The film from first-timer Francisco Vargas puts a human face on universal suffering. It is also about the power of music, as the title instrument saves (for a while anyway) three generations of peasant men in their roles as guerrilla fighters.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Mar 7, 2008

Life-or-death matters are handled with compelling gravity.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | Feb 8, 2008

A message this political has rarely been delivered in so poetic a form.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jan 4, 2008

The weathered Tavina, who lost his hand in an accident at the age of 13, makes a fittingly indomitable hero. He's a character you're likely to remember - his face alone is worth a thousand words.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Jan 4, 2008

Shot in luminous, high-contrast black and white, it has the rugged if faintly self-important authority of a Hemingway short story.

| Jan 4, 2008

A terrific debut by Vargas, who wrote, directed and produced.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jan 4, 2008

Another sort of movie would find a feelgood way of resolving the story; Vargas's vision is more grim and more realistic, but it is persuasively real, and in Tavira the director has found a natural star of the screen.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jan 4, 2008

A challenging yet rewarding watch.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jan 4, 2008

A slightly meandering build-up is saved by a second half that really cooks, with Vargas ratcheting up the tension by flirting with genre convention in order to deal with Plutarco's unconventional psychological stand-off with a malodorous Captain.

| Original Score: 4/6 | Jan 4, 2008

The austere monochrome photography gives the story a gravitas that's reinforced by the dignity of the amateur cast.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jan 4, 2008

Shot in a silvery black and white that lends a photojournalistic effect, this is not an easy film to sit through. But it will be a tough one to forget if you do.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Dec 7, 2007

Tavira's acting is the high point of this suspenseful yet beautiful movie, which -- for a while at least -- proves that music can soothe the savage breast.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Dec 5, 2007

The tiny, tough, sneakily moving film The Violin wears its revolutionary romanticism on its sleeve, not far from its gun.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Dec 5, 2007

Once the political lines are drawn, Vargas' film becomes richly layered, and builds with greater and greater tension toward its harrowing, inevitable finale.

| Dec 5, 2007

A movie of undeniable gravitas and monumentality -- even if it is too fond of its own effects.

Full Review | Dec 4, 2007

As far as battlefield-as-life parables go, humanity gets a fairer shake in Francisco Vargas's The Violin than in Bruno Dumont's Flanders.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Dec 3, 2007

Stark but absorbing drama follows an aging musician, beautifully played by Don Angel Tavira, who fiddles his way into the front lines of Mexico's peasant revolts during the 1970s.

| May 25, 2006