Sin Nombre

Wall Street Journal: This astonishing debut feature announces the arrival of a lavishly gifted filmmaker, Cary Joji Fukanaga. (He’s California-born, of a Swedish-American mother and a Japanese-American father.) The subject is immigration, the language is Spanish — with good English subtitles — the scope is epic and the achievement, though solidly grounded in conventional storytelling, is a revelation.

The filmmaker directs his actors — some of them seasoned professionals, some of them in front of the camera for the first time — with an absolute authority that’s absolutely invisible. Scenes play as if caught on the fly by a documentarian. (One of the movie’s most conspicuous strengths is its quasi-documentary detail.) “Sin Nombre” makes no judgments on immigration as a political issue. Mr. Fukanaga’s purpose is to evoke the immigrants’ experience, which he does with such eloquence and power as to inspire awe.

The poster and more raves after the cut.

LA Times: There is much strange beauty in the poverty and desperation captured by “Sin Nombre,” an evocative and impressive first feature from writer-director Cary Joji Fukunaga tracing both the journey north taken by so many from Mexico and Central America and the gang violence that stunts the lives of the many others who stay behind.

There is bitter and breathtaking truth in the story and in the story- telling, which won Fukunaga the directing and cinematography award in the dramatic competition at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year. He rode the trains for days himself before making the movie, and in “Sin Nombre,” he pulls you up there alongside him.

SF Chronicle: The highest calling of movies is to show audiences – to show you – a world you never thought of, a way of thinking and a way of life you never imagined, and then, having shown it, to make you understand it in the common language of human emotion. This is what writer-director Cary Fukunaga accomplishes in “Sin Nombre.”

“Sin Nombre” (“Without Name”) is an escape saga and a romance in which a teenage girl, fleeing poverty, meets a boy who is running for his life, and the two find a common understanding. There are some brief minutes when the tension drops and the story starts to sag, but Fukunaga almost always fills the frame with something worth seeing, and the story has a built-in suspense.

Flores has the lived-in fatalism of a film noir hero, the look of someone who has lived too long and seen too much, which is disconcerting in someone who otherwise looks like a kid. Fukunaga has the emotional sophistication to show us why a teenage girl might find this quality romantic, while letting us know that, in reality, it’s the furthest thing from it.