40
Grim and gritty. Warning: contains punishing scenes of testicle burning.
What are people saying?
What are critics saying?
60
Shock and awe are both present - as is Escalante's intense style - but Heli lacks the ideas or formal dexterity to constitute a state of the nation address in any but the most cursory of ways.
80
The Guardian by Catherine Shoard
The film functions as clammy thriller as well as poetic agitprop.
80
Time Out London by Dave Calhoun
If Heli lacks enough focus and thematic clarity to make it properly special, it's still winningly provocative and always compelling.
67
The Playlist by Kevin Jagernauth
Heli is a despairing, bleak watch. It's a slow, but unrelenting look at one young man's punishing loss of innocence amongst a society that has already decayed beyond understanding.
75
Miami Herald by Rene Rodriguez
By film’s end, everyone has been transformed for the worst. Heli is a troubling and upsetting picture, a portrait of a broken country that seems to be beyond repair and a depiction of how violence and corruption, when left unchecked, taints saints and sinners alike, sparing no one.
60
The Telegraph by Robbie Collin
Throughout the film [Escalante's] camera tends to be lurking in the middle distance; coolly observing everything that passes through its inquisitive frame, leaving the messy business of reaction to us.
50
An accomplished but singularly unpleasant immersion in Mexico's vicious cycle of drug-fueled violence.
40
The Hollywood Reporter by Stephen Dalton
Heli is undoubtedly made with serious intent, but it is also relentlessly depressing and curiously uninvolving.
63
Slant Magazine by Tomas Hachard
The emotional and political point through all this isn't to be taken lightly, but because the entirety of the film has such a nihilistic temperament, its effect is muted.