SpuffyWeb
Sadly Over-hyped
Listonixio
Fresh and Exciting
Mandeep Tyson
The acting in this movie is really good.
mbumba
this is a film about the vicissitudes of revolutionary Cuba made by a revolutionary without dollars, but with raw talent. it shows that Cubans endure. solas is a master cineasta. his "lucia" is a masterpiece of world cinema. his epic full length version of "el siglo de las luces", is one of the great little known masterpieces of history as cinema. his last two films were made on a low budget, and he relaunched the aesthetic of imperfect cinema, calling it "el cine pobre". his film "un hombre de exito" made in 1985, told a story that transpires over 3 decades of a Cuban family torn apart by dictatorship and revolution. andy garcia's "lost city" appears inauthentic compared to this narrative. rest in peace maestro solas.
Otto Rodriguez
Barrio Cuba is one of those movies that become memorable in an instant. It reflects crudely the Cuban reality. The plots don't need political discourses, they are dramatic and crude enough. It shows a country in ruins and the hopeless state of mind of Cubans. You have to have lived in Cuba or at least be extremely familiar with the Cuban reality to really grasp what this movie is all about. In my view the only flaw is that at the end Solas had the opportunity to beautifully link all the three plots in at least two different scenes, the one of Mario Limonta standing in front of a train and the scene at the airport, where a Cuban family is returning to visit their relatives in the island. Kudos to Humberto Solas!
teesee_03
This is an awful movie, on so many levels. Technically, it's simply inept; it is shot with little or no supplementary lighting, so the interior scenes appear muddy, with large areas of murky shadow. The colours generally are drab and washed out.To call the script melodramatic is an understatement - any of these situations could have been transplanted from a low-budget soap. These filmmakers need to realise that getting the actors to cry a lot doesn't guarantee that the audience will, too. Embarrassed laughter was the main response at the showing I attended.Finally, there is little that is uniquely Cuban about the the situations in this movie. Yes, it does show that life for the poor in Cuba is not wonderful, but it would have been better if the movie had explored more deeply *why* the situation of the characters is so desperate, and what it is about Cuba, its economy and its political situation that means that its people have to live that way.I was looking forward to seeing this film, but I came away from it deeply disappointed; unfortunately, the good intentions which may have been behind it simply couldn't make up for an overwhelming lack of talent.
mediatext
Of all the Cuban movies than I have seen, this is by far the worst of all (and believe me, I have suffered many a bad one). Production values are so incredibly poor that you realize that the concept "cine pobre" that the director subscribes is just an excuse for an extreme lack of talent. From the content point of view, this movie also --like other Cuban productions-- asserts, in veiled but irrefutable ways, that Cubans, not Castro's revolution, are the culprits for the island terrible situation. Also, acting is very amateurish and the cinematography very old style. It's boring, repetitive, dogmatic, clichéd, and very, very passé (looks like a bad Brazilian movie from the 60's.)Don't waste your time or money on this abysmal and politically biased production.
