Pizza, Beer, and Cigarettes

If you are curious about Argentine cinema, start here.

There was before Pizza, birra, faso, and after. This is the masterpiece of the New Argentine Cinema. It was the first feature-length film in the genre. Among its innovations are the use of non-professional actors, continuous shots, location shoots, the use of language of the streets, and a deliberate attempt to make the film appear unstudied.

The film tells the story of a group of friends living a marginalized life on the streets of Buenos Aires as the city descended into poverty and crime in the 1990s. It is as good as the best of the Italian Neo-Realist movement of the 1940s and 1950s. It tells the story from the perspective of the friends, using their language of the street, without sentiment and without becoming manipulative. It's a story of good people trying to survive in a merciless society.