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

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

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

| Original Score: 2.5/5 | Jul 10, 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

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

The emotional and political point through all this isn't to be taken lightly, but because the entirety of the film has such a nihilistic temperament, its effect is muted.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Jun 8, 2014

Heli paints a harrowing and often unbearably grim picture of a lawless bandit country, the indignities of which are made all the more powerful by Escalante's evident compassion for the struggling characters at the sharp end of all this escalating chaos.

| Original Score: 3/5 | May 26, 2014

The director Amat Escalante shows plenty of visual flair but his detached, matter-of-fact approach to the suffering endured by his protagonists becomes alienating.

| Original Score: 3/5 | May 23, 2014

It's forceful stuff, but the way the story drifts and dissipates in the latter stages is disappointing.

| Original Score: 3/5 | May 22, 2014

This relentless torrent of Mexican miserabilism makes for alienatingly grim and violent viewing.

| Original Score: 2/5 | May 22, 2014

Soon, the stylistic flourishes don't just seem self-conscious but cribbed, karaoke shades of Nuri Bilge Ceylan and Harmony Korine.

| Original Score: 3/5 | May 22, 2014

It's well-told and shot, yet ultimately unrewarding.

| Original Score: 2/5 | May 18, 2014

The imagery is equal parts ugly and beautiful as the tale descends into a nightmare most could never conceive.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Mar 31, 2014

For all the horrors Heli reveals about modern-day Mexico, it's stubbornly lacking in insight about the characters that live there.

| Original Score: 6/10 | May 29, 2013

One of those skillfully crafted, unflinching works that nevertheless leaves you questioning what the point of all the queasiness might be.

| May 28, 2013