REVIEW: “NO” (dir. Pablo Larraín)
GRADE: B+
Review by: Stephanie Zacharek
One of the great pleasures of regular moviegoing is watching young filmmakers gather steam, and strength, with each project. “No” is the fourth film by young Chilean filmmaker Pablo Larraín, and it’s the third of his films to be set in the era of dictator Augusto Pinochet. It’s also his most assured picture, a confident step forward that’s both energizing and entertaining.
Larraín was born in 1976, in the early years of Pinochet, and he has freely admitted that his upbringing was relatively comfortable. (His parents are both politicians — he has referred to his father, Hernán Larraín, as a senator from “the right.”) So if Larraín isn’t working from personal experience, he may be doing something even better: Drawing on a national and cultural imagination, and a set of shared experiences, to give outsiders a sense of what it was like to live through that troubled era.
