Its crude approach to drug violence strikes me as inane, gratuitous, uselessly sensationalist. [Full review in Spanish]

| Original Score: 5/10 | Jun 12, 2024

It's too hopeless and overdone to generate anything more than a shrug.

| Original Score: 5.3/10 | Jun 19, 2019

All the parts are played by non-professional actors, except for Ramon Alvarez, and Escalante gets powerful performances from them.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jun 6, 2019

Heli lacks the ideas or formal dexterity to constitute a state of the nation address in any but the most cursory of ways.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Mar 21, 2019

The film's nihilism serves as a metaphor for the merciless death pit of Mexico's drug war, but not much else.

| Dec 3, 2014

"Heli" is a slow, but unrelenting look at one young man's punishing loss of innocence amongst a society that has already decayed beyond understanding.

| Original Score: B- | Aug 24, 2014

...maybe Heli contains few layers beyond its central political outcry, but then, maybe it doesn't need to.

| Original Score: B | Aug 9, 2014

Director Amat Escalante and his gifted cinematographer Lorenzo Hagerman have crafted a powerful film that feels and looks a lot like Steven Soderbergh's Oscar-winning Traffic.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Aug 7, 2014

Though not without its faults, Heli is a beautifully shot, deliberately quiet surprise.

| Original Score: 6/10 | Aug 4, 2014

Although it obviously is made with some skill, it also is unrelentingly dire.

| Original Score: 2.5/5 | Jul 10, 2014

(Torture, child rape, mutilation, a penis set ablaze.) Still, the unforgiving, unrelenting, hostile tone of "Heli" is electric with unforgiving, unforgivable anger.

| Jun 26, 2014

It's very easy to appreciate Escalante's technique and ability, even if watching "Heli" isn't a particularly pleasant experience.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jun 12, 2014

Unmistakably, an angry film, an indictment of circumstances that seem to force a choice between impotence and homicide.

| Jun 12, 2014

The story of a rural, working-class Mexican family torn apart by the drug trade, this indie is a gripping and increasingly horrifying descent into violence and despair.

| Jun 12, 2014

A stunning piece of filmmaking.

| Jun 12, 2014

An average newspaper reporter can do a more artful, compassionate job with a drug-war story than this movie does.

| Original Score: 1.5/4 | Jun 11, 2014

The rest of the movie isn't as graphically awful as its centerpiece torture sequence, but it does little more than flatly illustrate the obvious-namely, that the drug war is very bad news for ordinary, well-meaning Mexicans.

| Original Score: 2.5/5 | Jun 11, 2014

A dead-eyed, lyrical art film that kicks you in the throat.

| Jun 10, 2014

Much of what Heli has to say feels either obvious and/or exhausted by a raft of other recent narrative and documentary features.

| Jun 9, 2014

The film's emotional and psychological threads resolve themselves less convincingly.

| Jun 9, 2014