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: 7.7/10
Critic Reviews: 11
Fresh: 10 | 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: 5,912
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,
Feb 24, 2004 Wide
Mar 6, 2007
Menemsha Films
All Critics (40) | Top Critics (11) | Fresh (33) | Rotten (4) | DVD (1)
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.
One of those special films that broadens and deepens as it goes on.
Machuca is sweet, poignant, and winningly evocative of the period, though occasionally dogged by predictable scenarios and caricatures.
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.
[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.
A movie that takes an average coming of age template and mixes it with the true story of social changes in 1970s Chile. Good acting by the main characters, especially for child actors. If the title character, Machuca, was given more of a reason for his name to be the title than the film could have been better, or have
October 5, 2006Super Reviewer
In "Machuca," it is 1973 in Santiago as democracy in Chile is undergoing its death throes. Gonzalo(Matias Quer) struggles to make sense of the chaotic situation as the only stores open are the black market. His mother(Aline Kuppenheim) has an affair with an older man to get the goods her family needs including the
October 17, 2007Super Reviewer
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