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Bookmark this pageLatino (1985)
Director: Haskell Wexler
Movie review
From Time Out Film Guide
After the impressive but inevitably compromised Under Fire, it's good to see a movie that deals with conflict in Central America with a real sense of commitment. Wexler's brazenly partisan film may lack the artistic sophistication of its mainstream counterparts, but it gains in power by focusing not on the familiar 'neutral' journalist/photographer figure, but on an invading American soldier, a Green Beret lieutenant (Beltran) drafted to Honduras to train a platoon of 'Contras' for secret raids on Nicaragua. There he becomes embroiled not only in the infliction of death, torture and US propaganda upon the Sandinistas, but in the contradictions of his position. First, he's a Latin American himself; second, he falls for a woman working in Honduras who hails from the village that is his prime target. Wexler's methods involve passion rather than 'balance': black-and-white moralising may occasionally be the result, but there's no denying the emotional punch dealt by the assured combination of taut narrative and intelligently researched context.Author: GA
User reviews of this film
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- Gort said...
- Posted on Jun 30 2011 12:32 Yeah great movie. Wish more people would see this one.
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Cast & crew
Director: Haskell Wexler
Producer: Benjamin Berg
Cast: Robert Beltran, Annette Cardona, Tony Plana, Ricardo Lopez, Luis Torrentes, Juan Carlos Ortiz full cast
Duration: 108 mins
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