Glue

Top badass moment? Films like this make me think, “what on earth did I waste my teenage years doing?” And I lived in London too, not Patagonia. When I see movies like this, I expect to watch endless shots of really old, wrinkly people, riding donkeys across windswept plains to sell bags of goat wool in the next town 100 miles away, not glue sniffing youths from broken homes listening to punk and ‘exploring’ their identities. It’s all so unrealistic. No cats, chainsaws or decapitations.

Delirously improvised by its young cast, Glue feels a lot more real and honestly adolescent than the more critically lauded XXY by Lucia Puenzo, and it doesn't hurt that the freewheeling sensuality is expressed formally and stylistically even more powerfully than it plays out in the minmalistic narrative. I love this movie, maybe because it seems to fullfil the promise of a young Gus Van Sant if he had been transplanted to Argentina.

An improved Y Tu Mamá También.

There's an immediacy to this movie that I really love. For lack of a better way of phrasing it, the behavior of the characters feels more real and extemporaneous than simulative; it's like you're right there hanging out with them. I think, because of the movie's improvisational nature, it empowers you to sympathize with them more than you otherwise would had it been scripted. Of course, this is a risky approach and often fails, but in this instance it succeeds. I like the Gus V Sant comparison.

Kinda good as coming-of-age porn.

"Alexis Dos Santos's artful doodle about a boy and his seething hormones in Argentina's dreary Patagonia region that recalls some of the seminal works of the New Queer Cinema movement." - Ed Gonzalez

Watch at your own peril. This is the real deal. A sniff film.