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Critics Consensus: With The Golden Dream, director Diego Quemada-Díez weaves a compassionate tale built on piercing honesty -- and outstanding work from an inexperienced cast.
Critic Consensus: With The Golden Dream, director Diego Quemada-Díez weaves a compassionate tale built on piercing honesty -- and outstanding work from an inexperienced cast.
All Critics (34) | Top Critics (9) | Fresh (30) | Rotten (4)
For most of its running time, it's a bit of a slog. To some degree, it's a rewarding slog, and yet even then, not entirely.
What these kids endure could easily read as melodrama on the page, but the movie - with its shaky camera work and amateur cast, including extras who were actual migrants - maintains a stark realism.
"La Jaula de Oro" may seem like a rehash of old news. But don't be deceived.
The filmmaking is fluid and electric; the acting, precise; the archetypal storytelling, seamless and brutal.
Adding a welcome dynamism to the unobtrusive silent-witness storytelling approach so much in vogue on the international art-cinema scene, Quemada-Diez assembles "La jaula de oro" out of moments rich in action, humor and intrigue.
Through little dialogue, mostly improvised by the nonprofessional cast, Quemada-Díez creates much compassion toward his young travelers and the emotional truths they uncover.
An impressive blend of gritty realism and atmosphere-dreamlike sequences that only make its characters' real lives that much harder.
Director Diego Quemada-Díez, who worked as a camera operator on a number of films including 21 Grams and The Constant Gardener, has let a little Alejandro González Iñárritu and Fernando Meirelles rub off, which is never a bad thing.
The Golden Dream is by no means an action film, but it has plenty of impressive stuntwork.
Given the racist hatred toward Latino immigrants, this is a film that will help increase much needed solidarity as well as deliver a powerful dramatic tale that succeeds in cinematic terms.
La Jaula de Oro just may stand as the definitive Latino immigrant odyssey.
This film carries a similar weightiness and moral heft to those tomes to mortality and realpolitik, yet retains a dreamlike quality that at times leaves the film in debt as much to Terrence Malick as Alejandro González Iñárritu.
What Quemada-Diez did here was make a most realistic and definitive cinematic depiction of the journey undertaken by all those migrants who set out full of hope after the American Dream but find themselves caught in a devastating nightmare that should teach us something about solidarity.
Super Reviewer
A beautiful, harrowing an brilliant film with some of the most natural performances I've ever seen. Director Quemada-Diez is a protegee of Ken Loach and his debut film is every bit as good as Loach's finest output. A masterpiece.
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