Deftly balancing a horror premise with the politics of a family drama, We Are What We Are is utterly refreshing.

| Feb 28, 2019

What could have been an intelligent rebirth for the cannibal genre... instead seems content simply to gorge, choke, and eventually suffocate on its own dullness and irrelevance.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Nov 6, 2018

Strikingly original in technique, it pays no heed to the old masters of Mexican film; alluding only indirectly to present social conditions, it rewrites the horror genre with a premise that is outrageously novel.

| Jul 6, 2018

A competent barebones transfer of a horror film that deserves to win a wider audience among the Netflix crowd.

| Aug 8, 2011

Grau equates his cannibal family much like Tobe Hooper's Texas clan - as disenfranchised poor people living on the fringes of society struggling with their own familial power structure.

| Original Score: B- | Jul 20, 2011

If the resulting work ultimately fails to completely marry its disparate goals, it's to Grau's credit that he manages to make this slow-burning horror drama work as well as he does.

| Original Score: 57/100 | Jul 14, 2011

Takes a what-if situation and drives it rather unimaginatively into the exact places you might imagine it would go.

| Original Score: C+ | May 26, 2011

While it ultimately wears its hollow critique of the current social divide in Mexico City on its sleeve, the film manages to infuse the desperation and anger of the lower classes in a potently horrific context.

| Mar 14, 2011

Time and again promises answers and payoffs that do not come. Instead of being enigmatic for a reason, the film feels simply half-formed.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Feb 28, 2011

An unexpectedly rich exploration of family bonds, blood rituals and the oftentimes zombie-like desire to assume the roles proscribed to each of us, played out with a sharp undertow of political allegory and darkly comic sensibility.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Feb 24, 2011

You might want to catch We Are What We Are before its inevitable, much-too-glossy remake brightens the walls of American multiplexes.

| Original Score: 7.5/10 | Feb 24, 2011

We Are What We Are is a superficially provocative movie that tries way too hard to be memorable.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Feb 19, 2011

Grau never offers a tangible way in, a meaningful reason for the audience to try and probe below the grotesque surface.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Feb 18, 2011

Unfolding in an impoverished neighborhood in Mexico City, this disturbing debut paints social decay with bold, elegant strokes and dizzying camera angles.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Feb 18, 2011

Grau's script is intelligent, and it has something to say about family and social dysfunction. You just might want to skip meat for a few days.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Feb 18, 2011

Like zombie auteur George Romero at his best, Grau locks his sights on his social commentary of choice and goes after it with the zeal of a 19-year-old cannibal girl sinking an ax into the skull of her next meal.

| Original Score: 7.5/10 | Feb 17, 2011

A visually striking debut for writer-director Jorge Michel Grau, who proves he has the chops for atmospheric horror even when his pretentious storytelling tendencies undermine the end result.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Feb 17, 2011

lack of exposition and an air of genuine confusion are key to the film's modest successes

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Feb 17, 2011

Grau effectively mixes wry, bloody, deadpan gags, family drama, and stomach-churning violence.

| Original Score: B | Feb 17, 2011

[VIDEO] Although Grau might imagine that the film's Spanish family of prostitute-killing cannibals represent some cogent diatribe on the nature of capitalist existence, no such literary rigor is applied.

| Original Score: D- | Feb 17, 2011