De Los Santos Arias is clearly more preoccupied with the religious tension between Alberto and the town natives, and even more so with deconstructing the traditional grammar of fictional film storytelling.

| Dec 13, 2023

It is a film with a chameleonic, poetic, eminently formalist visual style, subject to the countenance of a documentary and to a structure that rejects conventions. [Full review in Spanish]

| Original Score: 7/10 | Aug 2, 2020

A documentary-style approach to the editing, combined with the roller coaster aspect ratio changes makes the full-screen moments look and feel like found footage

| Original Score: F | Apr 30, 2019

Cocote is an enthralling film about religion, family and tradition which mixes cinéma vérité and gritty realism to produce a slippery hybrid

| Oct 31, 2018

Nelson Carlo de Los Santos Arias' fiction-feature debut is truly emblematic of the blurring of genres and forms at cinema's front lines.

| Original Score: A- | Oct 23, 2018

A muddled revenge crime drama.

| Original Score: C | Oct 6, 2018

Just when Alberto's situation begins to feel palpably fraught, the filmmaker's aesthetics pull you away when they should deepen the crisis.

| Aug 17, 2018

Cocote is as clear as day and as bewildering as a nightmare, as chaotic as a whirlwind and as calm as the Caribbean Sea.

| Aug 3, 2018

A challenging piece of art, but the challenges yield great rewards.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Aug 3, 2018

It's not a problem that "Cocote" is a fevered art film, but the movie is slipshod arty - a lurching, fragmentary tone poem that relies on too much patching together in the editing room.

| Aug 3, 2018

Grafts a fictional narrative onto the sturdy stock of documentary filmmaking.

| Aug 2, 2018

Cocote tells a relatively simple story in willfully obscure, opaque fashion. While the pic features many intriguing elements and often proves visually stunning, it ultimately feels a trial to endure.

| Aug 2, 2018

I wish I were able to give it an enthusiastic endorsement.

| Aug 2, 2018

Getting one's bearings isn't impossible; it's like divining the trick of a Sunday crossword. But Cocote isn't purely academic. It's alternately clinical and sensual.

| Aug 1, 2018

Gorgeous, restlessly creative hybrid fiction combines ethnographic documentary with improvised drama to explore a clash of two religious identities.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jul 29, 2018

It's hard not to be annoyed by a competent and confident film that is deliberately alienating, yet this accomplished debut from the Dominican Republic is just that.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jul 27, 2018

There is a palpable, intentional artistry in it - though its one that makes the film challengingly opaque.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jul 26, 2018

A story seeking coherence? Yes. That may be the point. The hero's own mind circles, dithers, perambulates. He's a Hamlet pondering the kill.

| Jul 25, 2018

Tough going but entirely unique.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jul 25, 2018

A kind of induced documentary that mixes fiction with reality, showing a different country from what can be seen in any tourist catalog... [Full Review in Spanish]

| Original Score: 8/10 | Apr 11, 2018