Sangre de mi Sangre.

"In Sangre de mi Sangre, Christopher Zalla serves up an old-fashioned, sentimental weeper with a sucker punch of urban-immigrant horror," writes David Edelstein in New York. "Zalla, a graduate of Columbia's film school, is talented and single-minded. He needs to lighten up, literally. He frames his characters to bring out all their sweaty desperation, and his palette is dark with splashes of muddy brown; even the street scenes look as if they were shot in a dungeon. The director really piles on the grotesquerie."

"Dark and clamorous, never less than tastefully lurid, Sangre de Mi Sangre intimates Luis Buñuel's classic slum drama Los Olvidados - not in terms of the narrative per se, but in the way it deals with conflict and characterization, as though Zalla had recast Buñuel's types (the confused good boy and his delinquent alter ego, the contested woman and the blind miser) in another drama set in another corner of society's basement," writes J Hoberman in the Voice. All in all, it's "contrived, but compelling."

Updated through 5/16.

"Though it's infinitely better than last year's execrable Trade (the worst movie... ever?), Zalla's film similarly traffics in south-of-the-border stereotypes, opening, of course, with the usual touristy-dangerous shots of Mexico, set to 'indigenous' rhythms, which only prove to further distance the viewer from what should be a more intimate, humane experience," writes Michael Koresky at indieWIRE.

"Throughout, the action unfolds in moody monochromes, with alternately blue-, gray- and golden-hued scenes," writes Benjamin H Sutton in the L Magazine. "Cinematographer Igor Martinovic puts his artistry on full display, reveling in expressive zooms, instinctual handheld movements and an isolating focus. Such technical prowess reinforces characters' unstable situations while Zalla's hybrid immigration-and-identity-theft script keeps the moving parts in flux."

"[I]ts noirish narrative is antithetical to the feel-good sentimentality of the recent Mexican mother-son reunion in Under the Same Moon," notes Andrew Sarris in the Observer.

A "refusal to show the Disneyfied version of New York (which anyone with an interest in can gorge on with the release of the Sex and the City movie later this month) is eventually what makes Sangre so haunting," writes Mark Peikert in the New York Press.

Earlier: Jason Guerrasio's interview with Zalla for Filmmaker and reviews from Sundance 07.

Updates, 5/16: "Although [Sangre] exhibits a heartfelt connection with the city's half-invisible population of illegal immigrants, its myriad inconsistencies and strained plotting are increasingly frustrating," writes Stephen Holden in the New York Times.

"Sangre De Mi Sangre is an exercise in misery, painting the immigrant life in America as every bit as bleak as what they were trying to escape," writes Noel Murray at the AV Club. "The film seems even more one-note when compared to the recent indie feature Chop Shop, which also follows young immigrant hustlers in NYC, yet takes the time to provide a fuller picture of the city and its opportunities. Zalla prefers to wallow in the dead-end, an approach that's initially powerful, then numbing."

"It's not that Sangre doesn't work; it's that it works way too smoothly for material this ostensibly raw," writes Joshua Rothkopf for Time Out.

"[T]he film's relentless focus on the adversities faced by illegal immigrants eventually tips from heartbreak to preachy pulp," writes Meghan Keane in the New York Sun.

Posted by dwhudson at May 15, 2008 12:24 AM