Maria Full of Grace
by Joshua Marston
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DVD Cover Information
Actor: Catalina Sandino Moreno, Guilied Lopez, Orlando Tob?n, Virgina Ariza, Yenny Paola VegaDirector: Joshua Marston
Producer: Orlando Tob?n
Writer: Joshua Marston
Producer: Becky Glupczynski
Producer: Gigia Jaramillo
Producer: Jaime Osorio G?mez
Producer: Paul S. Mezey
Producer: Rodrigo Guerrero
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Original Language); Spanish (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0 Surround; English (Subtitled); Spanish (Subtitled); French (Subtitled)
Format: AC-3, Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, Dubbed, DVD-Video, NTSC, Subtitled, Widescreen
Picture Format: 1.77:1
Running Time: 101 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2004-12-07
Audience Rating: R (Restricted)
Studio: Hbo Home Video
Movie Reviews of Maria Full of Grace
Movie Review: "If you don't do this well, we'll stop right now..."
Summary: 5 Stars
Stopping isn't an option, really.
Maria has a problem: she finds it difficult to conform to stupid conventions. But she ends up making a terribly wrong choice in her desperation to get out of the rut she is in. She's given the feeling that it's about easy money. Once she has made that wrong choice, she finds herself in situations which she wasn't warned about.
Having gone through the reviews, I find come common complaints in the negative ones: that it's like a documentary, that critics are partial to foreign films, that there's no story.
The fact is that this is a simple and moving tale, and it's told well, without fireworks. Apart from Catalina Moreno's wonderful performance, I liked her interview in which she says, "It's not about the drugs, it's about the girl". Equally important, the core of the story can be very close to you, if you look around.
The one problem is that some of the characters are a bit cheesy, like the gangsters in New York. For me, that didn't really dent the gracefulness of the movie much.
Summary of Maria Full of Grace
(Drama) Maria Alvarez (Catalina Sandino), a bright, spirited 17-year old, lives with three generations of her family in a cramped house in rural Colombia. Desperate to leave her job stripping thorns from flowers in a rose plantation, Maria accepts a lucrative offer to transport packets of heroin-which she must swallow-to the United States. The ruthless world of international drug trafficking proves to be more than Maria bargained for as she becomes ultimately entangled with both drug cartels and immigration officials. The dramatic thriller builds toward a conclusion so powerful and revealing it could only be based on a thousand true stories.When a movie can blend passionate social concern with good old-fashioned suspense, it must be doing something right. Maria Full of Grace scores high on both counts. Maria is a Colombian teenager who, for a large paycheck, agrees to be a mule for drug-runners: she has to swallow dozens of thumb-sized capsules of heroin and smuggle them into New York. This debilitating process is painstakingly described, and of course not everything goes as planned when Maria and her fellow mules land in America. Director Joshua Marston is working on a low budget, which explains the film's narrow, single-minded focus--but this may be a strength, not a weakness. The trump card is the lead performance of Catalina Sandrino Moreno, who won awards at the Seattle and Newport Film Festivals. Her empathetic face carries us along on Maria's journey, and humanizes a problem that is too easily relegated to a headline. --Robert Horton
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