Episode 40: The Dead Don't Die / Birds of Passage / All That Jazz

| Original Score: 78/100 | Oct 4, 2021

What Birds of Passagecaptures so magnificently is the way in which colonialism and capitalism will penetrate every aspect of life for the Wayúu tribe.

| Original Score: 3.5/4.0 | Sep 3, 2020

If the film's trajectory feels inevitable from its early moments, the particularities of culture and character frequently delight.

| Jul 30, 2020

Implicitly aware of its sociopolitical underpinnings, it flows more on emotion than character, making for a song of a film that's admirable even when it doesn't succeed.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jul 25, 2020

The film intrigues me a lot when it presents, as a kind of epic, the spiral of violence unleashed by two peasant families, in what appears to be a very elliptical chronicle of the origins of drug trafficking. [Full review in Spanish]

| Original Score: 7/10 | Jun 27, 2020

The female-forward characters and the matrilineal Wayúu tribe the movie orbits have gone surprisingly under-explored by film critics.

| Feb 25, 2020

The directors succeed in portraying two of the most important pillars of Colombian culture that, in turn, shape the two great concerns of the Colombian. [Full review in Spanish]

| Original Score: 70/100 | Dec 20, 2019

Yet even as Birds of Passage fetishizes its dreary mood, it excels at tracking the gradual impact of crime across generations less invested in playing by ancient rules.

| Original Score: B+ | Dec 20, 2019

As effectively violent and entertaining as Birds may be, there is a real current of bitterness and tragedy running through it.

| Original Score: A- | Dec 19, 2019

Cristina Gallego and Ciro Guerra draw on the ideas of a narco thriller without wallowing in them.

| Original Score: 4.5/5 | Dec 19, 2019

Boldly [blends] western and gangster movie tropes with anthropology and magic realism to create a dramatically formulaic, but intoxicating audiovisual assault on the senses.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Dec 19, 2019

No one had bothered to examine the origins of Colombian drug trafficking from an anthropological point of view... Therein lies the originality of a film like Birds of Passage. [Full review in Spanish]

| Original Score: 4/5 | Dec 19, 2019

Suffice it to say that while watching Birds of Passage this critic couldn't stop thinking about Martin Scorsese's Casino, with its lucid and kinetic dissection of the annihilation of a subculture at the hands of global capitalism.

| Dec 19, 2019

A visually arresting film that offers a fresh, tragic perspective on a familiar story.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Dec 19, 2019

The characters don't have much depth, but their heritage provides visual and thematic richness for the film makers, Cristina Gallego and Ciro Guerra.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Dec 18, 2019

Ciro Guerra and Cristina Gallego's follow-up to their 2015 gem Embrace of the Serpent is a stunner.

| Dec 18, 2019

Columbian directors, Cristina Gallego and Cirro Guerra have produced an entirely new kind of crime movie - an ethnographic gangster tale in which age-old tribal customs rub up against the brutality of the South American narcotics trade

| Oct 27, 2019

The raw authenticity of indigenous filmmaking, the arresting visual design that adds poetry to scenes of ritual and carnage, and a superb performance by Carmina Martinez... turn this age-old tale into something enchanted, haunting.

| Oct 17, 2019

The stench of death and dirt lingers on the frame, and the taciturn register of the film, even in its louder moments, makes it feel like a waking nightmare.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Oct 10, 2019

A violent film that puts a bloody lens on struggles with drug trafficking. [Full Review in Spanish]

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Oct 9, 2019