Reviewer:
Chris Kuykendall from Austin, TX United States
Watching this movie for only the second time, I was re-impressed by the zany bureaucratic frustrations the main character confronts. The plot resembles that of Mandabi (1968) by director Ousmane Sembene, but the Cuban movie was released two years earlier, and is more wryly nuanced and complex than the one from Senegal. Talented director Tomas Gutierrez Alea (1928-1996) was responsible also for Up to a Certain Point (1984), Letters from the Park (1989), and Guantanamera (1995). New Yorker Films issued VHSs of all four films, but was acquired by Madstone in 2002 and went out of business in 2009. It was revived in 2010 when Aladdin Distribution acquired the company and its library. Meanwhile, DVD replaced VHS, only Guantanamera saw a mainstream commercial DVD release, and since 2010 New Yorker Films has issued only a trickle of DVD movies and seems to still be sputtering. So anything Alea that MovieDetective.net issues, in the way of DVD-Rs, is and will be very welcome indeed.