Even if Güeros doesn’t entirely work, it feels worthy: a film made independently and without interference whose reverence for the past thankfully doesn’t result in too much solemnity or seriousness.
Güeros
✭ ✭ ✭ ✭ Read critic reviews
Mexico · 2015
1h 46m
Director Alonso Ruizpalacios
Starring Tenoch Huerta, Leonardo Ortizgris, Sebastián Aguirre, Ilse Salas
Genre Comedy, Drama
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Set amidst the 1999 student strikes in Mexico City, this coming-of-age tale focuses in on three restless teenagers, Tomas, Sombra and Santos, who are venturing through the city in a desperate search for an aging folk-rock music legend. Shot in black-and-white, Güeros brims with youthful exuberance.
What are people saying?
What are critics saying?
The New York Times by A.O. Scott
The story pops and swerves; the images are by turns comical, banal and ravishing; and the result is a briskly shaken cocktail made of equal parts provocation and comfort. You come away with a buzz that is invigorating and pleasantly familiar.
Village Voice by Alan Scherstuhl
What makes Güeros fascinating, besides the joyous invention of Ruizpalacios's craft, is how the director emphasizes rather than hides his own authorial engagement.
It’s a gorgeous sound-and-vision journey through a mystical or mythical space that has echoes of the 1960s Paris of Godard and Truffaut and the 1980s New York of Jim Jarmusch.
The Hollywood Reporter by Boyd van Hoeij
This bouncy and effervescent film often has the kind of timeless charms that can also be found in the early New Wave films, even if the screenplay, set against the backdrop of the massive 1999 student protests in Mexico City, unsuccessfully tries to smuggle in a slightly more serious and topical undercurrent via the backdoor.
Slant Magazine by Elise Nakhnikian
A good story, full of life and related with intelligence and a sense of humor.
New York Post by Farran Smith Nehme
Agreeable this film certainly is, but the shagginess never seems to take shape.
Güeros is a vivid illustration of factionalism’s brute outcome, which has people choosing up sides and tossing bombs at people, while dismissing their victims’ complicated lives and problems.
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