This $7,000 film is one that shows what passion and talent can do and how to bring a story to the screen properly with the right folks involved.

| Sep 14, 2024

By turns hilarious, soulful, gritty and sexy, this lively crime drama was created by 23-year-old director Robert Rodriguez of Austin, Texas, for a budget of 7,000.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Jan 11, 2023

Some of the film is monotonous, but it’s so completely what it is — a shoot-’em-up done with throwaway energy — that you’d have to be fun-impaired not to enjoy it.

| Original Score: B+ | Aug 31, 2022

El Mariachi makes the bloated movies of Steven Seagal and other American martial arts stars look as lazy and cluttered as the tag-team match at a tanktown wrestling arena. This movie means business.

| Sep 9, 2021

The best movie in the section... [A] vigorous action movie.

| Sep 9, 2021

El Mariachi is a filmmaking primer. The building blocks of moviemaking are on display from the outset... Watching is a technical reward and a promise of good things to come.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Sep 9, 2021

Although crude, it deftly balances kinetic action sequences with hip awareness, only occasionally succumbing to moves that seem self-conscious or affected.

| Sep 9, 2021

It's great to find this green shoot of talent in the present Hollywood desert.

| Sep 9, 2021

It's a straight-arrow genre piece; a comic paella Western set in Mexico and shot in Spanish. But the film is a little triumph. What distinguishes it is the execution.

| Sep 9, 2021

Rodriguez's first feature has qualities no money can ever provide, like youthful imagination, puckish black humour and a powerful sense of narrative.

| Sep 9, 2021

A flawed revelation of a talented new filmmaker. Let's pray that he doesn't get corrupted by that big-money deal with Columbia.

| Original Score: B | Sep 8, 2021

Despite its superficial sense of low-budget genre-as-usual, this project offer something truly new for American film.

| Sep 8, 2021

For something that was intended as an exercise of straight-to-video, crank-it-out movie-making, "El Mariachi" is a surprisingly strong piece of work.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Sep 8, 2021

Creative exuberance is its own reward and El Mariachi is strikingly original even with its constant reminders of Sam Peckinpah and Sergio Leone.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Sep 8, 2021

Rodriguez has drop-dead natural talent.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Sep 8, 2021

Yes, it's great that an unknown film maker could make a movie on the cheap and get it distributed. Too bad it's not a better movie.

| Original Score: 1/4 | Sep 8, 2021

Rodriguez has an intuitive sense of how to make movies.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Sep 8, 2021

Rodriguez's ability to keep his story simple and to embellish it not with any pretension but with the liveli-ness of his camerawork and editing is certainly something to write home about.

| Sep 8, 2021

Despite plot holes wider than the Rio Grande, director and co-writer Robert Rodriguez delivers an action movie that triumphs on pure charm.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Sep 8, 2021

[A] funny, hyperkinetic action movie.

| Sep 8, 2021