Young & Wild

Graphic images however the strong sense of such issues are realistic

This one was a surprise for me. I expect most foreign films to be good, but this one was really different, and make you really engage your brain. First of all, if you don't understand the language, you have to read subtitles, and there's such rapid dialogue, that you have to read fast or you'll miss out. Which means you tend to miss a bit of the visuals, but it can be done without missing too much.

As for the story, it's fascinating, and pretty disturbing, to see the lengths an evangelical family will go to try to keep their daughter from having sex. Let's just say "slut shaming" is taken to an extreme level in this family. You can feel the poor girl's angst; it's not pleasant.

This movie explores the darker side of growing up and trying to find one's place in the world. It's not for prudes or people afraid of human sexuality. 7/10 stars.

Sorry but this film it's so bad. The direction is very poor, the camera shots are so "amateur", like a beginner cameraman, the rhythm of this movie is very slow making it boring of watch.

The worse is the monotone performance of the principal character (Alicia Rodriguez) who don't show any emotion, and her narration (Voice off) is so flat, you can listen clearly that she is reading the lines and no acting.

The script is full of bad words and explicit sexual references (Chilean argot) which don't have any purpose just for make "polemic" the film, and not rise the lazy plot.

YOUNG AND WILD (dir. Marialy Rivas) A sexy and thought provoking film from Chile about a young woman's journey to sexual maturity and the problems posed by her domineering and overbearing family. Because Daniella receives nothing but banal Christian platitudes about her emerging sexuality, she shares her private anguish and confusion with friends on the Internet in her blog entitled, "Young & Wild". The film makes the point that evangelical acculturation is only psychological coercion sweetened with biblical aphorisms, and offers no real answers and only false comfort. Daniella comes to reject the relentless dogma of her parents, and learns to accept the undetermined nature of life. She seems to realize that it's healthier to embrace an uncertain existence without doctrine than to be conned with pious nonsense, and Daniella's family inadvertently prods her into an acceptance of a more secular humanistic world-view. MUST SEE

Ever since the surprise success of "Y Tu Mama Tambien", Latin American filmmakers have realized they can compete with Hollywood, and even successfully export Spanish-language films to North America, if they make films that contain a strong dose of the kind of sexual explicitness their more Puritanical northern neighbors tend to shy away from. Unfortunately, few of these films are nearly as good as "Y Tu Mama Tambien" and are more likely to approach the dismal depths of something like "Night Buffalo".

This Chilean movie is about a girl in her late teens who is kicked out of her evangelical school for having sex and decides to start a blog to rebel against her community and overbearing religious mother. Her blog involves her talking about having all manner of sex (oral, anal, you name it) with partners of both genders. And, not surprisingly, a lot of this sex occurs on camera. The problem with this movie is it is neither fish nor fowl. It kind of wants to be a serious art film, but the character is just not particularly believable. Nothing that happens to her really justifies her rather extreme rebellion. The movie wants to take it as a given that religious repression will inevitably result in promiscuity and jaded sexual attitudes, but it doesn't SHOW how it happened with THIS character very convincingly. I would compare this movie--unfavorably--to the excellent Argentinean film "The Holy Girl", which much more believable portrays the nexus between religion and sex.

The lead, Alicia Rodriquez, is definitely very cute, and with all the graphic sex scenes this movie could have at least been solid exploitation. But while it definitely has enough hot sex scenes to qualify, to really do this it would need to make the character LESS realistic and sympathetic and much more satirical. An example of this would be the recent US indie film "King Kelly" about very hot, but very stupid, fame-obsessed young woman who sets out to become an internet porn star. This movie is only slightly more realistic than that scathing satire, and it is also not as much fun.