masterpiece.This is what maverick director Peter Sellars’ multimedia information overload had not allowed this already complex work to seem in the Barbican performance following the December 2000 Paris premiere (Adams soon came to admit the mistake of giving free rein to his usually trusty collaborator). God knows the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Clocking in at a comparatively lean 102 minutes, 2 Guns is a speedy and rumbustious buddy movie in which Bobby Trench (Denzel Washington) and Stig Stigman (Mark Wahlberg) form a wisecracking, fast-shooting duo forced to abandon their mutual suspicion and pool their wits to battle swarms of double-crossing bad guys. The two leads don't quite fizz like Butch and Sundance - Wahlberg as light comedian is like inviting Vladimir Putin to host Celebrity Masterchef - but there are several perfectly serviceable gags, while these days you can put ol' Denzel anywhere and he looks as comfortable as a cat Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Post Tenebras Lux is a hard film to love, but it is one which engrosses. Although riveting, its appeal is akin to the fascination exerted by catastrophes and car pile-ups. Fittingly, the taste it leaves is bitter. It’s also hard to digest. Contrary to the title – light after darkness – there’s little to suggest either salvation or a path towards redemption.Director Carlos Reygadas doesn’t make it easy for viewers: there was animal cruelty in Japón (2002) and explicit sexual situtations in Battle in Heaven (2005), but he seemed to have mellowed with the Dreyer influenced Silent Light (2007). Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
Last night saw the launch of the second edition of the enterprising MexFest at Richmix in East London– a celebration of all things Mexican (film, architecture, food and music in particular). The opening film was introduced by Baroness Jane Bonham Carter, the UK’s trade Envoy to Mexico, who announced 2015 would be Mexican Year in the U.K. which will showcase the best of the country's creativity.The opening film was the impressive The Girl, a tale of a struggling Texan single mother, played convincingly by Abbie Cornish who gets involved in attempting to smuggle people over the border. The Read more ...
Sue Hubbard
Artists love a good revolution. The social upheaval, the bubbling up of new ideas and the breaking down of old ones, attracts them like flies to fly paper. The Mexican revolution was no exception. During the years 1910-1940, Mexico attracted large numbers of international intellectuals and artists, seduced by the political maelstrom and apparent freedoms that beckoned in this culturally diverse and varied land.For many European artists Mexico seemed like a primitive (if somewhat fictional) Nirvana, with its stunning scenery, indigenous culture and mysticism that fed the modernist appetite for Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
Lake Chapalá begins just south of Guadalajara in the state of Jalisco. In case there’s any doubt we’re in Mexico, a mariachi band are propositioning the families who stroll along the waterfront and doing good business in their silver tunics and red cummerbunds. A shoeshine boy with his box and brush is pointing hopefully at dusty footwear, and another boy is selling hammocks. Couples are sweetly holding hands on their Sunday-morning paseo. It’s a tranquil scene.Glittering dark birds skim the surface of the water and waterfowl wallow in the reeds. Swallows swoop and elegant white egrets perch Read more ...
garth.cartwright
Remember the Brass Band Battle of a couple years ago? The one that pitted Romania’s Fanfare Ciocarlia vs Serbia’s Boban & Marko Markovic Orkestar on CD and stage? The concert at London’s Koko was great fun, less a "battle" and more a good humoured showcase for two great Gypsy brass bands to tear it up.Balkan Brass Battle was such a success it toured for two years. Then Boban pulled his Orkestar out. He has now broadened the brass battle by lining up against Mexico’s Banda Estrellas de Sinaloa de German Lizarraga. Mexico and the Balkans share a popular brass band tradition that stretches Read more ...
Ismene Brown
The annual Sadler’s Wells Flamenco Festival is a hidden treasure-house of brilliance, too quietly sneaking into London in the unappealing limbo between winter and spring, but surely one of the great global gatherings of the dazzling individualists in this mysterious dance form. Flamenco ranges from the red-top populists like the ebullient exhibitionist Farruquito to the wilfully innovative Israel Galván, who lit up two Sunday nights in a row which both brought the house to their feet in ovations.Israel Galván’s the real galvaniser. Half a silent-movie comedian, half a mesmerising midnight Read more ...
emma.simmonds
In Post Tenebras Lux (light after darkness, in Latin) Mexican writer-director Carlos Reygadas casts a spell which transforms the ordinary into the extraordinary. The human condition is eye-poppingly explored in this ambitious, sometimes puzzling work of visual poetry, buoyed by the innocence of children and mired in the contrasting anxieties of their parents. Whether it's sexual neurosis, the natural world, or kids at play it's all too beautiful. Confounding, intoxicating and hugely rewarding, Post Tenebras Lux won Reygadas Best Director at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival. This is cinema as Read more ...