The Motive is a fun, light film with a sad sack lead we can love and good laughs sprinkled throughout.
The Motive(El autor)
✭ ✭ ✭ Read critic reviews
Spain, Mexico · 2017
1h 44m
Director Manuel Martín Cuenca
Starring Javier Gutiérrez, María León, Adelfa Calvo, Adriana Paz
Genre Drama
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Álvaro is an aspiring writer who dreams of writing a great novel. He soon finds, however, that he lacks the imagination necessary to do so. To find inspiration for his book, he begins manipulating the lives of the people around him in hopes of writing about the consequences of his own actions.
What are people saying?
What are critics saying?
Whatever attracted Cuenca (“Cannibal”) to this material is seldom evident in his handling of it. Yet the material itself still lends the film its genuine if all-too-modest pleasures.
The Hollywood Reporter by Jonathan Holland
A high-risk shot at a screen adaptation of a novel within a novel, The Motive is entertaining and buzzes with fun ideas, but as an involving drama, it never gets past the first chapter.
Los Angeles Times by Michael Rechtshaffen
With its probing camera and spare piano score, the film effectively creates a clinically sterile environment that’s as spiritually devoid as the soul of its protagonist, and while the inevitable twist ending doesn’t land with the unsettling thud it might have, getting there is quite the page-turner.
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