Curator Watchlist
A devastating, unsentimental portrait of poverty, juvenile violence, and moral collapse, made sharper by Buñuel’s surreal touches and refusal to romanticize hardship. It’s brutal, influential, and still feels disturbingly current.
Where to watch: Buy
Sat · 1h 22m
Director: Luis Buñuel
Starring: Estela Inda, Miguel Inclán, Alfonso Mejía
A group of juvenile delinquents live a violent life in the infamous slums of Mexico City; among them Pedro, whose morality is gradually corrupted and destroyed by the others.
Luis Buñuel
Estela Inda, Miguel Inclán, Alfonso Mejía
A devastating, unsentimental portrait of poverty, juvenile violence, and moral collapse, made sharper by Buñuel’s surreal touches and refusal to romanticize hardship. It’s brutal, influential, and still feels disturbingly current.
Buñuel turns a story of delinquent boys into something colder and more unsettling than a standard crime drama. The film is rooted in the material reality of poverty, but it never settles into simple realism; dream imagery, cruel ironies, and sudden shocks keep the world unstable and morally poisoned.
What makes it endure is its refusal to sentimentalize the children or the institutions around them. There is no easy innocence here, only damage passing from one generation to the next, and a city that seems to have abandoned its own future.
It’s a harsh watch, but a major one: formally precise, emotionally brutal, and still startlingly modern in the way it links social neglect to violence. If you can meet it on its own uncompromising terms, it’s one of the essential films of postwar cinema.
laird (5★) · 954 likes
I read a 1950s horror comic last month in which a mad scientist kidnaps two starry-eyed youths who are madly in love and locks them in a cage without food or water as part of a sadistic experiment which he proposes will prove that the bonds of love will easily crumble once the two begin to starve and their primitive animal instincts take over. Luis Buñuel wasn't so sadistic, but he certainly shared this scientist's (and Freud's) view that men
Edgar Cochran ✝️🍋 (5★) · 408 likes
***One of the best 150 films I have ever seen.*** SPANISH REVIEW: Luis Buñuel es otro de mis directores gigantes del cine, y estoy orgulloso de presentarles la primera mejor película de su entera filmografía, la cual está considerada también como una de las mejores películas mexicanas de todos los tiempos por una versión de la revista "SOMOS" publicada en 1994, ocupando el segundo puesto justo después de ¡Vámonos con Pancho Villa! (1936), de Fernando de Fuentes. A pesar de… more
Ethan Colburn (4★) · 393 likes
Buñuel slays it! This movie is a pretty uncomfortable watch as it’s a brutal look at poverty in 50s Mexico. It follows a gang of kids navigating a life of crime both to survive and often just generally being assholes to hopeless people. This along with the animal cruelty and the implied rape make it visceral but difficult to deny the power of. It’s spectacular in its scope and weight, reminding me most closely of City of God. It feels… more
basty2049 (4.5★) · 361 likes
De las representaciones mas fieles y desgarradoras de la juventud en situaciones precarias. una tragedia totalmente atemporal y actual, a pesar de haber sido estrenada hace más de 70 años. 9 pesos de 10
noen (5★) · 351 likes
What a magnificent, raw, and realistic work about problems so many choose to ignore. An urban narrative stripped of sweetness and euphemism, one that tears apart the romanticized idealizations of a society that refuses to look at its own abandoned children, at the open wounds scattered through the alleys and sidewalks of the city. The work penetrates, without concessions, the marginalized world of youth in poverty, exposing with brutal honesty the failure of the social, familial, and institutional structures that
Another landmark of postwar hardship and social despair, with a similarly unsparing look at poverty and dignity.
A brutal, street-level portrait of abandoned youth and criminal survival that echoes the film’s emotional devastation.
Fast-moving but equally harsh, it tracks children pulled into violence by environment and circumstance.
A classic youth film that, while gentler in tone, shares the focus on neglected childhood and institutional failure.
A devastating study of social invisibility and human dignity under pressure, with a similar postwar ache.
For viewers who want a crime film with fatalism, pressure, and a sense of lives trapped by circumstance.
A dark, morally corrosive noir about desire, manipulation, and self-destruction.
An urban crime film that treats the city as a living system of pressure and exposure.
Another Buñuel film that mixes cruelty, irony, and social critique with unforgettable images.
Buñuel’s austere moral vision continues here, with compassion colliding against social reality.
Not a crime film, but it shares the emotional severity and postwar humanism that make the tragedy resonate.
A stylized, nightmarish American film where innocence is threatened by a world of predation and fear.
poverty, juvenile delinquency, moral corruption, urban neglect, social realism, surrealism, violence, fatalism
social realism, crime drama, bleak, postwar cinema, urban poverty, juvenile delinquency, surrealist touches, moral decay, tragic, black-and-white