Birds of Passage

Yet even as Birds of Passage fetishizes its dreary mood, it excels at tracking the gradual impact of crime across generations less invested in playing by ancient rules.

Suffice it to say that while watching Birds of Passage this critic couldn't stop thinking about Martin Scorsese's Casino, with its lucid and kinetic dissection of the annihilation of a subculture at the hands of global capitalism.

Ciro Guerra and Cristina Gallego's follow-up to their 2015 gem Embrace of the Serpent is a stunner.

We've seen plenty of films about South American drug cartels, but Birds of Passage is unique as it depicts the very source of the problem. Guerra and Gallego show the inexorability with which the violence follows the money.

There are ethnographic films and there are crime films. I can't recall a film before this that does both successfully - but wait, there's more. Birds of Passage is also an epic tragedy... It's a breathtaking, moody, elegiac piece of work.

[I thought] this film just had a really distinctive personality and really beautiful cinematography.

Episode 40: The Dead Don't Die / Birds of Passage / All That Jazz

What Birds of Passagecaptures so magnificently is the way in which colonialism and capitalism will penetrate every aspect of life for the Wayúu tribe.

If the film's trajectory feels inevitable from its early moments, the particularities of culture and character frequently delight.

Implicitly aware of its sociopolitical underpinnings, it flows more on emotion than character, making for a song of a film that's admirable even when it doesn't succeed.