This is the sort of tepid tragedy, all sentiment and no cojones, that one could previously malign as a 온라인카지노추천 movie, as it attempts to say nothing new about the issues at hand.

| Original Score: 2/5 | May 7, 2024

It’s hard not to get wrapped up in the lives of these two people even if we pretty much know how everything is going to end.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 19, 2022

The film takes a great turn in a very simple scene that manages to wrench out both high hope and deep tension all within the context of yard work.

| Mar 24, 2021

Demian Bichir gives one of the year's finest leading performances.

| Original Score: 3.5/4.0 | Sep 2, 2020

A week and a half later, I still haven't stopped thinking about it. It is the summer, anti-blockbuster movie I am recommending to everyone.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Jan 14, 2020

The stakes are high in A Better Life and Bichir matches the film's tormented tone with a portrayal of a man overcome by both fear and faith.

| Original Score: B+ | Jan 26, 2018

...Weitz finds a third character in the form of the L.A. landscape. Appearing entirely Eden-like when we're in the gardens with Carlos, but rundown and seedy when he's in his own element, the city assumes all the dimensions of the American dream itself.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Jul 10, 2017

The film's beautiful simplicity is carried massively on the work of Demin Bichir, instantly and surely one of the best performances seen in 2011.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Sep 14, 2014

A Better Life is a half-step removed from the Hallmark Hall of Fame.

| Original Score: B- | Aug 26, 2012

A Better Life's sense of place and eye for detail are strong, but the too-smooth style and rushed dramatics are at odds with the hardscrabble existence on display.

| Original Score: C+ | Aug 17, 2012

[A] gentle, honest, heartfelt film, but [it] does not have much to offer beyond an earnest respect for a segment of American society that is too often derided...

| Feb 22, 2012

The silver lining is an excellent lead performance from Bichir.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Jan 26, 2012

A well deserved Oscar nomination for Demian Bichir in a film with echoes of The Bicycle Thief.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jan 25, 2012

Each sequence plays out in mind-numbingly cliched fashion: father-son lectures, chin-up resilience-especially the final shot-and a stern message about the heartless anti-immigration movement are depicted in an infuriatingly shallow manner.

| Original Score: 32/100 | Dec 30, 2011

it's far too predictable and mundane to carry my interest through the rest of the film

| Original Score: 2.5/5 | Nov 13, 2011

Although the structure of the film is conventional, the ending of the film is not. Unlike most films, it does have a real hero, Carlos.

| Original Score: B | Nov 4, 2011

A sympathetic tale about an illegal Mexican.

| Original Score: B | Oct 31, 2011

Essentially a variation on Vittorio De Sica's The Bicycle Thief, but it has a vitality and resonance all its own.

| Original Score: 4.5/5 | Aug 26, 2011

Modest as A Better Life may be in scope, it commits wholeheartedly to achieving the goal of socially conscious cinema: to make visible the previously unseen.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Aug 8, 2011

A movingly simple and simply moving father-son drama set in downtown LA, refreshingly free of pretentious narrative pyrotechnics. Have a hankie up your sleeve and hang your cynicism up at the door.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jul 31, 2011