[Director Gerardo] Naranjo seems to be onto something, even if he doesn't quite get it right this time out.
Comment
11/01/07
Drama/Mex (2007)
35 %
Reviews Counted: 20 Fresh: 7 Rotten:13 Average Rating: 5.2/10
Consensus:
Lovely visuals can’t save Drama/Mex from its shaky camerawork and thematically uneven plot.
Runtime: 1 hr 33 mins
Synopsis: Drama/Mex is a bitter-sweet telling of three intense human relationships stories that are interlaced during one night in contemporary Acapulco. Once upon a time a luxurious port, now in decadence, Acapulco serves as a background for a suicidal old man, for a 15 year old runaway girl, and for a... [More]
Genre: Dramas
Starring: Fernando Becerril, Juan Pablo Castaneda, Diana Garcia, Miriana Moro, Emilio Valdes
Reviews
1 - 20 (sorted by date; UK critics are listed first)
Drama/Mex has flashy style but puppetlike characters and unconvincing stories.
08/16/07
Top Critic
The murky melodrama's vicarious perversions may set a dubious new low standard in cinema - gross-out tragedy.
07/17/07
This relentlessly downbeat portrait of numerous troubled characters is ultimately too derivative and familiar for it to connect with art house audiences despite some effective moments and good performances by its mainly youthful cast.
07/17/07
Top Critic
Drama/Mex has an overheated plot, but it plays out at a low boil, mainly because Naranjo is more interested in the subtle stresses of human interaction than in shrill desperation.
07/13/07
This morally-ambiguous adventure's cleverly-concealed, parallel powder keg plotlines are sufficiently compelling to keep you riveted to these loco losers' predicaments till the bitter end.
07/13/07
It is just too bad that the location is far more evocative than the drama itself.
07/13/07
Visually arresting but thematically uneven, Gerardo Naranjo's fictional snapshot of a gritty Mexican beach is simply too desperate to shock us.
07/13/07
The turgid pace and shaky camerawork, both seemingly a deliberate style, evaporate whatever cinema-geek enjoyment there might have been.
07/13/07
A Mexican drama set in Acapulco that revolves around flimsily drawn characters who fail to elicit our empathy.
07/13/07
All the edgy style in the world can’t camouflage a black hole. Drama/Mex turns loose these insistently shallow characters and provides no insight into their bad behavior.
07/12/07
There may be nothing moral or especially original about this movie, but it's got life in it.
07/11/07
Writer/director Naranjo is a talent worth keeping an eye on -- provided he can find his own idiom and less predictable subject matter. And it’s impossible to take your eyes off the ravishing Garcia in her debut.
07/11/07
Drama/Mexmeans to say something about its country of origin, though it's hard to know exactly what.
07/11/07
Top Critic
You want to hate his characters? Go ahead. You want to feel sympathy for them? That's OK too. In either case, you'll be shaken by Drama/Mex.
07/11/07
Amores Perros is a yappy whelp compared to this striking degrees-of-separation drama.
07/10/07
'Drama/Mex' fails to supply motivation for or roundness to its unappealing inhabitants, and its two stories lack any reflection to one another.
07/08/07
At its heart, Drama/Mex is a story of people struggling to fulfill their roles, and the camera's forceful gaze is their confessional box.
06/28/07
An unerring compositional eye plus firm control of an inventive structure keep Drama/Mex well within the attention span, even when the script wanders without seeming to know why.
05/25/06
Top Critic1 - 20 (sorted by date; UK critics are listed first)
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• Drama/Mex at Rotten Tomatoes
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