Cinema can find so many ways in.
Alejandro Landes’ astonishing “Monos,” recently named Colombia’s official Oscar submission, seeps in through the skin like a sweet, druggy sickness — the kind that heightens and sharpens your dreams even as it scrambles them, making the brights brighter and the darks darker, while keeping you feverishly uncertain about whether the next cut will bring rapture or nightmare.
, “Monos” presents an ugly reality in terms so profoundly paradoxical it becomes surreality: an experience at once jagged and lyrical, brutal and beautiful, angry and abstract, scattered and wholly singular.These Lost Boys, some of them girls, whose raggedy clothes are accessorized with ever-present machine guns, slung across bony shoulders or dangling carelessly off thin arms, go by noms de guerre like Rambo (Sofia Buenaventura), Boom-boom (Sneider Castro), Lady (Karen Quintero), Dog (Paul Kubides), Wolf (Julian Giraldo) and Bigfoot (Moises Arias).
On a misty mountaintop, these
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