Sin Nombre: Critic Reviews

Whenever Sin Nombre turns violent, it seizes you with its convulsive skill, but the film's images 
 vastly outstrip its imagination.

The caressing, honeyed light in Sin Nombre beautifies and softens every ugly moment in this equivocating story about geographic and moral border crossings.

If you've ever got your hands on a second-hand set of Operation, you'll know how it feels to watch the latest addition to the slum drama stable. Most parts are present and correct, but there's definitely something missing - a heart, perhaps?

That this is Fukunaga's first film is astonishing, given its sharp script, technical proficiency and suspenseful pacing. The ensemble cast is top-notch.

Sin Nombre is pure filmmaking: a great story told in beautiful images.

It's the tone of the movie's two sides -- action and stillness, graphic violence and romantic melodrama -- that don't cohere.

The scope is epic and the achievement, though solidly grounded in conventional storytelling, is a revelation.

Rich details make the immigration thriller Sin Nombre vivid and haunting.

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.

As accomplished as Sin Nombre is in many ways, you're always aware of the ever-tightening plot screws, rather than the human beings caught in one threatening situation after another.

Writer-director Cary Fukunaga keeps the story lean while peppering it with realistic details.

[Director] Fukunaga's startlingly impressive first feature is almost ruthless in its depiction of the brutality and degradation confronting the hidden hordes that cross rivers and hop trains trying to get to the United States.

This is a stunning feature debut for director Cary Fukunaga. The story borrows from road movies and crime thrillers, but the scenes and situations vibrate with authenticity.

Brutal, wrenching and filled with desperation and meanness, Sin Nombre signals a major new talent in writer-director Cary Fukunaga, who never flinches while telling a story so grim and sad it moves beyond tears to numbness.

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 very few.

The actors, particularly Flores, have a documentary reality about them. Their reactions to most of their predicaments, even the ones given away too easily by the script, are real in the most human sense.

Among the film's many revelations is a cast of talented unknowns who stand to become much better known in years to come -- which makes the 'no name' title seem almost ironic.

The thrilling and beautifully crafted debut feature of 31-year-old Californian Cary Joji Fukunaga.

More substantive than the average thriller/road movie.

Intense Spanish-language feature debut intrigues but doesn't quite gel.

Sin Nombre is at once subtle and intense, familiar but refreshing, intimate even as it tells a story untold numbers have endured.

There is bitter and breathtaking truth in the story and in the story-telling.

It's a drama, a romance and a thriller, but make no mistake - Sin Nombre pulls no punches in delivery a raw, powerful film that shrugs aside genre convention.