Machuca (2004)
Average Rating: 7.5/10
Reviews Counted: 37
Fresh: 33 | Rotten: 4
Machuca is a touchingly bittersweet story of childhood friendship and a demonstration of how the political affects the personal.
Average Rating: 7.6/10
Critic Reviews: 13
Fresh: 12 | Rotten: 1
Machuca is a touchingly bittersweet story of childhood friendship and a demonstration of how the political affects the personal.
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Average Rating: 4.1/5
User Ratings: 6,408
My Rating
Movie Info
Political unrest helps spawn and destroy a friendship between two schoolboys in this drama. In Chile in 1973, as the leadership of socialist president Salvador Allende was coming under fire from the nation's military leaders and the leaders of several powerful Western nations (including the United States), many in the country were inspired to address the issues of the vast gulf between Chile's rich and poor. Father McEnroe (Ernesto Malbran), one of the headmasters of an exclusive private school,
Cast
-
Matías Quer
Gonzalo Infante -
Ariel Mateluna
Pedro Machuca -
Manuela Martelli
Silvana -
Aline Küppenheim
Maria Luisa -
Federico Luppi
Roberto Ochagavia -
Ernesto Malbran
Father McEnroe -
Tamara Acosta
Juana -
Francisco Reyes
Patricio Infante -
Alejandro Trejo
Willi
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All Critics (40) | Top Critics (14) | Fresh (33) | Rotten (4) | DVD (1)
Though the film would benefit from further cuts, Machuca still manages to convey the frailty of convictions and the difficulties of growing up -- be it a child or a nation.
Top CriticThanks to a pristine eye for period detail and strong acting skills by the entire cast, there's no need for the script to press any points.
A fine, exciting film that makes a bloody historical event live all over again by showing it through the eyes of children on the edges of the conflict.
That rare film that merges the personal and political without sacrificing restraint or intellectual honesty.
[The film has] an unerring eye for time and place that's counterbalanced by an overly passive, if sympathetic, central character.
It's a sensitively wrought work that reveals a time in Chile when class differences were both ignored and emphasized, depending on your perspective.
Chilean director Andres Wood sharply observes and re-creates the era.
[The film] examines how this unstable social climate strains the incipient friendship between two boys.
Wood is content to pace his film with a methodic leisure that both suits his tone and stretches his story a bit thin.
A visually stirring film that asks many questions about Chile's 1973 coup, without providing any easy answers.
Has moments of vivid clarity and power, mixed randomly with clunky samples of other coming-of-age films.
Dense and well-crafted.
The film succeeds...in fleshing out the central characters, lending credence to their personal experience of historically sweeping events
As perceptive about youth as were the French New Wave films, and in its wide sympathy and honest outrage extends some of the rich implications of The Motorcycle Diaries.
Machuca doesn't just recite a history lesson for us - it lives it as only two children on the cusp of adulthood can.
Audience Reviews for Machuca
Super Reviewer
[font=Century Gothic][/font]
[font=Century Gothic]"Machuca" is an ordinary and superficial coming-of-age movie with strong echoes of "Au Revoir Les Enfants" whose sole distinction is its setting which it does not take full advantage of. "Blame It on Fidel" did a much better job of showing a conflicted world through a child's eyes.[/font]
Super Reviewer
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Foreign Titles
- Machuca, mein Freund (DE)
- Mon ami Machuca (FR)
