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05/12/07
Romántico (2006)
96 %
Reviews Counted: 24 Fresh: 23 Rotten:1 Average Rating: 7.5/10
Runtime: 84 mins
Synopsis: Romántico is a feature-length documentary portrait of Mexican musician Carmelo Muñiz. The film follows Carmelo as the troubadour returns home to scratch out a living after years of trying to get ahead in San Francisco. Through his eyes, the viewer watches a migrant tale in reverse, as the... [More]
Genre: Education/General Interest
Starring: Carmelo Muniz
Director: Mark Becker
Reviews
It is like a duet in which both men work together to achieve a kind of cinematic harmony, and out of it comes a beautiful recording of the universal struggle that is life.
04/23/07
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03/05/07
A low-key personal portrait that helps you understand an illegal immigrant's desperate psychology. But mostly, it fills you with an aching empathy for this profoundly decent man, who numbly (even heroically) soldiers on.
02/02/07
This is a simple yet stunning movie, one that proves that romance can take many different forms.
01/30/07
... a fine example of how the new technologies enable filmmakers to tell stories hard to capture before.
01/26/07
There's nothing extraordinary about mariachi singer Carmelo Muñiz Sánchez, and nothing extraordinary about Mark Becker's documentary profile Romántico. At times, that seems to be the point.
01/19/07
Romántico would be nothing if it were just a hard-luck story. The movie is something else: the revelation of a way of life, of a whole area of human experience going on right under our noses -- or standing over our restaurant tables.
01/19/07
Romántico is a quiet, admirable slice-of-life documentary, giving us insight into the human condition without claiming universal knowledge of larger questions involving immigration or family responsibility.
01/19/07
The filmmaker has delivered such an insightful look into one man's experience of emigration and homecoming.
01/19/07
Becker's movie is subtle, unsentimental, but heart-rending all the same in its portrait of a kind man's single-minded focus on providing a better life for his children.
01/12/07
The movie's interests tend more toward the personal than the political. Cultural differences notwithstanding, Sánchez is the archetype of the overachieving dad, sacrificing his present to provide for his family's future.
01/11/07
Top Critic
If this terrific documentary doesn’t adjust your idea of what it means to have a hard life and a good attitude, you haven’t been paying attention.
01/11/07
Sánchez's songs might be interrupting your supper. But he is singing urgently for his.
01/05/07
No one would pick Carmelo Muñiz Sanchez, itinerant mariachi singer and champion of his own lost cause, as a romantic movie hero. Yet, in Mark Becker's beautiful, intimate Romántico he is exactly that.
11/03/06
It will be a long time before you forget the deep pain etched into the weary face of Carmelo Muñiz, the mariachi singer at the center of Mark Becker's immensely moving documentary.
11/03/06
Carmelo, the central figure, returns home when his mother's health begins to decline, and his love of family, something of an abstraction in the first part, leaves him deeply divided.
11/01/06
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