A heartbreakingly lovely Honduran emigrant (Paulina Gaitan) makes her perilous way, with father and uncle, through Mexico en route to Texas and New Jersey, her path converging with that of a sensitive, pensive Mexican gangbanger (Edgar Flores), a teardrop tattoo by his right eye, who runs afoul of his blood brothers. First-time filmmaker Cary Koji Fukunaga offers a soft-hearted view of a hard world, seeking out tender innocence and then stomping it for our horror and pity. The illegal-alien film and the gang-life film are both genres that are prone to a certain sameness, and the combination of the two into one film doesn’t produce a sense of differentness so much as a doubled sameness. Slickly done, nonetheless. (2009) — Duncan Shepherd
This movie is not currently in theaters.