Promising young filmmaker Cary Fukunaga makes his feature debut with this Spanish-language thriller that played at Sundance. TRADE’s Paulina Gaitan plays a young Honduran woman who longs to leave her country for America. The harrowing journey she makes with her father and uncle is further complicated when she meets El Casper (Edgar Flores), a gang member from Mexico who wants to escape his former life.
Review 1:
3.5 stars out of 5 -- "The director filmed this tense blend of sociological drama and street thriller on real locations, working with a saturated palette that utilized natural decaying backgrounds with hot spots of color....It's always thrilling to discover an emerging talent with enormous potential."
Source: Box Office
01/21/2009
Review 2:
"SIN NOMBRE is a powerful, wrenching thriller that weaves together several absorbing stories set in Central America. It is also the most moving and well-told saga of Latin American immigrants bound for the USA since 1983's EL NORTE."
Source: USA Today
03/20/2009
Review 3:
"This astonishing debut feature announces the arrival of a lavishly gifted filmmaker, Cary Joji Fukunaga....The scope is epic and the achievement, though solidly grounded in conventional storytelling, is a revelation."
Source: Wall Street Journal
03/20/2009
Review 4:
"This Sundance prizewinner is a journalistic saga of immigration directed with a thriller's physicality by Cary Joji Fukunaga....Whenever SIN NOMBRE turns violent, it seizes you with its convulsive skill..." -- Grade: B-
Source: Entertainment Weekly
03/27/2009
Review 5:
"A big new talent arrives on the scene with SIN NOMBRE. Writer-director Cary Joji Fukunaga's enthralling feature debut takes viewers into a shadow world inhabited by many but noticed by few -- that of Central America migrants making the perilous trip through Mexico to get the United States border."
Source: Variety
03/12/2009
Review 6:
4 stars out of 4 -- "It contains risk, violence, a little romance, even fleeting moments of humor, but most of all, it sees what danger and heartbreak are involved. It is riveting from start to finish."
Source: Chicago Sun-Times
04/01/2009
Review 7:
"[A]n evocative and impressive first feature....There is bitter and breathtaking truth in the story and in the story-telling..."
Source: Los Angeles Times
03/20/2009
Review 8:
"[SIN NOMBRE is] written and directed by the young American Cary Joji Fukunaga....What keeps you watching is his superb eye. Working with his cinematographer, Adriano Goldman, he fills in the cracks of his story with moments of beauty..."
Source: New York Times
03/20/2009
Review 9:
4 stars out of 5 -- "[I]t's the scenes of immigrants heading north atop moving trains which resonate the most -- a testament to Adriano Goldman's brilliant, expansive cinematography."
Source: Total Film
07/28/2009