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83Santana was cast prior to making her gender transition and had never acted before. Her personal experience brings such legitimacy that she would probably succeed in the role even if she sucked at line reading. Fortunately, she doesn't.
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75This is the first movie to make me equate coming home from prison with coming home from war.
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Aug 11, 201175Manages somehow to be gritty, delicate, in your face and nuanced at the same time. It's a beautiful, compelling, sometimes harrowing family drama, with excellent performances across the board.
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60The quietly commanding turn by newcomer Santana - whose outward embrace of an already well-internalized transformation leaps off the screen with equal parts joy, melancholia and bravery - is a standout.
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60Without pushing too heavily, Green makes the parallels between Enrique and Michael's situations genuine.
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60Though two late plot developments are borderline-contrived, Green's direction is marked by mature dramatic and aesthetic understatement.
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50Tenderness and good intentions don't necessarily add up to a movie.
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50A strangely bifurcated film, Gun Hill Road comes to life only when focused on Michael, and Ms. Santana (who was just beginning her own gender transition when she won the role) holds the screen like a pro.
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50Gun Hill Road is worth seeing for the acting. The great character actress Miriam Colon makes a brief but memorable appearance as the strong matriarch of the household, and Ms. Santana, a true transgendered teen who has never acted before, is especially wrenching.
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50Green has chosen for his focus to fall on Enrique, in many ways the least interesting character in his story, rather than the son or even the mother who is surprisingly protective and understanding.
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50Of the film's three principals, it's only teenage Michael--more than ably embodied by screen newcomer Harmony Santana--that writer-director Rashaad Ernesto Green seems to have much of a feel for.
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50Earnest and well cast, but less involving than it should be.
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40Yet even with the rich, inherently cinematic texture of the urban setting and two excellent native outer-borough actors in Morales and Reyes, Gun Hill Road falters thanks to its paint-by-numbers storytelling.
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40The melodrama is tiresome, overwrought and clichéd.
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