Impressive how an ostensibly melodramatic premise is able to mix with social realism. When Adelino first returns home, his initial discovery is not filmed as a revelation (i.e. an intense close-up accompanied by music crescendo), but observed in mostly wide shots, where his inner turmoil can be sensed through small pauses during his interactions with others. In another scene, a conversation between him and his brother initiates on the ground level but concludes on a high angle shot observed through…

Unlike Cordeiro and Reis’s two previous features, the dialectical relationships between land, its people, and their history are expanded into a plane of infinitude. Past, present, future are no longer simply intertwined, what’s onscreen is the concrete now, where the sense for place and time are lost to disparate and ambiguous time periods with equal wonders of myriad sensual elements and cinematic gestures. When history or myth is invoked, we can no longer securely return to the here, we’re always elsewhere.…

Kind of poetic to make a movie about cultural gentrification and then to gentrify and regurgitate every genre that comes in its way. Also poetic for the trailer-like ending to require post-credit scenes for its resolution, something populated by movies that have done nothing but decimated and narrowed cultural space.

Typical muscular filmmaking with long takes and dense colour palette that intermittently produces exciting scenes (the dance sequences) through accumulation of flashes (complicated dollies and climactic music), but with no…