New Order

A fascinating, stylish, uncompromising thriller for all its repugnant prejudices: punk rock movie-making for the ruling elite.

New Order very effectively persuades you that a real-life revolution might well be every bit as ugly, horrifying and un-Hollywood as this shows - and that it is on the way.

The refusal of hope is offset by a lack of platitudes, making this an antidote to complacency.

The expertly calibrated sound design is a character in its own right, manifesting the rebellion in snatches of background radio chatter and small-talk asides before bringing it ear-splittingly into the foreground. The actors are very good too...

What a disappointment... It ends up a little too enamored of its own chaos and cynicism to reach a coherent message.

As a container for Franco's sloshing cynicism, New Order is just as leaky as anything he's made, but on a much larger scale. This time, it leaks all over us too.

Instead of being suggestive and sticking to entertainment, this film is dark and is more focused on telling the truth and showing it all.

By the time Franco joins together strands that the audience will most likely have seen coming, New Order grinds to a halt.

There are no sympathetic or redeeming characters, the politics is very muddled and any message it wishes to convey is drowned out by the violence. New Order is a short, sharp shock to the system. Albeit a deeply unpleasant one with no redeeming features.

Its dystopian treatise questions the inequality margin between the social classes that make up present-day Mexican society, but I am afraid that its exercise never escapes tautological inertia or first-order aesthetic pretensions. [Full review in Spanish]