Quinceañera (2006) (Richard Glatzer / Wash Westmoreland)

“Quinceanera” has an understandably broad appeal in its keenly observant and unassuming exploration of a Mexican American family and the extending community. And that proved to be the case when it seized both the Audience Award and the Grand Jury prizes at Sundance, a feat unheard of in these times of divided opinions. It gladly wears its optimism and giddy exuberance on its sleeves when it introduces us to the innocent charms of its ingénue, Magdalena (Emily Rios) during a zestful celebration, a rite of passage for young women called a quinceanera. But will Magdalena’s own quinceanera be as joyful?

When the threat of an extra mouth to feed comes looming over her family’s celebratory mood, the shamefaced Magdalena finds herself exiled to her great-uncle’s rented apartment in a building owned by a duo of gay white yuppies eager to cash in on the burgeoning property market. She finds herself sharing a common but uneasy bond with Carlos (Jesse Garcia), another family member ousted because of his sexual preference.

The writer-directors in Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland do not condemn the conservatism of the immigrant Latino community. Their social commentary is primarily concerned with the ones that are forgotten, misplaced in the functioning society’s own religious principles and way of life. Astutely crafting a smooth flow and a nicely paced narrative, it has an astonishing amount of detail and observations in its compact and decidedly simple story of outcasts in the country’s minority neighborhoods. Transcending its clichéd scenarios, it manages to convey a sense of longing in the pariahs while they huddle together in a small apartment with problems that can only be sorted by them. Staying clear of odious stereotypes about gangland lifestyles and contrivances about inhabitants of the barrios, it finds an able and authentic footing in its environment that effuses a rare amount of sincerity. In its packed house of flawed but relatable characters, each of them is made real by distinctive and natural performances.

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Cure (1997) (Kiyoshi Kurosawa)

With a much more divided critical base than his much revered namesake, Kurosawa either draws ire or much respect for his genre twisting mindfucks of Asian cinema. I stand somewhere in between because even while I recognise and applaud his intentions and sheer nerve in bending the genre to the extent of esoterica, there's just something hollow left behind. With "Cure", he adds to an oeuvre of stringently erudite horror/thriller by quite obviously referencing the 1995 Sarin gas attack on Tokyo's subway system.

He dithers around the subject of cults and finds that searching for identity in a (dys)functional society a much more clamant aspect of a person's descent into GroupThink and susceptibility of persuasion. Deliberately coy and abstract, Kurosawa is an auteur of surrealism and builds a intriguing cross between David Fincher and David Lynch while questioning our buried impulses and slowly pulling back the layers of detachment in a country that's gradually supplanting it's own identity with nothing of note.

Arguing that the diegetic murders are related in more ways than a mysterious amnesiac and a curious X carved in the victims' neck, Kurosawa links the cause to the alienation from our contemporary lifelessness by way of allegory. With no discernable soundtrack aside from the electronic droning, ambience and permutations of desperation in the lone protagonist's voice, Kurosawa demands attention through arduousness in minimalism but relents a caveat before long in its subtle ambiguity.

Rating: 3½ out of 5