80
Metascore
10 reviews · Provided by Metacritic.com
- 90The Hollywood ReporterDavid RooneyThe Hollywood ReporterDavid RooneyAn acutely observed chamber piece played out by two exceptionally well-cast actors who keep you guessing about the subtle shifts in their characters’ relationship, this is an unflinching account of human lives rendered disposable by greed and corruption.
- 90Screen DailyJonathan RomneyScreen DailyJonathan RomneyLa Caja is a canny blend of detective story, political drama and rites of passage vignette, and is the sort of film that comes across as so simple and direct that it’s easy to miss how meticulously conceived and constructed it is.
- 90The New York TimesBeatrice LoayzaThe New York TimesBeatrice LoayzaThe Venezuelan director Lorenzo Vigas’s The Box weaves some of the greatest horrors of modern Mexican life into an unsettlingly cryptic thriller.
- 90Film ThreatMichael Talbot-HaynesFilm ThreatMichael Talbot-HaynesThere is this marvelous hard-boiled narrative style Vigas employs, with long periods without dialogue and little exposition. The way the intrigue is built as the picture progresses almost takes us into thriller territory. This is the cinematic storm the filmmaker creates here when a child’s yearning meets the brutality of an outlaw land.
- 83The PlaylistCarlos AguilarThe PlaylistCarlos AguilarThe Box lacks the sort of ardor that made From Afar so memorable. Here, not all the major beats amount to substantial commentary on this relationship or the context. However, there are choices and plot elements that confirm the director’s narrative sagacity.
- 80The GuardianLeslie FelperinThe GuardianLeslie FelperinDirector Lorenzo Vigas, who collaborated on the script with Paula Markovitch and Laura Santullo, adeptly manoeuvres things so that the film slides effortlessly from mystery to criminal story to quasi-Greek tragedy, changing registers with subtle alterations of tone. The landscape – vast, desiccated, menacing – is practically a character in its own right, full of inscrutable secrets like Hatzín’s own deadpan face.
- 75Movie NationRoger MooreMovie NationRoger MooreThe new film from award-winning Venezuelan filmmaker Lorenzo Vigas is a lean, quiet and disturbing parable about global capitalism as it is practiced in much of the Third World.
- 60The GuardianXan BrooksThe GuardianXan BrooksVigas’s direction is efficient, pedestrian, entirely built for purpose. But he manages to keep the audience on-board throughout the tale’s twists and turns.
- 42The Film StageEthan VestbyThe Film StageEthan VestbyOnly touching on something interesting formally in the hum of factory machines and the depressing deadness of low-rent diners, it feels like the kind of work where one uses the descriptor “well-made” as a backhanded compliment. The director pulls off his “vision,” but frankly it doesn’t seem that hard to think up.