Redwarmin This movie is the proof that the world is becoming a sick and dumb place

Catangro After playing with our expectations, this turns out to be a very different sort of film.

Erica Derrick By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

Geraldine The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

juanpide This movie is a little bit overrated. In my opinion it received the Goya award NOT for its quality but because of political reasons and string-pulling, like many other things here.The movie is not too bad, sometimes boring, the best thing it has is the gracefulness that comes from the kids, whose acting is just right, maybe overacting, and the scenery and customs are right too. Sometimes you feel you are in a theater instead of watching a movie.The story is absolutely not original, we are tired of always the same, the dictatorship. Spain suffered from a civil war and a dictatorship that clashed different social classes and political convictions. But nowadays some people tries to rewrite it and show it as a war against Cataluña, a region of Spain that has never been a nation or state before, though some try to distort history.We had a bad period but we need to go on.

rightwingisevil This movie has given me the same feeling of what another Spanish movie, "The Labyrinth" did to me several years ago. The cinematography, the lighting, the shooting angles, the colors are just top notched, but the story itself is not as good as the aforementioned elements. There are so many weird and depressed moments in this movie, sometimes even a bit messy. It seems to me that the Spanish people are still deeply haunted by their civil war and could never walk away or walk out of it. This is a very depressive movie full of symbolism. The bird lover father and his caged birds in the attic. The awkward and always confused childhood of the son, the local police chief, the often helpless mother, the whole family clan, the weird and a bit crazy left-hand missing girl...The Spanish dialog is sometimes too quick to be absorbed and understood even with the English subtitle. The struggle of the poor, as always, fell prey to the rich and the powerful. The adults always told their kids that what they did, good or bad, right or wrong, are solely for their kids and it's disgusting. No wonder the kid finally realized what the adults said were nothing but lies. His self denial, rejection and his recognition in the end was an inevitable result, gloomy and hopeless. This is a very heavy movie, just like the heavy colors in this movie.

Chris Knipp Agustí Villaronga wrote and directed this austerely beautiful Catalan coming-of-age film based on a novel by Emili Teixidor with echoes of Clément's Forbidden Games and Dickens' Great Expectations and a setting -- a child's rural world during the grim days after the Spanish Civil War (1944) -- that links it with de Toro's Pan's Labyrinth. But while del Toro's film is Gothic and surreal, Teixidor's, apart dream sequences and flight metaphors, impresses in both its narrative and its imagery with a stark simplicity worthy of Italian neorealism, overlaid with greater layer of moral ambiguity. Again as in Pan's Labyringh, Sergi López plays the local fascist Alcalde, this time a less clearly sadistic one. At the center is 11-year-old Andreu (Francesc Colomer), who at the outset witnesses a shocking crime. He sees a hooded figure kill a man, toss him in a covered wagon, than blindfold the horse pulling the wagon and cast them all off a cliff with a boy inside. Andreu's father Farriol (Roger Casamajor) is suspected, perhaps because he has an anti-fascist background. Farriol goes into hiding and Andreu is sent to live with his grandmother (Elisa Crehuet) in a houseful of widows. Andreu's lean, handsome father gives his son many inspiring peptalks about keeping the moral high ground, but all the while his own character remains somewhat suspect. Eventually Andreu will also turn away even from his long- suffering mother Florencia (Nora Navas) when he is adopted by a rich, plump Miss Havisham figure, Mrs. Manubens (Merce Aranega).At school the teacher is a monomaniacal fascist drum-beater and alcoholic (Eduard Fernandez), who even sleeps with Andreu's feral, maimed but beautiful cousin Núria (Marina Comas) -- her hand has been blown up by a bomb. Yet he is not without redeeming qualities, and Fernandez conveys complexity when he advises Andreu to leave his past behind and seek a better life. Núria and Andreu become frequent companions, and roam the mysterious forest together (this is the Forbidden Games part). Here also he meets an older boy, first spotting him bathing naked in that forest, a consumptive boy (Lázaro Mur) who lives in the monastery, and who imagines he has angels' wings. The none- too-subtle bird imagery extends to a pet in a red wooden cage kept by Andreu's dad. Obviously Andreu is to fly away, and the comsumptive boy can only dream of it.It's Andreu's mother who approaches Mrs. Manubens when Farriol has been found and taken away. Not much comes of that, and Farriol is taken to Barcelona and shot, but Mrs. Manubens warms to the idea of adopting Andreu. All this happens with a kind of precipitous energy fueled by the intense but simple cinematography, the understated, compelling acting, the emotional scenes, and the prevailing sense of fear and moral ambiguity in which Andreau remarkably, with the innocence and determination of a boy, sails through unharmed, or at least capable of accepting adoption and going to a good school that will change his future. It's not necessary to undermine the rich accomplishment of Pan's Labyrinth to praise Black Bread, but it does shine forth precisely because of its simplicity and completely lack of the kind of baroque flourishes del Toro relishes. There is some strong hand-held camera work, but also smooth tracking shots. The cinematography of Antonio Riestra is classic and the editing by Raul Roman is smooth and swift. According to Jonathan Holland's review in Variety, this is Villaronga's"most mainstream film" but still "retains his trademark subversive edge." Holland also points to the way "as a depiction of rural poverty" the film is "impressive: The darkly lit, richly textured interiors seem to be an extension of the beautifully lensed natural landscape." Something about the simple dignity of the people offsets the danger and moral uncertainty of events and gives one a sense of humanistic tradition even in a world where all's gone mad and main characters like Andreu and his parents reject the comforts of religion. Black Bread/Pa negre, whose sense of style is timeless, understandably won many awards, an unusual number for a film in Catalan, both at its San Sebastián festival debut and with nine Goyas after Spanish theatrical release including best picture and best director and prizes to most of the main actors. Both Francesc Colomer, who plays the young lead and Marina Comas, who plays his cynical pal Núria, won "most promising" awards. Colomer, who is in nearly every scene, has a limpid confidence that stays with you as a memorable presence long after the final scene.The film showed earlier this year in the US at the Palm Springs festival. Seen and reviewed as part of the San Francisco International Film Festival 2011.

ironheadrat This film swept the board at this year's Goyas (Spanish cinema awards), but after last years Cell 211 ( an enjoyable but unremarkable prison drama) did the same, I wasn't expecting too much. I'd enjoyed Villaronga's disturbing Aro Tolbukhin, but I wasn't expecting this. One of the best opening sequences you'll see all year leads to a mystery, experienced through the eyes of one boy, that reveals lies, conspiracy and the dark secrets in the heart of a rural Catalan village a few years after the end of the Civil War. It's magnificently done, and the performances of the children match those of actors such as Sergi Lopez (whose role echoes that in Pan's Labyrinth),Eduard Fernández and Marina Comas.Scenes such as the boy's father instructing him to uphold his ideals and walk tall, or a powerless mother pleading her husband's innocence, are familiar from more commercial films. Here they are brutally undermined until nothing is left but pitiless self interest. A chilling study of how war and poverty create monsters.