Review: Embrace of the Serpent, 2016, dir. Ciro Guerra

This year, the race for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Picture might have been the most easily predicted outside of Best Animated Feature; even if you only knew of Son of Saul through pop culture osmosis, it’s likely that you were pretty sure the Academy voters were going to give it the top prize in its category. Sort of a no-brainer. But that doesn’t mean the other nominees aren’t worth watching! Case in point: Ciro Guerra’s Embrace of the Serpent, an imperfect film that is nonetheless pretty damn good in spite of its imperfections. Maybe he needed to rein in his movie’s trippy qualities. Maybe he needed another fifteen minutes to tie the whole thing together. Maybe it doesn’t matter, because it’s a gorgeous and keenly acted joint about how fucking awful white people are (according to history). I committed some ink to it at Birth. Movies. Death., and I think you should go and see what I had to say in full over there.