ExpFil

Ruiz's first completed feature won him top prize at Locarno at the age of 28. This is a bleak and blackly humorous vision of a couple of hopeless losers' quotidian attempt to get by over a few days at the edges of Santiago de Chile's inebriated underworld of squalid strip joints and dingy apartments. Nelson Villagra and Shenda Román are both totally credible as an emotionally numb, mumbling brother-pimp-and-sister-whore "team" and Jaime Vadell is also great as Villagra's ambitious, frisky sometime boss. Organised semi-criminality and sweaty repressed frustration pervade the world of the film. Every conversation produces conflict and violence. (The military coup of 1973 is approaching - with unbridled neoliberalism to follow.) Formally, the film has little in common with Ruiz's later European work, but his trademark experimental play with language and music is already in effect. The hand-held b&w cinematography is rough-and-ready yet ambitious for a no-budget indie directorial debut made with the country's only Arriflex: the camera often seems like a spectator in these muscular, evidently meticulously choreographed long takes. The film bears comparison with Cassavetes' SHADOWS (1959) and FACES (1968), Iosseliani's ONCE UPON A TIME THERE WAS A SINGING BLACKBIRD (1970) and even Scorsese's MEAN STREETS (1973). NADIE DIJO NADA (1971) was Ruiz's surreal, bohemian companion piece to TRES TRISTES TIGRES.

My first negative review on IMDb - prompted by strong disagreement with the positive reviews "Angels One Five" has on here.

I found this to be the worst written British war film I've ever seen - a sophomoric, by-the-numbers "Way to the Stars" rip-off. There's nothing compelling or original about it. The airmen come across as gratingly camp airHEADS. And the film singularly fails to convey either of the portentous bookending Churchill quotations.

For propaganda/entertainment purposes, I'd recommend real classics of the genre like "The First of the Few", "The Way to the Stars", "The Dam Busters" or even so-so flicks like "Reach for the Sky" and "Battle of Britain". A disappointing waste of time and talent which is of historical interest/value only.

This is nicely made and will hopefully contribute to a change in preconceptions about women in prison. The filmmakers successfully use makeup and theatrical performance to create an empowering space for the "gangster girls" to tell their stories. I felt able to engage with the circumstances and contexts of the crimes the girls had committed but also saw their burgeoning development of agency through collective work in the prison theatre group. If this had been shot like many docs (with the usual banal techniques for hiding participants' identities), I doubt it could have presented the human side of these stories as effectively or as respectfully.