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Mexico · 2015
1h 39m
Director Arturo Ripstein
Starring Patricia Reyes Spíndola, Nora Velázquez, Arcelia Ramírez, Alberto Estrella
Genre Drama
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Prostitutes Adela and Dora are burdened with bad marriages and financial problems. To make ends meet, they drug and rob dwarf twins working as luchadores. The only problem is the drug dosage proves to be fatal. Scared and confused, they decide to hide from the police and run away together.
The New York Times by A.O. Scott
The film’s enigmas are atmospheric, and somewhat superficial. It solicits the audience’s morbid curiosity rather than gripping our emotions or haunting our dreams. It’s a creepy and beguiling oddity, willfully weird but, at the same time, not quite weird enough.
The Hollywood Reporter by Boyd van Hoeij
Truth is indeed sometimes stranger than fiction but Ripstein struggles here to turn his odd collection of two-dimensional characters into real people. What does impress is the gorgeously crisp black-and-white cinematography, which deserves to be seen on the big screen.
Slant Magazine by Diego Semerene
Bleakness, Arturo Ripstein's film implies, demands different kinds of labor from a man than from a woman.
New York Post by Farran Smith Nehme
The crime and aftermath (based on a real story) are the best parts by far, but these come well after many overextended scenes of selfish, squalid people treating one another like dirt.
Ripstein, who began his long career working with the maestro Luis Buñuel, has his one-time mentor’s post-idealistic anger but doesn’t adopt an insouciantly ironic mode to filter it through; his perspective is determined but never detached.
Like his onetime mentor Luis Buñuel, Ripstein favors sparse, naturalistic settings populated by pathetic-yet-zany characters and eschews anything that might be considered traditionally beautiful. Instead, he unearths beauty in the mire of his characters' social conditions and in their dedication to each other.
The A.V. Club by Mike D'Angelo
Neither Ripstein nor his wife and regular screenwriter, Paz Alicia Garciadiego, succeed in unearthing (or inventing) anything of more than sensational interest from this tragedy.
Los Angeles Times by Noel Murray
The grubby melodrama should appeal to adventurous moviegoers — and to the director’s small-but-fervent cult — but even that crowd should brace themselves for something slow-paced and opaque.
Certain images...leave lasting impressions, though Garciadiego’s script doesn’t seem to do enough with the story, other than laying it out in linear order for Ripstein to film.