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Mala Noche
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  • Summary: A key work in American independent moviemaking, Gus Van Sant's first feature tells a story from Portland's grubby skid row, about Walt, a thirty-something convenience-store manager madly in love with an illegal teenage Mexican immigrant named Johnny. (IFC)

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  1. Positive: 3 out of 3
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  1. Chicago Reader
    Reviewed by: Jonathan Rosenbaum
    100
    This 1985 film's absolute freedom from cliches is genuinely refreshing; looking at it again after Van Sant's subsequent "Drugstore Cowboy," I found it every bit as good and in some ways even more impressive than the later film. It shouldn't be missed.
  2. Village Voice
    Reviewed by: Nathan Lee
    90
    Based on an autobiographical novella by Portland "street poet" Walt Curtis, Mala Noche (1985) was the 33-year-old Van Sant's debut feature. Shot on 16mm for $25,000, it was the first of his bittersweet odes to tender outcasts and remains the simplest and least burdened.
  3. Boston Globe
    Reviewed by: Wesley Morris
    75
    This is the first, smallest, and most essential planet in the Van Sant solar system. The seediness of "Drugstore Cowboy " started here. So did the one-way crushes in "My Own Private Idaho " and the gorgeously epic longueurs of "Last Days. "

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