| Original Score: 1/5 | Nov 17, 2011

[Director Gerardo] Naranjo seems to be onto something, even if he doesn't quite get it right this time out.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4 | Nov 1, 2007

Drama/Mex has flashy style but puppetlike characters and unconvincing stories.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Aug 16, 2007

The murky melodrama's vicarious perversions may set a dubious new low standard in cinema - gross-out tragedy.

Full Review | Jul 17, 2007

This relentlessly downbeat portrait of numerous troubled characters is ultimately too derivative and familiar for it to connect with art house audiences despite some effective moments and good performances by its mainly youthful cast.

Full Review | Jul 17, 2007

Drama/Mex has an overheated plot, but it plays out at a low boil, mainly because Naranjo is more interested in the subtle stresses of human interaction than in shrill desperation.

| Original Score: B | Jul 13, 2007

This morally-ambiguous adventure's cleverly-concealed, parallel powder keg plotlines are sufficiently compelling to keep you riveted to these loco losers' predicaments till the bitter end.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Jul 13, 2007

It is just too bad that the location is far more evocative than the drama itself.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | Jul 13, 2007

Visually arresting but thematically uneven, Gerardo Naranjo's fictional snapshot of a gritty Mexican beach is simply too desperate to shock us.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Jul 13, 2007

The turgid pace and shaky camerawork, both seemingly a deliberate style, evaporate whatever cinema-geek enjoyment there might have been.

| Jul 13, 2007

A Mexican drama set in Acapulco that revolves around flimsily drawn characters who fail to elicit our empathy.

Full Review | Original Score: 1/5 | Jul 13, 2007

Drama/Mex can't see past its nihilistic little nose.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4 | Jul 12, 2007

There may be nothing moral or especially original about this movie, but it's got life in it.

| Jul 11, 2007

Writer/director Naranjo is a talent worth keeping an eye on -- provided he can find his own idiom and less predictable subject matter. And it's impossible to take your eyes off the ravishing Garcia in her debut.

| Original Score: 2.5/5 | Jul 11, 2007

Drama/Mexmeans to say something about its country of origin, though it's hard to know exactly what.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Jul 11, 2007

You want to hate his characters? Go ahead. You want to feel sympathy for them? That's OK too. In either case, you'll be shaken by Drama/Mex.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jul 11, 2007

Amores Perros is a yappy whelp compared to this striking degrees-of-separation drama.

Full Review | Jul 10, 2007

'Drama/Mex' fails to supply motivation for or roundness to its unappealing inhabitants, and its two stories lack any reflection to one another.

| Jul 8, 2007

At its heart, Drama/Mex is a story of people struggling to fulfill their roles, and the camera's forceful gaze is their confessional box.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Jun 28, 2007

An unerring compositional eye plus firm control of an inventive structure keep Drama/Mex well within the attention span, even when the script wanders without seeming to know why.

| May 25, 2006