Customer Reviews

Amores Perros

5 star:		(67)
4 star:		(11)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

It arrived on time. It is probably the best mexican movie ever. Gael garcia performs the best in the movie. Great combinations of scenes

Emilio Echevarria makes one of the most powerful Mexican films to be viewed in US American cinemas to date. This three-part film follows three stories and the interwoven themes of love and dogs. The first story, "Octavio and Susana" features the at once grittily violent and tragically romantic story of Octavio and his sister-in-law, Susana. Octavio chooses dog fighting as his path to liberate his love Susana and himself from their destitute state of servitude to Octavio's family. The story ends with a bloody crash that brings us to the next story of "Daniel and Valeria," and we are harshly jolted by the contrast between this beautiful model and her apartment overlooking her billboard and where we left off in Octavio and Susana's bloody lives. Echevarria even foreshadows this contrast earlier in the film when Valeria appears in the background on a television talkshow in the livingroom of Ocatvio's friend prior to a final dogfight. However, Echevarria cleverly turns our concerns on their head, and the most superficially perfect of lives becomes the most sad. We are left feeling empty and helpless when "El Chivo and Maru" ties all three stories together, by at once showing dogs as our loves, our enemies, our weaknesses. This film is gritty and real; the cinematography is at once documentarylike, and beautifully crafted. The shift in time and space suggests the ties between love and dogs, a theme that carries us through the end of the film. You will not be able to see this film once; multiple viewings are required in order to capture all of the beauty and pain.

what an excellent movie. if you aren't an idiot and can read subtitles watch this movie, this is what movies today should apire to be.

maybe i'm the stupid one. i've seen so many great reviews of this movie and i loved the director's new movie, 21 grams, so i decided it would make sense to see this one. i was a bit dissapointed. maybe there is something big that i am missing in the point of the movie, or maybe the point itself is just a letdown. it seems to me that there was this nasty car crash and through it, the movie tells 3 different stories about the people involved. there is a lot about familial relations, namely between brothers and maybe the dogs are metaphores for brothers. it is also about how (...) happens to different people. otherwise, the first story is entertaining and my favorite, the 3rd is the best in terms of theme, and the 2nd just seems boring and irrelevent. they are 3 different storeis which are loosely but forcedly connected and i don't understand why everyone says this is the best movie ever.

(See above for synopsis)
This film BRILLIANTLY links 3 very different stories together (via an horrific car accident), and there aren't many movies that link stories cleverly as this.

This is a shocking, exhilarating, disturbing, violent and even at times touching (the depth of feeling the assassin has for his dogs is very moving) film, which is brilliantly acted and brilliantly directed.
A genuine modern classic.

For those who have doubts because it's a subtitled film - this is a brilliant film to cut your teeth on, and will open your eyes to a world of cinema that you may have ignored until now.

This movie has rare power. There is a kind visceral violence here that is really wrenching. American films are rarely in this league. I could taste the blood in my mouth while I watched this thing, and I surely felt the ulcers of these characters. The story is fast and character-driven and subtle.

For me, it touched the hard-wires at the back of my brain. The whole movie experience completely envelopes and separates the audience from the here and now and takes us to the Mexican dreamworld.

The acting is almost invisible. The feeling is fly-on-the-wall such that I felt I knew these people in their most personal moments, full of rivalry, blood-lust, anger.. All sorts of brilliant, burning taboo emotions that are rarely porrayed in mainstream film.

Innaritu has a very direct style and a lot of fire in the blood. His style requires no setups - He basically launches the characters into tense, brutal events, forming plots that dovetail together in perfect synchronicity. He's a Picasso to George Lucas's etch-a-sketch.

I don't know if he'll ever be a box-office hero - there are no kid-friendly puppet-contraptions in the works - but this guy is a cinema superstar and a true artist. His work will last. Also see '26 Grams' with Naomi Watts, another film worth it's weight in gold.

I highly recommend this film. It is well made and has a strong message: oppression in Mexico does not come from above now - it comes from within!
Having lived in Mexico for three years I could clearly see the message in this film. The working classes are stuck in traditional beliefs, and in the dream of a quick fix. The so called popular idols are living in a rosy illusion. The wake up is cruel. They are idols because their perfection gives ordinary people a contrast tp their own sqaulor. When you are not perfect any more you are worthless. The only ones that are not given up as hopeless are the 1968 revolutionaries. Even if they also get some kicks.

I rented this movie on the recommendation of a friend, and it couldn't have been more captivating, emotional, powerful, intense, or thought-provoking, even within the first few minutes. It is one of the fastest, non-stop, and deepest motion pictures (especially foreign) that I have ever seen and the title suits it perfectly. What elevates this movie above the usual straight-forward, unnecessarily violent movies we see out there today is just that: it's not straight forward (we do not know the causes of the accident until about an hour in, or even who all in all was injured) and although the dog-fighting and slashing (you'll know what i mean when you see it) violence is a little bit uncessary (ok, over the top) its there for a good reason. About the straight-forwardness: if you found ( or find ) this movie confusing, you were asleep because the director is so genius at weaving these three simple, yet almost unfamothable stories together (including the characters), you understand everything thats going on to each of them, no matter how back and forth the movie may be at times. By the time this movie is over, you'll reconsider your views about your own life, look at everything you "own" differently, and be thankful your alive because with this movie, and world, sometimes life, not just love, is a *****.

I taped this one day, hearing the rave reviews and didn't see it until a month later. I am so glad I saw. This had to be one of the best movies and best foreign movie I've seen in a long time. It is a bit long, but you get so involved in the three stories that it doesn't seem that long. The sexual tension and the violent dog fights help the intense stories come to life. It was so terribly real and the acting is superb especially by gael...I also saw Y Tu Mama right after I saw this having gotten the DVD a while back and I loved that movie too with all of its' liveliness. If you want to see a great movie...it could be better than Pulp Fiction...see this - the dog scenes are hard to watch but in the end, you'll wish you did.

This movie kicks some serious ...!! The acting, the photography, the pace...everything about it is perfect! Yes, it is a very brutal movie, but not unneccesarily so, unlike so many other movies these days...especially, dare I say, from oh-so-perfect Hollywood - which also puts violence over the top, e.g. a person can be stabbed 86 times, and stil be standing on his feet, fighting. This movie goes a long way to describe how love - and the loss of it - can turn otherwise loving people into cynical, desperate beings that don't care about others, let alone themselves.
Watch this movie. Yes, rent it first, if you must, but just watch it. It doesn't tell you anything you don't know, but it tells it in a new and refreshingly honest way.