Despite its stumbling narrative and sometimes shallow characters, Esto no es Berlín stands out for its ability to transport us to a specific time and place. [Full review in Spanish]

| Original Score: 6/10 | Aug 19, 2024

This is not Berlin, much like its title suggests, is a potent love letter to a Mexico at a crossroads.

| Sep 4, 2020

[An] edgy, challenging coming of age story.

| Mar 17, 2020

I really wanted it to break my heart open, but it just left me wistful for what could have been.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Jan 25, 2020

The subtext is enriched by certain camera and aesthetic decisions. [Full review in Spanish]

| Original Score: 4/5 | Dec 16, 2019

With this semi-autobiographical film, Hari Sama recreates the changes that emerge in such a transcendental moment for Mexican culture. [Full Review in Spanish]

| Original Score: 4/5 | Dec 12, 2019

It explores suggestively and frankly the rarefied atmospheres of what was the 80's musical and artistic counterculture. [Full Review in Spanish]

| Nov 15, 2019

Despite its flaws, this is Hari Sama's best film to date. [Full Review in Spanish]

| Original Score: 6.5/10 | Oct 29, 2019

Sama manages to make this story a hard and much less romantic reflection on a country that has not managed to be. [Full Review in Spanish]

| Oct 23, 2019

This is not Berlin can be a bit disconcerting at times, but it's the wild version of of a good storyteller's adolescence. [Full review in Spanish]

| Oct 14, 2019

An exciting coming of age story, that pays tribute to an LGBT subculture without fetishising it from a straight character's perspective.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Sep 30, 2019

Smacks of autobiography without reflection.

| Sep 17, 2019

Throbbing dance scenes can be wearing and the basic story -- libidinous liberation leads to near tragedy -- hardly feels groundbreaking.

| Sep 13, 2019

[Its] superficial shock value masks the real pain of finding your voice.

| Sep 12, 2019

Evocative and intermittently emotive, locating the heart of adolescent pain and the difficulties of finding one's way in a predatory world.

| Original Score: B- | Sep 12, 2019

A chiaroscuro coming-of-age tale set in turbulent 1980s Mexico City and a fine bookend to Alfonso Cuaron's Roma.

| Original Score: A- | Aug 30, 2019

Sama shoots this all as a swirl of sensation, with lots of dreamy, sexed-up montages and druggy interludes. The chronology isn't always entirely clear but what comes through is an intensity of feeling.

| Aug 29, 2019

The details are fresh and the lead actor holds the screen even as his character withholds himself, defining who he will be in his own time and on his own terms.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Aug 29, 2019

Before our eyes, the incisive comedy of manners we'd been hoping for devolves into somewhat of a telenovela.

| Aug 28, 2019

Both edgy and sensitive... It doesn't go in the directions that you necessarily expect.

| Aug 26, 2019