It is like a duet in which both men work together to achieve a kind of cinematic harmony, and out of it comes a beautiful recording of the universal struggle that is life.

| Apr 23, 2007

A touching and worthwhile experience.

| Mar 1, 2007

A low-key personal portrait that helps you understand an illegal immigrant's desperate psychology. But mostly, it fills you with an aching empathy for this profoundly decent man, who numbly (even heroically) soldiers on.

| Original Score: B+ | Feb 2, 2007

Romantico is a very simple film about a very complex problem.

Full Review | Jan 30, 2007

This is a simple yet stunning movie, one that proves that romance can take many different forms.

Full Review | Jan 30, 2007

... a fine example of how the new technologies enable filmmakers to tell stories hard to capture before.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Jan 26, 2007

There's nothing extraordinary about mariachi singer Carmelo Muiz Snchez, and nothing extraordinary about Mark Becker's documentary profile Romntico. At times, that seems to be the point.

Full Review | Original Score: C | Jan 19, 2007

Romntico would be nothing if it were just a hard-luck story. The movie is something else: the revelation of a way of life, of a whole area of human experience going on right under our noses -- or standing over our restaurant tables.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jan 19, 2007

Romntico is a quiet, admirable slice-of-life documentary, giving us insight into the human condition without claiming universal knowledge of larger questions involving immigration or family responsibility.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Jan 19, 2007

The filmmaker has delivered such an insightful look into one man's experience of emigration and homecoming.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Jan 19, 2007

My favorite documentary in well over a year.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Jan 18, 2007

Becker's movie is subtle, unsentimental, but heart-rending all the same in its portrait of a kind man's single-minded focus on providing a better life for his children.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Jan 12, 2007

The movie's interests tend more toward the personal than the political. Cultural differences notwithstanding, Snchez is the archetype of the overachieving dad, sacrificing his present to provide for his family's future.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Jan 11, 2007

If this terrific documentary doesn't adjust your idea of what it means to have a hard life and a good attitude, you haven't been paying attention.

Full Review | Jan 11, 2007

Snchez's songs might be interrupting your supper. But he is singing urgently for his.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jan 5, 2007

No one would pick Carmelo Muiz Sanchez, itinerant mariachi singer and champion of his own lost cause, as a romantic movie hero. Yet, in Mark Becker's beautiful, intimate Romntico he is exactly that.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | Nov 3, 2006

It will be a long time before you forget the deep pain etched into the weary face of Carmelo Muiz, the mariachi singer at the center of Mark Becker's immensely moving documentary.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Nov 3, 2006

Carmelo, the central figure, returns home when his mother's health begins to decline, and his love of family, something of an abstraction in the first part, leaves him deeply divided.

| Nov 1, 2006

Romantico is muy bueno.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Nov 1, 2006

This modest, unassuming documentary about an illegal Mexican immigrant living in San Francisco is a case study of a life defined by poverty.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Nov 1, 2006