While undeniably outrageous at times, Bleak Street also takes its protagonists and their plights seriously. Like many of Ripstein's previous films, there is real grit and dirt within his desaturated poverty-riddled scenarios.

| Aug 25, 2018

Although the movie doesn't flinch at presenting a dark and unsavory portrait of a down-and-out slice of humanity, it also detects a glimmer of something more in the characters, nudging the story in the direction of tragedy.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Mar 10, 2016

The true story that inspired it raises eyebrows, but those raised eyebrows are all the film provokes, as well. That just isn't enough.

| Original Score: C+ | Jan 21, 2016

"Come, let us have a drink," says one aging streetwalker to another, "and hate everything and everyone." If that sounds tempting, then Mexican auteur Arturo Ripstein's latest will be right up your dimly lit, trash-strewn alley.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Jan 20, 2016

[A] sense of surreality within a mode of social realism (the scenario, believe it or not, was actually inspired by true event) ... gives the movie its off-kilter power.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Jan 20, 2016

It's a creepy and beguiling oddity, willfully weird but, at the same time, not quite weird enough.

| Jan 19, 2016

Ripstein finds dark humor in his characters' diminished expectations, which sag so low they're subterranean.

| Jan 19, 2016

Bleakness, Arturo Ripstein's film implies, demands different kinds of labor from a man than from a woman.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Jan 18, 2016