The violent shadow of Guatemala’s decades-long civil war looms large over Mexico 86, an intimate political thriller about a family of two trying to stay together as the fight pursues them abroad. Written and directed by César Díaz, whose 2019 Cannes Caméra d’Or winner, Our Mothers, also dealt with the deadly repercussions of the Guatemalan conflict, this engaging if somewhat rote second feature stars Bérénice Béjo (The Artist) as a leftist militant forced to decide between revolution and motherhood.

Per the press notes, Diaz based the story on his own childhood, and there’s clearly an authenticity to the way he depicts the harried underground life that activists were forced to lead at the time, with a suitcase always packed so they could flee at any moment. What’s less convincing is the film’s tepid emotional atmosphere and predictable chain of events, even if they lead to a rather moving finale that manages to pull the rug out from under us.

If Our Mothers was more of a contemplative narrative about the war’s long-term traumatic aftereffects, Mexico 86 hits the ground running and never really lets up. After a prologue, set in Guatemala in 1976, shows activist and recent mother Maria (Béjo) witnessing her husband’s murder by government thugs in broad daylight, we skip 10 years ahead to find her living under cover in Mexico City, where she dons a wig, goes by the name of Julia and works as an editor at a progressive newspaper.

Maria is far from home but still deeply entrenched in her combat, shacking up with a fellow activist, Miguel (Leonardo Ortizgris), and doing her best to fight Guatemala’s military-backed — and U.S.-supported — dictatorship from a distance. She’s also doing her best to stay close with her 10-year-old son, Marco (Matheo Labbé), who lives with Maria’s mother (Julieta Egurrola) back home. When the two arrive in Mexico for a visit and Marco winds up staying, it puts Maria in a tough spot: How can she be a good parent while waging a clandestine war against a right-wing junta?

The dilemma recalls the one in Sidney Lumet’s 1988 masterwork Running on Empty, a similar story of family ties and leftist revolutionaries that was made two years after the events in this film are meant to take place. But whereas Lumet’s devastating coming-of-age story provided a major shot to the heart, especially in its portrayal of a teenager trying to crawl out from under his parents’ weighty shadows, Mexico 86 is less emotionally effective overall, and works best during its handful of suspense sequences.

One has Maria receiving a secret dossier about Guatemala’s mass killings only seconds before her contact is stabbed on a crowded street. In another strong scene, she escapes from her apartment with Miguel and Marco, which leads to a car chase with the secret police. When they get caught in a traffic jam, the chase turns into a shootout, with Maria at one point appearing to hold a gun to Marco’s head — a telling sign that she’d rather sacrifice her own child than hand him over to the enemy.

There’s a way out of all this, but it’s a tough one: Maria’s overseeing operative (played by Fermín Martínez from Narcos: Mexico) tells her she can send Marco off to a “hive” in Cuba, where he’ll be raised with other children of the revolution in relative safety. But the bond between mother and son seems to be tightening, despite some rocky moments, and Maria clearly doesn’t want to give up either Marco or the bigger battle.

Béjo, whose own parents fled the dictatorship in Argentina and settled in France, does a good job portraying Maria’s push-and-pull between family and political engagement. The path her character takes can feel obvious at times, and there’s a general lack of depth to Diaz’s script, even if it’s been drawn from real events. Yet the director manages to land a powerful ending that puts the effaced Marco front and center in a major way, even if it comes a tad late.

The film’s title refers to the 1986 World Cup, which took place in Mexico and which is never referred to except in a few perfunctory moments. The greater backdrop to the story is what happened in Guatemala during the dark years of its many dictatorships, including a genocide in the early ’80s that lead to hundreds of thousands of deaths. If anything, Diaz succeeds in conveying how fatal the conflict in his homeland truly was, making its way into foreign lands and tearing loving families apart.

One Life (now streaming on Paramount+) is proof that the presence of Sir Anthony Hopkins always and without fail elevates a movie. (OK, maybe not that one Transformers movie, but at least his scenes were memorably unintentionally hilarious.) This film is more stereotypical of what we’d expect from the veteran Oscar winner, who plays the older version of real-life British gent Nicholas Winton, whose efforts to extract hundreds of Jewish children from Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia made him an unsung hero of World War II. Johnny Flynn (Stardust) plays the younger version of Winton as the film jumps between the late 1930s and 1987 – but as you’d expect, Hopkins is the one who truly carries the movie.

ONE LIFE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Nicholas (Hopkins) has too much stuff. Boxes and boxes of it, piled up here and there, in the den, in the garage. He’s 80-ish, and he takes it slow around their nice, spacious house, but he still drives and still dives into the pool in their lovely back garden. His wife Grete (Lena Olin) insists it’s time to get rid of some of that stuff – but they’ll find a special place for that one attache he keeps in the drawer, she promises. It’s the kind of attache that’s ripe to trigger a flashback: Young Nicholas (Flynn) visiting Prague in 1938. He visits a refugee camp where children clamor for the bit of chocolate in his pocket. A sweet girl, in spite of the harsh conditions and the dirt on her face and hands, smiles wide and shows the gap where her two front teeth are about to grow in. A 12-year-old girl looks considerably more haunted, holding a baby that isn’t her sibling or cousin but one that belongs to people who are just, well, no longer there. 

The Nazis have already pushed these people from their homes, and are on the brink of invading Prague. Something must be done about this, Nicholas insists. He can’t just return to London and resume his job as a stockbroker. He wires his boss and says he’ll be back whenever, and gets to work, recruiting humanitarians Doreen Warriner (Romola Garai) and Trevor Chadwick (Alex Sharp) to come up with a plan to extract the children to the U.K. Nicholas goes home and gets his mother (Helena Bonham Carter) to help him drum up money, visas and foster families. He pleads with British bureaucrats to be, well, less damn bureaucratic, and they put the kids’ paperwork to the top of the pile. 

Letters are written. Photos are taken. Money is raised. Promissories are penned. Typewriters go tickity-tack. Phones ring. Children say heartbreaking goodbyes to their parents as they board trains to safety. Meanwhile, in 1987, Nicholas contemplates. That is to say, he stares longingly into the distance, in between cleaning jaunts (he piles up boxes of old paperwork and burns them in the yard). He opens the attache and pulls out a scrapbook full of photos and documentation. There’s no pride or nostalgia on his face. Just – blankness? An unwillingness to open old wounds, perhaps? He takes the attache to a newspaper, and the doltish editor sends him away. This is Nicholas’ legacy. And he doesn’t know what to do with it.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: There’s some very clear parallels to Schindler’s List here.

Performance Worth Watching: Without Hopkins’ haunted nonverbal performance, One Life would be incredibly ordinary.

Memorable Dialogue: Nicholas states it plainly at the refugee camp: “I have seen this, and I cannot unsee it. And because I may be able to do something about it, I must at least try.”

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: One Life is a character study cloaked in the trappings of a historical drama – and thank the cinema gods it sidesteps most of the trappings of the staid biopic. The finely shot, relatively bare-bones 1930s sequences lay the groundwork for Hopkins to silently and existentially ruminate in 1987, where Nicholas very pragmatically clean-sweeps the clutter from his life and ends up finding a bit of emotional clarity in that precious briefcase. Director James Hawes shows an eye for the usual period detail, but more crucially, executes the narrative with a sense of urgency, maintaining tension as the Nazi invasion looms and using montages effectively to convey significant amounts of visual information while Lucia Zucchetti edits crisply, sharply and with clear intent. This is not at all the talky foot-dragger of a drama you may expect it to be.

Hopkins’ scenes are where the film finds its true agency, a complexity beyond the easy and simple assertions of his character’s selflessness. It’s obvious that Nicholas deserves recognition, but he may not feel quite the same. And so the actor, furrowing his brow, stirs all manner of intangibles into the screen version of Nicholas: The specter of aging, feelings of unworthiness, long-faded memories vividly returning. On top of all that, and more visibly spelled out by the screenplay, is nagging regret: Did I do enough? That notion leads to an inevitable tearjerker conclusion, one that feels less egregious after Hopkins put in all that work. This is precisely why he’s a master of the craft.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Hopkins’ thoughtful artistry, coupled with Hawes’ technical proficiency, renders One Life a thoughtful and memorable drama.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

How is it possible that Borderlands, a new action blockbuster based off one of the best-selling video games of all time, will continue its legacy as of one of cinema’s greatest disappointments?

That reality is the saddest part watching the new Borderlands movie, now stupefying and nauseating audiences everywhere. What should be a fun, sci-fi summer romp is instead a total misfire from nearly every department.

For those unfamiliar, the Borderlands games feature a set of ragtag outlaws across dystopian planets across space, often searching for treasure and space-like creatures. This film version loosely follows the main plot of the first game, first released back in 2009.

That premise though, of a rescue mission gone wrong on a dangerous, desert planet, is here obliterated in an awful screenplay that feels like a half-hearted rip-off of Mad Max and Guardians of the Galaxy (another big summer hit that, strangely, first premiered almost ten years ago to the day.)

Borderlands’ script is atrocious, filled with unspecific nonsense at best and cruelty and crudeness at worst. The plot is derivative and simple. The technical design is unfinished and grotesque, with no clear theme or purpose. The editing and direction is confusing, and most of the cast looks bored and anxious on screen.

Even worse is the film’s sense of humour, seemingly insulting the PG-audience of teenage boys by stuffing every scene with as much unfunny toilet humour is possible. The jokes are consistently crass and gross – sometimes downright revolting – and each is worse than the one before it.

Some of the more tasteful zingers, for example, include quips like, “You’re a bunch of poopy mouth faces who can eat your own butts!”, or, “I didn’t know electrocution caused defecation!”, complete with the matching visuals.

As if this wasn’t bad enough, somehow the film’s $110 million budget didn’t include enough to finish rendering or animating the film’s special effects, which often have the composure and detail of a half-finished high school project. I haven’t seen effects this sloppy since 2019’s Cats…which famously went on to win Worst Picture that year.

Having an unpolished final product in the modern movie landscape is unacceptable when it’s a large studio project like here at Lionsgate, especially when the competition (like Universal and Warner Bros.) have cutting edge effects in every major film with ease. An unfinished or rushed movie is just lazy. The effects are so poorly rendered the 15-year old original Playstation 3 video game looks better than this.

Yet the worst sin is how all of the characters in the cast are endlessly nasty and unlikable, with almost no redeeming character traits. These are bitter, cynical characters with no counter balance that makes the audience want to root for them.

Not only is this a betrayal of their more gripping, gritty personalities in the source material, but it gives talented actors in the cast nothing meaningful to work with, leaving them to flounder with shallow, clunky dialogue and comedy dripping with corporate synergy.

I almost feel bad for the genuinely talented performers like Cate Blanchett, Kevin Hart and Jamie Lee Curtis whose skills as storytellers and comedians are being wasted, especially with designs and relationships that are being misdirected as a clear knock-off to better science fiction movies of the last decade.

Blanchett, for what it’s worth, is still fully committed to the character however unpleasant she is. Her performance, along with a few others (like a great Janina Gavankar as Commander Knox) are truly the sole enjoyable elements of this mess.

Video games movies have a (perhaps unfair) reputation in the last 40 years of having disingenuous Hollywood adaptations often misunderstanding the tones that made the franchises and characters popular in the first place. It’s possible to get the adaptation right – look at the recent success of The Last of Us on television.

But not Borderlands. Director Eli Roth has completely misunderstood what makes summer blockbusters entertaining or why the games were such a big hit in the first place. His tone is so off-putting that the whole film feels boring and hollow.

I’ve been reviewing movies for more than a decade, and I genuinely can’t remember the last time I disliked the experience of watching a movie this much. For anyone going out to the cinema for a good time, that’s a borderline disgrace.

1 out of 10

Rated PG, 1hr 42mins. Sci-Fi Action Adventure.

Co-written and directed by Eli Roth.

Starring Cate Blanchett, Ariana Greenblatt, Kevin Hart, Jamie Lee Curtis, Florian Munteanu, Jack Black and Edgar Ramírez.

Now playing at https://www.cineplex.com/theatre/silvercity-burlington-cinemas.