Güeros

2015 "Being young and not being revolutionary is an even biological contradiction."
7.5| 1h51m| NR| en
Details

Set amidst the 1999 student strikes in Mexico City, this coming-of-age tale finds two brothers venturing through the city in a sentimental search for an aging legendary musician. Shot in black-and-white, Güeros brims with youthful exuberance.

AD
AD

Watch Free for 30 Days

All Prime Video Movies and TV Shows. Cancel anytime. Watch Now

Trailers & Clips

Also starring Sebastián Aguirre

Reviews

Fluentiama Perfect cast and a good story
UnowPriceless hyped garbage
FuzzyTagz If the ambition is to provide two hours of instantly forgettable, popcorn-munching escapism, it succeeds.
Robert Joyner The plot isn't so bad, but the pace of storytelling is too slow which makes people bored. Certain moments are so obvious and unnecessary for the main plot. I would've fast-forwarded those moments if it was an online streaming. The ending looks like implying a sequel, not sure if this movie will get one
Chris Knipp A hip coming of age road movie is the first feature from gifted Mexican writer- director Alonso Ruizpalacios. Shot in academy ratio and black and white and marked by a fresh use of camera, editing, sound, and humor and a breaking the fourth wall that owes something to the Nouvelle Vague, it focuses on Tomás, a slim, pale teenage bad boy ("güero" is Mexican slang for light-skinned) whose mother can't cope with him, so sends him from Veracruz to live in Mexico City for a while with his older brother "Sombra" ("dark-skinned"). Sombra is a student at the national university, but it's disrupted by a huge strike (loosely based on the 11-month strike of 1999), and he's "on strike from the strike," sitting idly in his trashy concrete apartment, a depressed slacker trying to teach himself card tricks. They get out, with his roommate and best friend Santos and girlfriend Ana (a strike leader), on a mission to find a cult Mexican rock idol of the Sixties called Epigmenio Cruz admired by their late father and both brothers, reportedly dying of cirrhosis of the liver, to pay him homage. It's said that Cruz once "made Bob Dylan cry." Ruizpalacios has acknowledged a debt to Truffaut, Godard, Wim Wenders, Jim Jarmusch, and Fellini, but his light touch, wit, and grasp of earthy Spanish vernacular (though he studied in London and speaks perfect English too) also link Güeros with Latin American youth films like Alex dos Santos' 2006 Glue, Che Sandoval's You Think You're the Prettiest, But You Are the Sluttiestt (2009), and the work of Fernando Eimbcke and Gerardo Naranjo. This won prizes at Berlin and Tribeca and had a limited US release May 2015 (see A.O. Scott's enthusiastic and detailed description in the NYTimes). Now out on DVD from Kino Larber. Watched on a DVD provided by Rodrigo Brandão (Indie Strategy) 2 Jan. 2015.
ejamessnyder The story here is as clever as it is simple. Two brothers and a friend hit the road in search of a dying Mexican folk singer who, according to legend, once made Bob Dylan cry with one of his touching ballads. While there are numerous side stories and plenty of character development, the plot doesn't get a whole lot deeper than that, and it is all the better for it. In that sense, the filmmakers knew exactly what they were doing and they achieved it wonderfully.The film has a few flaws, but overall I thought it was pretty good. It could have been shorter, but the pacing is great. I felt like a few of the scenes were added just to ensure a sufficient running time and they could have been cut. One thing I loved about the film was that we never actually hear the music of the fictional Mexican folk singer that the brothers are following. Their car's cassette player is broken so they only ever listen to him via headphones. We are left to watch their silent reactions and fill in the missing pieces for ourselves. I'm not sure if the filmmakers had intended to possibly insert music during post production and then decided against it, but either way it is very effective and well done.Without giving anything away, the ending of the film is right in line with the rest of the film's pacing. It is slow and anticlimactic, but we still end up feeling like everything turned out just the way it should, much like the characters are left feeling. And it is totally hilarious, but in such a dry way that you just might miss it.Despite being a road film in essence, with characters traveling around and getting into adventures, Güeros isn't about story or characters so much as it is about a feeling. It's a feeling that most of us likely experience at some point in our lives, and for that reason most people will be able to relate to this film on some level.
SnoopyStyle Sombra and Santos are aimless youths in Mexico City. There is a student strike at the University and the guys are striking against the strike. Sombra is surprised to find Tomás at his apartment. He's been sent there by their mother. Mexican rock musician Epigmenio Cruz is supposedly hospitalized and Tomás wants to visit him. The guys search for him and encounter a series of incidents.The first forty minutes are aimless. It's a lazy hazy afternoon of nothing dramatic. It could be a lost start and then the road trip happens. The situations get more interesting. It's all in black and white. It has a dreamy quality. It has some compelling moments and an overall feel of adventure.
lasttimeisaw A voguish feature debut from Mexican filmmaker Alonso Riuzpalacios, shot entirely in Black and White with an uncommon 1.37:1 aspect ratio. GUEROS is a pristine debut full of promise but also sink into the filmmaker's own ideal existential wallow.In the opening scenes, the film directly prints the explanation of the word "güeros" on the screen, in case us foreign audience cannot catch the meaning, and it proposes two options, it is either a discrimination against colour or against homosexuality. And the film only deals one of the two. Set the backdrop of an undefined time (where Walkman is still popular, I suppose, should be in the 90s), Tomás (Aguirre) is a young boy lived with his widow mother, being too naughty, he is sent to live with his big brother Federico aka. Sombra (Huerta), who is a college student living with his roommate Santos (Ortizgris) in their messy apartment.While the university students are in the middle of a massive strike. The trio lay around in the apartment doing nothing. Since Tomás is a devotee of an over-the-hill musician Epigmenio Cruz (Charpener), who is sent to hospital due to poor health, the news triggers his quest to find him and ask for an autograph. So the story maunders around a two-day road trip, en route they visit the hospital, bump into some dangerous thug, reunite with Ana (Salas), a fervent activist student in the campus, party-crash, go to the zoo while Sombra has to face his worst nightmare, a tiger, and eventually track down Epigmenio in a remote cantina. Ostensibly, it is another plot-doesn't-matter ethos-journey combined with political agenda, budding romance, surrealistic touch, fly-on-the-wall realism and the dry humour.The picture exudes appealing élan thanks to its swift camera movement, monochromatic freshness and the idiosyncratic treatment of the fictional Cruz's music - a muffled void defies categorisation. But, the momentum doesn't hold up, soon, the journey deflates into an aimless wander, pry into the underbelly of a contemporary Mexico but never reach a cinematic catharsis or produce any prospective worth of excitement, the main characters are bankrupt of any empathy or charisma to keep up audience's attention of their often arbitrary behaviour. It is a film eventually fails to live up to its master-class craftsmanship, but considering its successful tournament in the international festival circuits, I might again find myself in a minority of one, to each his own taste, GÜEROS doesn't emerge as a comprehensively outstanding film in spite of its uniqueness.