Top 3 Critics’ Picks In Theaters this July: Manuel Martin Cuenca’s Cannibal

Cannibal – Manuel Martin Cuenca
Limited Release & VOD – July 25th
Distributor: Film Movement

Awards & Fests: Selected for the 2013 Toronto Int. Film Festival, this had important stops at San Sebastian, Torino and the upcoming Karlovy Vary film fest. Film Movement folks picked it up in December. Award-wise, it managed to land a couple of Cinema Writers Circle Awards win and several Goya Award nominations.

What the critic’s are saying?: Variety got to the film a little late, but Ronnie Scheib found plenty to admire in the “sumptuously shot in carefully composed long takes, the film firmly keeps its butchery offscreen, and given its glacial pace and lack of overt sensationalism, it definitely ranks as a niche item — and a rarefied one, at that.”

From TIFF, THR’s Jonathan Holland touts Cuenca as a strong filmmaker, “as capable of exploring a series of frankly outlandish filmic, thematic and moral propositions with absolute conviction and sureness of touch, the results are usually memorable.” 

Twitchfilm’s Shelagh M. Rowan-Legg underlines the perf from the film’s lead in Antonio de la Torre, “it is a film about light and shadow, the interior and exterior spaces we occupy, with a incredible central performance by Antonio de la Torre.”