| Amazon Prime Video | Release Date: September 15, 2023 | CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION | ||
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Positive:
30
Mixed:
4
Negative:
0
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Critic Reviews
Sep 11, 2023
Cassandro takes place in an inherently goofy arena — this is over-the-top, stagey fighting, after all — but the filmmakers avoided the temptations of cheap laughs and produced a satisfying dramatic story that will appeal to both fans and non-fans of this outlandish wrestling genre. That’s a rope move worth cheering for.
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The PlaylistJan 21, 2023
Cassandro isn’t here to cover every moment of Armendáriz’s life. And there are storylines, especially with his father, that neither Williams or his co-screenwriter, David Teague, can bring to a satisfying conclusion. But as a portrait of a man finding himself in his profession? Of celebrating his true self? It’s extraordinary.
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Sep 21, 2023
Williams and Bernal aren’t focused on making a dramatized ESPN-friendly narrative or a melodrama about a gay man suffering the slings and arrows of intolerance. They’re far more interested in what resides in the thin middle of that Venn diagram, in which a luchador finds his authentic self in the most outrageous, over-the-top way possible, and revolutionizes a sport in the process.
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Jan 23, 2023IndieWireJan 21, 2023
Glowing with García Bernal’s magnetism, “Cassandro” balances the triumphant exaltation of Arbendáriz’s singular evolution as a trailblazer who didn’t set out to become one, with the obvious, still not entirely eliminated bigotry that made his trajectory so significant and groundbreaking in the first place.
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Sep 22, 2023
As Bernal plays him, Cassandro is a hero for our dismal times, not just because he crashes through norms, but because he makes it look fun, even when it most certainly isn’t. This is a performance filled with truthful joy, and it floods this modestly scaled but open-hearted movie with light.
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Jan 21, 2023
Seasoned documentarian Roger Ross Williams, who profiled Armendáriz in 2016 for the Amazon series The New Yorker Presents, makes an assured transition into narrative features with this entertaining biopic, which doubles as a gorgeous depiction of mother-son love and an exhilarating exploration of fearless queer identity in a macho environment.
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Nov 28, 2023
Nothing new in any of it, but the tenderness of his performance stretches Bernal’s talents to the point of heartbreak, and his fearless and startling determination to “let it all hang out” results in a challenging star performance that is a thrill to watch and a privilege to applaud.
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Sep 21, 2023
Williams, an Oscar-winning documentary filmmaker, is an expert orchestrator of naturalism. The trouble is that lucha libre, built on glitz, is anything but naturalistic. The self-assured freedom Saúl channels in bed never makes its way into scenes in the ring, which tend to tire when they should dazzle.
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