Modest little Mexican comedy by Fernando Eimbcke, shot in black-and-white, or anyway low-contrast gray, with an impassive static camera and a strong compositional eye for the artless, graceless lines and planes of a drab urbanscape. (The few grainy flashbacks with a mobile hand-held camera add nothing, and the one that exposes the barbarities of the Dog Pound even subtracts something.) A bit of a shaggy-dog story, or perhaps a ruffled-duck story (the title alludes to a nature painting of disputed ownership in a divorce settlement), it passes a single leisurely day in the company of two early-teen boys left alone in a middle-class apartment. The slightly older neighbor girl (a very engaged and engaging actress, Danny Perea) comes over to use the oven and warms up to one of the boys, and a pizza-delivery man won't go away without his payment despite missing his guaranteed delivery deadline by maybe a minute. A standoff ensues, and a video-game soccer match fails to settle the argument when the power goes out in sudden-death overtime. The business of the marijuana in the birthday cake might be pretty stale, but the bigger business of human isolation and tentative connection, when observed with the patience and perception of Eimbcke, remains ever-fresh. Enrique Arreola, Diego Cataño, Daniel Miranda. (2005) — Duncan Shepherd
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