Monos

Tonally, the film is mercurial, capturing the multiple realities of its young subjects who are both children and soldiers – the distressing, disorienting dichotomy at the centre of its eerie spell. With skill and sensitivity, Landes manages to capture both sides of their fractured world, evoking empathy without resort to pity.

Monos isn’t a social-issue tract, or just a lament for the beasts of no nation. It’s a fever dream of a war drama, caught halfway between realism and the hallucinatory intensity of an ancient fairy tale.

Monos is an immersive, sweaty, almost hallucinatory experience of hormone-driven anarchy.

There’s a specific, singular madness that this movie conjures up that’s completely its own, a spell it casts that goes way beyond homages or spot-the-reference pastiches.

Nothing short of an aesthete’s dream, a film crammed with visual bravado that at various times echoes Kubrick, Malick, and Coppola’s Apocalypse Now.

The viscerality will surely leave one shaken, though they may question if the unceasing sadistic acts on display are worth the experience.

Even in this fictional context, the line between portraying and exploiting abused innocence gets uncomfortably, offensively blurred.

WOW!!! I have never been so shaken by a movie... in an amazing way! The story has a way of pulling you in and taking you a wild ride... with an amazing score by Mica Levi and surreal cinematography. The movie is still in my head since it does not give you a happy ever after ending tied up in a little bow but leaves you questioning what will happen. And in real life that is the situation. Highly recommend it!! And if you can please watch it in the theater.... you need the big screen for the sound and image.

A very half-baked film if you ask me. On the surface, it's seemingly 'Lord of the Flies' meets 'Apocalypse Now', but regardless, this film felt like it was wandering around aimlessly all over the place. The editing, especially towards the end became very confusing and disjointed to me to the point where I had no idea what was going on. Films can be weird and random if it aims to serve the story (David Lynch seems to be the only one to have truly mastered this concept). Everyone else that tries it always seems to be setting themselves up for defeat. Case in point here with this film. Overall, it really was an intriguing first half, but the second half is really where the film lost sight of what it was aiming for or trying to communicate.

Despite excellent cinematography and fine film editing, this would-be epic saga **** of adolescent rebel commandos harboring an American hostage in the mountains and jungles of Latin America aspires to heights of profundity that it never quite reaches. With an almost complete lack of back story, an episodic meandering narrative and unresolved plot lines at movie's end, this film seems to strive at making a statement it can never quite articulate. Yet another case of hype trying to outmuscle quality and failing miserably.

For the past 19 years I have been going to a movie matinee on Friday, missing only 2, because in the back of my mind, for some stupid, unexplained reason that I know is not true, I think the world will come to an end. I wish I had taken that chance today. I had a choice between "Joker" and "Monos". I am a huge fan of Joaquin Phoenix and don't think I have ever missed a movie he has been in but I had heard about all the violence in "Joker" and I do not like seeing violence in movies no matter how phony I know it is but then I have never heard of "Monos". I looked up the synopsis of the latter and it seemed 'different' so I decided to go see that movie. When I got to The Classic Gateway Theatre I sort of smiled and, at the same time felt good about, to see that there were 2 fully dressed and armed policemen stationed at/in the auditorium that "Joker" was playing! "Monos" here I come. After 102 minutes watching a group of teenagers running amok, supposedly guarding an American hostage, I couldn't see how "Joker" could have been more violent, and "Monos" is one of those pictures that is so indecipherable I really want to ask you to go and see it and then tell me what it was/is about and what it is all suppose to mean? I came home and read a few critics reviews and I still ahve that question! I won't even ask how and/or what that American is doing in the jungles of Columbia---I guess that is where they are because the movie was made there---but who are the kids and what are they doing there? "Monos" is certainly a movie I don't recommend but wouldn't mind if you went to see it and emailed me what it was about!!

(Mauro Lanari) Madness and violence in a subtropical forest: like Coppola or the first Herzog, with a spasmodic search for the dramatic scene at every single shot. Primordial brutality as in Refn with hallucinatory hints as in Lynch, applied to training Colombian kids as guerilleros. Overly explicit authorial quotes and references, which turn Landes' film into a derivative work. Garrone could have shot it with the "scugnizzi" (street urchins) of Scampia and its surroundings, and it has nothing to share with the cinema of my interest.