Who's in It: Don Ángel Tavira, Dagoberto Gama, Gerardo Taracena, Mario Garibaldi
The Basics: Art kids, this one is all yours. It's a black-and-white Mexican film about 1970s revolutionary peasants who play music by day and fight the oppressors by night, using a really old violinist as camouflage. It's all starkly powerful, with a very somber on-point power-to-the-people message and beautifully composed cinematography. Comes with a Cannes Film Festival stamp of approval, too.
What's the Deal? It always shocks me when people say, "Hey what good movies have you seen lately?" and then I tell them about stuff like this, and I watch their eyes glaze over and the words DO NOT WANT start flashing in neon lights above their head. It's like suddenly I'm assigning them homework. But the truth is that it's bad movies that are homework. This just requires your presence and your attention span. And where else are you going to see an 81-year-old guy make his acting debut, one that won him an award at a fancy French film festival?
Wrinkles Do, in Fact, Make You Beautiful: Speaking of the old man, he's an actual violinist (this fact is crucial to the plot, by the way) named Don Ángel Tavira, and he has the best beaten-up face I've seen since Tommy Lee Jones in No Country for Old Men. Seriously, wouldn't you rather look like these dudes when you're old instead of resembling a surprised, foreheadless blow-up doll?
One Minor Beef: And it's very minor, I promise. Sometimes the cinematography and direction are just this side of being too into themselves. It's like when a hot person knows s/he's hot and unbuttons his/her shirt just one notch too many. You forgive that person because s/he's so hot. But you notice.