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

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

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

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

| 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'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

Shamelessly derivative -- Mad Max, The Terminator, the Coen Brothers, you name it -- this, much like Sam Raimi's Evil Dead, has an exhilarating rawness that works for, rather than against it.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 8, 2021

There is little here that makes sense in the plot department but El Mariachi succeeds on sheer cinematic energy -- a very impressive debut.

| Original Score: 7/10 | Sep 8, 2021

Rodriguez has style to spare.

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

One can only, hope that Rodriguez follows in the steps of Spike Lee and manages to trigger a surge of Latino filmmaking.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Sep 8, 2021

Like an outlaw Strictly Ballroom, El Mariachi is an irresistible send-up with an engaging plot.

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

[Robert Rodriguez's] brio is infectious -- not just because he's so willing to try anything but because he has a born comedian's superb sense of timing. For all its gunplay and dead bodies, his movie works like an expertly honed stage farce.

| Sep 8, 2021

For all its endless chases and gory shoot-outs, there isn't a moment of real tension in El Mariachi.

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

It's basically a cinematic exercise that provides a shoot-out or a chase scene every few minutes. But from moment to moment it keeps you watching.

| Sep 8, 2021

[El Mariachi,] by the first-time director, Robert Rodriguez goes where many people have tried to go and often failed: into the land of the tight and controlled and funny parody.

| Sep 8, 2021

An enormously entertaining movie.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Aug 30, 2021