The Mugger (2007)

Recommended

Argentina

Short Feature Film

Original Title: El asaltante

Writer/Director: Pablo Fendrik

Cinematographer: Cobi Migliora

Cast: Guillermo Arengo, Germán de Silva, Arturo Goetz, Maya Lesca, Bárbara Lombardo, Verónica Piaggio

Captured in near-enough real time with claustrophobic hand-held photography, featuring an excellent performance from Arengo, Fendrik’s promising feature directorial debut grippingly follows a seemingly respectable middle-aged man around the streets of Buenos Aires as he perpetrates a series of robberies at a number of plush private schools, before returning to his decidedly more mundane everyday life (allowing us to re-evaluate his actions). Iain.Stott

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Carancho (2010)

Recommended

Argentina/Chile/South Korea/Spain

Feature Film

Director: Pablo Trapero

Writers: Alejandro Fadel, Martín Mauregui, Santiago Mitre, Pablo Trapero

Cinematographer: Julián Apezteguia

Cast: Ricardo Darín, Martina Gusman, Carlos Weber, José Luis Arias, Fabio Ronzano, Loren Acuña, Gabriel Almirón, José Espech

A shady middle-aged solicitor, who arranges traffic accidents for a local gangster, to whom he is in debt, begins to court an attractive young doctor, who moonlights as a paramedic, in order to supplement her income, and has a drug problem; but all does not run smoothly, as his lifestyle soon begins to catch up with him and consequently her, in Trapero’s visceral, hugely compelling drama, which unflinchingly and expertly captures car smashes, medical procedures, and savage beatings with great authenticity, but fails to completely convince with its central relationship – Gusman, though giving a good performance, is far too drop-dead gorgeous to convince opposite the time-worn Darín. Iain.Stott

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My Father, Pablo Escobar (2009)

Cautiously Recommended

Argentina/Columbia

Feature Documentary

Original Title: Pecados de mi padre

Director: Nicolas Entel

Cinematographers: Mariano Monti, Patricio Suarez

Composers: Didi Gutman, David Majzlin

Narrator: Laurence Fox

Featuring: Sebastián Marroquín, Rodrigo Lara, Carlos Galán, Juan Manuel Galán, Claudio Galán, Maria Isabel Santos

Entel builds a thoroughly compelling portrait of Pablo Emilio Escobar Gaviria – doting father, philanthropist, wannabe politician, drug dealer, murderer, terrorist – making the most of a wealth of archive material and candid interviews with his exiled son; less successful, however, is the horribly awkward and irredeemably contrived-feeling bringing together of said son and the sons of a pair of politicians that he had had assassinated. Iain.Stott

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