The second film of the day, and one of the reasons why I so enjoy the Un Certain Regard section of this festival: for among the intentional oddities, and the boring experiments there are usually a number of gems that fit the competition’s manifesto of presenting films that are “worth a look” extremely well, Miss Bala is an incredibly terse, and successfully tense situational horror/thriller. The film begins conventionally enough, with Laura (Stephanie Sigman), attempting to enter the Miss Baja California with her friend Suzu, and then joining her at a club with its own police-devoted VIP section (or so it seems), in order to – as Suzu suggests – get in with some powerful men who can help them win the contest. Following an altercation with one of said policemen, Laura finds herself in the toilet, surrounded by armed gang members, who shoot the place up, leaving Laura to survive, but to fret over her friend’s fate. Attempting to track down what happened to her, Laura ends up being delivered to the same cartel, after approaching the wrong policeman, and becomes embroiled in an endlessly progressing spiral of events alongside the charismatically malignant cartel leader. Miss Bala presents a Mexico that is rotting from the inside: corruption runs rampant to the extent that no one is to be trusted, regardless of what their badge might suggest, drug trafficking and running gun battles are an everyday occurrence, and the value of human life is far less than the appeal of power [Due to Content Scraping and Theft, we have been forced to try abbreviated feeds. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and woud very much appreciate you clicking through to view the full article on FilmSchoolRejects.com]

On the opening of Round One of our Movie World Cup, we see host country South Africa face off against Mexico with two strong films. District 9 is somewhat of a fanboy favorite, so it might be hard to beat, but Sin Nombre came out of the gate strong last year and impressed almost every audience it touched.

Sly has an idea for Rambo 5. Involving abducted women. And Mexico. And Mariachis with shotgun-packed guitar cases. Basically Rambo would be blowing the mierda out of Mexico.