Cinema can find so many ways in. Alejandro Landes’ astonishing “Monos,” recently named Colombia’s official Oscar submission, seeps in through the skin like a sweet, druggy sickness — the kind that heightens and sharpens your dreams even as it scrambles them, making the brights brighter and the darks darker, while keeping you feverishly uncertain about whether the next cut will bring rapture or nightmare. , “Monos” presents an ugly reality in terms so profoundly paradoxical it becomes surreality: an experience at once jagged and lyrical, brutal and beautiful, angry and abstract, scattered and wholly singular.
These Lost Boys, some of them girls, whose raggedy clothes are accessorized with battered machine guns, slung across bony shoulders or dangling carelessly off thin arms, go by noms de guerre like Rambo (Sofia Buenaventura), Boom-boom (Sneider Castro), Lady (Karen Quintero), Dog (Paul Kubides), Wolf (Julian Giraldo) and Bigfoot (Moises Arias). On a misty mountaintop, these...
These Lost Boys, some of them girls, whose raggedy clothes are accessorized with battered machine guns, slung across bony shoulders or dangling carelessly off thin arms, go by noms de guerre like Rambo (Sofia Buenaventura), Boom-boom (Sneider Castro), Lady (Karen Quintero), Dog (Paul Kubides), Wolf (Julian Giraldo) and Bigfoot (Moises Arias). On a misty mountaintop, these...
- 9/28/2019
- by Jessica Kiang
- Variety Film + TV
Atop a lonely Latin American mountain, breaching the cloud’s barrier of visibility, eight teenage commandos do their part in an operation neither we nor they fully understand. Their ties to an entity called “The Organization” are, at the start of Monos, unbreakable and unquestioning; living in a feral state, they eagerly await orders from a horse-riding and harsh superior, who’s stripped them of their domestic identities and molded them into obedient machines, cultic militants. But by the end of Columbian filmmaker Alejandro Landes’ gorgeous third feature, the fabric of both their compliance and comradery will be unraveled in a 140-minute dissertation of unnerving, yet valid humanity.
The task at hand is simple, the “Messenger” (Wilson Salazar) informs his platoon: protect the cow and protect the girl. The cow, named Shakira, provides nutrient-rich milk for the near-savage warriors, and the girl (Julianne Nicholson), only referred to as “doctora,” is an American hostage.
The task at hand is simple, the “Messenger” (Wilson Salazar) informs his platoon: protect the cow and protect the girl. The cow, named Shakira, provides nutrient-rich milk for the near-savage warriors, and the girl (Julianne Nicholson), only referred to as “doctora,” is an American hostage.
- 9/27/2019
- by Luke Parker
- We Got This Covered
They have names like Rambo, Bigfoot, Wolf, Dog, Lady, Smurf, Swede, Boom Boom. They live, for now, up in the hills of Colombia, high enough that clouds roll in and blanket the fields during pick-up soccer games. (Just to make things interesting, they all play blindfolded.) They have kidnapped an American engineer (Julianne Nicholson) who they call “Doctora”; sometimes, the young women looking after her braid her hair. They answer to “The Messenger” (Wilson Salazar), a small, muscular man who represents “The Organization.” They shoot guns, stage guerilla attacks, perform...
- 9/16/2019
- by David Fear
- Rollingstone.com
The hands of fate have bestowed a raw deal on the young protagonists of co-writer and director Alejandro Landes' bleak, rather ghastly Monos. Sporting names like Rambo (Sofia Buenaventura), Lobo (Julian Giraldo), Bum Bum (Sneider Castro) and Patagrande (Hannah Montana alum Moises Arias, hard-left-turning into gun-toting psychopathy), these youths and barely-teens are beholden to a mysterious rebel force known only as The Organization, which is conducting terrorist strikes against some ill-defined powers-that-be in South America.
We first see these babyfaced subversives under the harsh tutelage of Mensajero (actual ex-guerrilla Wilson Salazar), a diminutive taskmaster instructing them in gunplay atop a stunningly ...
We first see these babyfaced subversives under the harsh tutelage of Mensajero (actual ex-guerrilla Wilson Salazar), a diminutive taskmaster instructing them in gunplay atop a stunningly ...
- 1/27/2019
- The Hollywood Reporter - Film + TV
The hands of fate have bestowed a raw deal on the young protagonists of co-writer and director Alejandro Landes' bleak, rather ghastly Monos. Sporting names like Rambo (Sofia Buenaventura), Lobo (Julian Giraldo), Bum Bum (Sneider Castro) and Patagrande (Hannah Montana alum Moises Arias, hard-left-turning into gun-toting psychopathy), these youths and barely-teens are beholden to a mysterious rebel force known only as The Organization, which is conducting terrorist strikes against some ill-defined powers-that-be in South America.
We first see these babyfaced subversives under the harsh tutelage of Mensajero (actual ex-guerrilla Wilson Salazar), a diminutive taskmaster instructing them in gunplay atop a stunningly ...
We first see these babyfaced subversives under the harsh tutelage of Mensajero (actual ex-guerrilla Wilson Salazar), a diminutive taskmaster instructing them in gunplay atop a stunningly ...
- 1/27/2019
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
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