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

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

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

Good but could have been great.

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

It begins as a swirling drama of survival in the Filipino capital - but then suddenly it slips off down an alleyway, only to emerge a scrupulously engineered, Christopher Nolan-ish crime thriller.

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

It's pacy, engrossing, and Jake Macapagal's turn as the plucky schmuck protagonist is stellar

| Original Score: 3/5 | Sep 17, 2013

Brit filmmaker Sean Ellis does terrific work balancing the disparate elements of his crime-laced drama. Recommended.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 16, 2013

Boasts the stock characters and situations, sentimentality, foreshadowing and melodrama of soap opera. Yet by cleverly blending these ingredients with those of an action caper, the pic presents a fresher appeal.

| Jan 29, 2013

It is poetic, honest and at times almost upsettingly real. It will be fascinating to see what Ellis does next.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jan 25, 2013