Most Beautiful Island

This movie is not quite what you expect and this is it's charm. I like this movie because it shows essentially how the rich exploit the poor, and although not an original idea, it takes on a new spin, and thus is not quite what you think. The heroine of the movie seems to draw you into her world, her problems and yet despite everything, she emerges not as a victim, but as someone in control, with a heart, and someone with great strength. The immigrant seeking a better life emerges as someone more beautiful and stronger than the spurious "American Dream" , and she removes the facade from the rich and powerful for weak and pitiful embodiments that they really are.

Not great acting but decent enough, and good story. Kept the suspense up right to the reveal, which was worth the wait, though I may not sleep well tonight...

Most Beautiful Island was extremely well-received at Austin's SXSW Film Festival where it won Grand Jury Award for Narrative Feature. This eloquent film explores the experiences of Luciana, a recent undocumented immigrant, who has recently arrived from her home land and is just trying to get by in New York. The film focuses on a single day as she takes various odd jobs and then gets invited to work at a mysterious party where she will be extremely well-paid for a single night's work. The suspense builds towards a truly shocking and deeply disturbing climax. This film shows the truly dark side of the American Dream and the truly disturbing nature of class privilege in a society with huge gaps in class and, therefore, power and privilege.

The story is described as inspired by true events so there may be some exaggeration in the actual climax, but it is still quite powerful and leaves the audience awestruck. Ana Asensio directed, wrote and stars in this fascinating and absorbing film. It is beautiful written, filmed and acted. The tension builds towards the disturbing climax. The American Dream is not always what it seems to be and needs to be re-imagined for our current economic and political realities. I hope the film gets distributed so more people can learn to empathize with the immigrant experience which has sadly become a political punching bag in recent years.

If you watch the last 15-20 minutes of the movie you watch it all. The rest of it just seems stretched. In the beginning there is a scene where there are many cockroaches entering through a wall. I thought it was meant to give a horror turn but it turned out to be nothing. If its just meant to be the story of hardships faced by an immigrant and what all things they sign up for then it could have meant something but tagging it under horror mystery doesn't make much sense.

Although I am a huge fan of thriller movies and I keep myself very open minded to every type of film I decide to watch, this film, I have to say lacked a few essential components that I believe are very important when creating a movie. Personally, I do like this film and the only detail that I really care to write about and that really took away the most "points" from my rating was definitely the ending. If you've already seen the movie then you know exactly what I m referring to. There was so much buildup throughout the movie and when everything finally started to pickup or connect, there was a huge drop...as if it were meant for the audience to be left at the edge of our seats. If that's what they were going for or what was meant to happen, then I personally don't care for that type of conclusion; although it's pretty difficult to call it a conclusion at all. Also, if it were meant to leave us drawing the conclusion that a sequel were to follow, there just wasn't enough detail to insist that either. So, all in all, I liked it...but because a very smooth and well thought out ending is very important to me, personally, I had to take away quite a bit from what I rated this movie.