Spring Of The Vanishing (2024) Santa Barbara 2025

This is the story of a mother who is trying to find out what happened to her son  in Nuevo Laredo on the Texas border. It is a story that involves coverups by both the American and Mexican governments.

The short version of the story is that when the leader of the drug cartel that controled  Nuevo Laredo was removed a vacuum was created. Federal police were put in place. While they were supposed to be keeping the peace people started to disappear, some turning up dead.  The problems were the result of deals made between the the Mexican and US governments to get control of the border area.

This is a good film on an important subject. The whole notion of trouble in the border region between the US and Mexico is ahot topic thanks to the current adminstration, but as this film makes clear the issues are neiher nothing new nor as simple as the current bunch of authorities are making out. By focusing on the plight of one family the film allows us to get glimpse at the problems happening on a larger scale. It also allows us to emotionally connect to what is happening, as opposed to a cold and impersonal TV news broadcast.

This is a solid film and i recommended.

FINE YOUNG MEN aka (HOMBRES ÍNTEGROS) (2024) Santa Barbara Film Festival 2025

Alf is a young man recently returned  to a Catholic school in Mexico after a stay in America. He quickly finds himself back ith his friends who are very alpha male always competeing to get drunk and score with the ladies. However Alf is more interested in one of the other young men in the school, however the macho rules of the group he travels with makes it impossible for him to give into desire. 

This is a very busy film with a kind of split personality. On one hand the film is an examination of  someone struggling to find out who they are and what want from life, and at the same time the film kind of loses that focus as an certain event shifts the film into an examination of society and how it looks to present itself as right and upstanding but is really rotten behind the curtain. It's a split that kind of works against the film because the two halves feel not always connected.

The real problem with the film is that the film is so well made as to be perfectly polished. It is shiny and waxed to such a perfect degree that our ability to connect to it kind of bounce off the screen. This is a film with a lot to say but it it is too slick to grab on to it. The reason for that is that the film is so perfectly constructed in order to make it's point it didn't create real breathing characters.  Yes we like them and we watch them but we don't  connect to them as if they were people we know. They always remain characters in a movie going through movie things. It's frustrating because the material and cast is better than the package they are contain in.

I don't dislike the film, I just wish it was it was better