Machuca (2005)
Runtime: 2 hrs
Genre: Foreign Films
Starring: Mamoun Hassan, Matias Quer, Ariel Mateluna, Aline Kuppenheim, Ernesto Malbran
DVD Info
Release:
Mar 6, 2007
DVD Features:
- Keep Case
- Widescreen - 1.85
Audio:
- (unspecified) - Spanish
Buy It On DVD
Reviews
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.
Thanks 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.
Chilean director Andres Wood sharply observes and re-creates the era.
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.
[The film] examines how this unstable social climate strains the incipient friendship between two boys.
That rare film that merges the personal and political without sacrificing restraint or intellectual honesty.
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.
[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.
Has moments of vivid clarity and power, mixed randomly with clunky samples of other coming-of-age films.
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.
As the story moves along, visual and narrative motifs enhance the ideology.
An eloquent and moving take on the tragedy of a society that attacks its own and successfully humanises difficult ideas of political and class loyalty.
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by: Darko, Donnie 3/16/07


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