Metacritic Film

Chronicle of an Escape

Starring Rodrigo De la Serna, Pablo Echarri, Nazareno Casero, Lautaro Delgado, Matías Marmorato, Martín Urruty, César Albarracín, and Diego Alonso

MPAA RATING: R for brutality and torture, nudity and language

IFC First Take
Suspense/Thriller
Spanish minutes | Color
Argentina
Released In Theaters November 28, 2007

A true story of terror and survival. Buenos Aires, 1977. A task force working for the fascist Argentine military government kidnaps Claudio Tamburrini, goalkeeper of a B-league soccer team, and takes him to a clandestine detention center known as Sere Mansion: a forbidding old building in the suburban neighborhood of Moron. Claudio enters a living hell of interrogations, beatings, humiliations & betrayals. A nightmare world of arbitrary lunatic rules and relentless violence, mental and physical. Alongside other young detainees, he battles to survive while awaiting his fate to be decided. After four months of imprisonment, with execution looking certain, Claudio and three other prisoners make their desperate move. Forcing open a window in the middle of a thunderstorm, completely naked, they jump into the void. Their flight into the future begins. (IFC Films)

WRITTEN BY
Adrián Caetano
Esteban Student
Julian Loyola

DIRECTED BY
Adrián Caetano

Overall Metascore

This is a weighted, normalized average of all individual scores given by critics, on a scale of 0 (worst) to 100 (best).

64 / 100

Critic Reviews

83	Entertainment Weekly Clark Collis The result is blessed with great performances; director Israel Adrián Caetano lets events speak -- and plead and weep -- for themselves.
80	Salon.com The film is taut and ruthlessly constructed, with odd flashes of humor and a white-knuckle pace. Rodrigo de la Serna ("The Motorcycle Diaries") gives a committed performance as Tamburrini, today a philosophy professor in Sweden.
75	New York Post This film is both a warning about abuse of government power and a reassurance that justice will sometimes triumph.
60	Variety Turns the chilling story of Argentina's military regime and its large scale political murders into a tense, exciting escape thriller. Though functional on its own terms, this fourth feature by Israel Adrian Caetano feels hollow at the core, leaving a feeling of lingering disappointment over a missed opportunity to probe recent history.
50	Village Voice Nick Pinkerton Chronicle might be utterly uncompromising in its "you are there" visceral style--or just unresourceful. I tend toward the latter reading.
50	The New York Times Because Chronicle of an Escape doesn’t seriously scrutinize Argentine history during the years of the so-called dirty war, when the ruling military junta sought to eliminate anyone deemed hostile, it lacks a stinging moral authority.

CLOSE THIS WINDOW

©2009 CNET Networks Inc. All rights reserved.