When you’re a film lover–and see as many movies as we programmers do in any given year–there’s nothing quite as exciting as coming upon an enormous new talent. Alonso Ruizpalacios is just such a filmmaker, and his virtuosity practically crackles from the screen in this beautifully shot feature debut. When teenage troublemaker Tomás is sent to Mexico City to live with his older brother – a student paralyzed with inertia during university strikes—he becomes the catalyst for the boys’ sprawling ride through the urban landscape to find a beloved aging folksinger. The film serves up comic doses of Buñuel, Jarmusch, and the French New Wave, but its cinematic vision—one photographed in gorgeous black and white—is entirely Ruizpalacios’s, and deeply Mexican. –JBFC Programmer Kathy Bonomi