Halfway into The Delinquents, a character named Roman randomly meets three new characters. They just happen to be called Morna, Norma, and Ramon. From here on, we see a very different film from what we were seeing before. It almost feels like two very different kinds of films conjoined together, but it can also be said that the two halves complement each other. Rodrigo Moreno’s 2023 film, which happens to be the official Argentine entry in the “best international feature” category at the upcoming Oscars, is a heist film at its core, with additional layers of a love triangle as well as a very specific kind of social commentary. True to its title, which basically means people who break the law, The Delinquents is centered on a crime, but the direction it takes is not something you would see coming. The runtime does seem a bit too much at times,...
- 12/17/2023
- by Rohitavra Majumdar
- Film Fugitives
The best capers are endowed with a professional gambler’s spirit of self-assured play, and this inherent mischievousness is both taken to logical extremes and given a less flashy treatment in Rodrigo Moreno’s The Delinquents. The film constantly toys with its audience, deploying genre cues only to sidestep their expected payoffs and moral resolutions. Whether one interprets the routes that it takes as relatively frivolous fun or serious arthouse theme-making hardly affects the pleasure of watching it. That distinction is just one of many that are defied in a film that treats the very notion of identity like an easily foiled con man.
The Delinquents alternatingly dares the viewer to read it as a caper flick, a moral parable, a comedy of coincidences, and an existential probe. It probably lands closest to the latter, though in fine existential fashion, it also cautions against searching for too much weighty significance in its story.
The Delinquents alternatingly dares the viewer to read it as a caper flick, a moral parable, a comedy of coincidences, and an existential probe. It probably lands closest to the latter, though in fine existential fashion, it also cautions against searching for too much weighty significance in its story.
- 9/9/2023
- by Pat Brown
- Slant Magazine
Most of us know the illicit rush of the sick day slyly pulled when you’re not really sick. The turning you ignore on your commute, but that one day, for no real reason, you take. Oh, that sudden, intoxicating sniff of freedom! It’s perhaps the closest thing that many of us get as adults to the ceaseless adventure we thought, as children, we’d be living. Argentinian writer-director Rodrigo Moreno’s delightful “The Delinquents” knows the feeling too. Over the course of its droll, meandering, indefinably strange three hours, it may well persuade you that the crazy thing is not to break from your normal routine. The crazy thing is to ever go back.
Filmmakers have long been attracted to the heist format for the high drama it can generate, but Moreno begins his movie with a bank robbery so banal it’s hard to believe that’s actually what is going on.
Filmmakers have long been attracted to the heist format for the high drama it can generate, but Moreno begins his movie with a bank robbery so banal it’s hard to believe that’s actually what is going on.
- 5/24/2023
- by Jessica Kiang
- Variety Film + TV
There are movies that grab you by the throat and refuse to let go until the story ends. And there are others that playfully take your hand, guiding you into stories that blossom and fold in on themselves several times over, leading to endings that are more like beginnings.
For the past five years, a crop of films from Argentina has been specializing in the latter type, telling long, winding, labyrinthine stories inspired by the French Nouvelle Vague — especially Jacques Rivette’s Celine and Julie Go Boating and his serial epic, Out 1 — as well as Latin American postmodernists like Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortázar and Roberto Bolaño.
With mammoth running times and multiple characters, Mariano Llinás’ six-part, 13-hour La Flor (2018) and Laura Citarella’s two-part, six-hour Trenque Lauquen (2022), are the best-known examples of the genre. Enigmatic and absorbing, they have found a fanbase at festivals and on specialty streaming sites,...
For the past five years, a crop of films from Argentina has been specializing in the latter type, telling long, winding, labyrinthine stories inspired by the French Nouvelle Vague — especially Jacques Rivette’s Celine and Julie Go Boating and his serial epic, Out 1 — as well as Latin American postmodernists like Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortázar and Roberto Bolaño.
With mammoth running times and multiple characters, Mariano Llinás’ six-part, 13-hour La Flor (2018) and Laura Citarella’s two-part, six-hour Trenque Lauquen (2022), are the best-known examples of the genre. Enigmatic and absorbing, they have found a fanbase at festivals and on specialty streaming sites,...
- 5/18/2023
- by Jordan Mintzer
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
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