Metro Manila sports some excellent visual sequences, and manages to abstain from veering into overly soapy melodramatics... At its core, the film features a dynamite lead performance from Macapagal.

| Sep 4, 2019

Refreshing to see Metro Manila laud the little guy... This admirable approach is galvanised further by a quietly compelling performance from lead actor Macapagal.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Mar 2, 2019

The tone is much bleaker [then Cashback], though, showing his evolution as a filmmaker and person to embrace the world's cynicism with a lens no longer tinted by fun quirk.

| Original Score: B+ | Feb 28, 2016

The acting is very good in this movie and the story is well-written and compelling. The production values are solid. This is a good looking film. This is a grim, depressing tale, but there is more to it than that.

| Original Score: B+ | Feb 2, 2015

Satisfying as entertainment and remarkably cathartic as drama, this is a masterful achievement that deserves to find the audience that the marketplace seems determined to deny it.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Oct 13, 2014

The painstaking set-up for the heist is both admirable in its detail and off-putting in the slick way it exploits poverty, reducing social drama to a genre gimmick.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Sep 19, 2014

Proof that you can't go wrong with the same old story.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Sep 19, 2014

As bleak as a Dickens novel, yet twinned with a contemporary heist drama, Metro Manila straddles two worlds in telling the story of a desperate family man who moves from a small farm to the city.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Sep 18, 2014

For all the images of slum life at its most desperate and violent, Sean Ellis' Metro Manila is an exploitation movie masquerading as social drama.

| Original Score: 3.0/5.0 | Aug 20, 2014

Sean Ellis doesn't so much understand Filipino society as merely see it as grist for standard genre fare, perhaps hoping that the foreign setting will somehow automatically make the clichs feel fresh.

| Original Score: 1.5/4 | Aug 18, 2014

The movie works as a contemporary look at desperation in crime-riddled Manila, but it's also as deliciously old-fashioned as the late '40s-era film noir "Kiss of Death," and nearly as entertaining.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Mar 31, 2014

It's drama, it's crime, it's a story of a family's survival against the struggle of life and even though it lacks the blood, gore, zombies and the monsters of the Fantasia Film Festival, Metro Manila is a horror story in its own unflinching way.

| Original Score: A- | Sep 27, 2013

The story is perhaps a bit too tidy, broadly signposting both themes and plot twists, but a natural cast and the urgent camerawork make it a riveting ride.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Sep 27, 2013

There's a tenderness in the depiction of the central family which was notably lacking from Ellis's earlier work, and the nuts and bolts of the heist narrative are handled with slow-burn dexterity.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Sep 23, 2013

One of the most enrapturing experiences I've had at the movies in 2013: fiercely, grandly humanist, and almost unbearably tragic.

| Sep 20, 2013

Metro Manila may be rife with well-worn genre devices, but this sporadically creative thriller is bolstered by Sean Ellis's keen eye for both visceral action and relationship drama.

| Sep 20, 2013

The influence of Ken Loach makes way for the dynamics of a Quentin Tarantino-style heist. The result is an expertly crafted heartbreaker that cuts to the core of desperate lives.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 20, 2013

Ellis proves that the slow-burning thriller can still work as both an entertainment and as a penetrating social critique.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 20, 2013

Tales of country innocents corrupted by the big city have been a staple of cinema since the silent era, but the theme is bracingly updated here, in the colourful squalor of modern-day Manila.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 19, 2013

Characterisation basic. But plot well-turned and pace moodily rubato, as in the best kind of B-movie.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Sep 19, 2013