Watch Now
Where To Watch
| Buy on |
|
| Stream On |
|
| Stream On |
|
Critic Reviews
- Critic score
- Publication
- By date
-
The Trade, a five-part series from Showtime and “Cartel Land” filmmaker Matthew Heineman doesn’t purport to be a corrective or some magic key to unlocking the problem. But as a means for empathy and a way to understanding the human cost at each step of an international heroin trade, it does far more than hollow words and shallow promises.
-
There may not be a more effective way to understand the sinister pervasiveness of this crisis and the destruction it is wreaking in the United States and Mexico than to spend time with the different kinds of people it's holding in its net, in addition to the people trying to destroy it and a few of the millions caught up within it. None of this makes The Trade easy to watch, but it is transfixing.
-
An unnervingly close-up study of the conflict. Given an astonishing level of access to both Mexican drug lords and American junkies, he's intercut their stories with a narrative about an Ohio police narcotics squad, which though far more ordinary, is still revealing.
-
The Trade is a reminder that the people who are caught up in this world are only human; it encourages empathy. Much of what is most affecting in The Trade are the small human details--a Christmas tree in a drug dealer's house, the childhood pictures on a refrigerator door of a son or daughter lost to dope, a police detective rubbing the neck of a frustrated partner. The film is in letter-boxed widescreen for maximum cinematic effect--the photography is handsome without making things too pretty.
-
This isn't a documentary that has occasional exciting patches. It's a thriller that occasionally does the wonky work of a documentary. It's an episode of Narcos only it's apparently real and chances are good you'll appreciate all of these glimpses into a clandestine and personal world we're not supposed to be seeing without getting hung up on how we came to be seeing it.
User score distribution:
-
Positive: 8 out of 13
-
Mixed: 3 out of 13
-
Negative: 2 out of 13
-
Mar 15, 2018