Alejandra Martinez

Austin, Bern

award-winning tejana writer & cat mom | @AustinChronicle @latinamediaco @DreadCentral @letterboxd @TheWrap @ebertvoices @awards_watch y mas | @ATXFilmCritics🤠

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Articles

SXSW Film Review: Descendent

1 month ago | austinchronicle.com | Alejandra Martinez |Alejandra Martinez

From the bodily to the existential, the horrors of parenthood are apparent and well-explored across the horror landscape. Sean Brunner (Ross Marquand) is a soon-to-be father with a lot on his mind. Orphaned at a young age, due to his mother dying in childbirth and his father taking his own life a few years after, Sean is understandably anxious about what’s to come.
SXSW Film Review: Assembly

1 month ago | austinchronicle.com | Alejandra Martinez |Alejandra Martinez

Doc suggests AI & art work together as agents of resistance Rashaad Newsome’s art exists in a space that plays with surrealism, futurism, and resistance. The multidisciplinary artist has created video works, collage, and sculpture, but in Assembly, we follow Newsome as he prepares for an ambitious exhibit of the same name that controversially incorporates artificial intelligence.
SXSW Film Review: Good Boy

1 month ago | austinchronicle.com | Alejandra Martinez |Alejandra Martinez

It’s a moment that’s universal to all pet owners: the way an empty corner or blank wall can grab your furry friend’s attention. The mind races at what could be happening there. Good Boy takes the idea and runs with it, creating a charming twist on the haunted house film. In Good Boy, we meet Indy (playing himself) and see the world through his eyes.
SXSW Film Review: Sweetness

1 month ago | austinchronicle.com | Alejandra Martinez |Alejandra Martinez

There is a fragile vulnerability to being a teenage music fan. Often, music can reach into the spaces where others can’t tread in one’s adolescence. In Emma Higgins’ debut thriller, Sweetness, one teenage girl’s hero worship of a pop star turns into something deadlier. Sixteen-year-old Rylee (Kate Hallett) is a familiar face in the teenage cinematic canon: lonely and frustrated with the world, sulking through her life and looking for her place in the world.
‎‘Mickey 17’ review by Alejandra Martinez • Letterboxd

1 month ago | letterboxd.com | Alejandra Martinez

★★★★ i've had some time to sit with this, and the more i think about it, the more i realize how romantic it is.
‎‘The Annihilation of Fish’ review by Alejandra Martinez • Letterboxd

2 months ago | letterboxd.com | Alejandra Martinez

Letterboxd is an independent service created by a small team, and we rely mostly on the support of our members to maintain our site and apps. Please consider upgrading to a Pro account—for less than a couple bucks a month, you’ll get cool additional features like all-time and annual stats pages (example), the ability to select (and filter by) your favorite streaming services, and no ads!
“Endless Cookie” Portrays Indigenous Life as Vibrant Chaos

2 months ago | latinamedia.co | Alejandra Martinez |Alejandra Martinez |Denise Zubizarreta

Life is rarely neat. It’s full of joyful chatter, stories shared over couches and dinner tables, painful moments, and the love that holds us all together despite it all. Endless Cookie is a Sundance documentary by Canadian filmmakers and half-brothers Pete and Seth Scriver that proves that point. It stands apart from other documentaries in its bold animated style and its commitment to an almost stream-of-consciousness narrative.
In "Mad Bills to Pay: (or Destiny, dile que no soy malo)," Machismo Belies A Wounded Heart

2 months ago | latinamedia.co | Alejandra Martinez |Alejandra Martinez |Denise Zubizarreta |Cristina Escobar

How do young men deal with the ground beneath their feet opening up – with their world changing? Those are the well-defined and deeply felt stakes in Sundance’s Mad Bills to Pay: (or Destiny, dile que no soy malo). It’s an intimate coming-of-age film that follows Rico (Juan Collado), a 19-year-old who’s in over his head when his pregnant 16-year-old girlfriend, Destiny (Destiny Checo), comes to stay with his mom and sister over the summer.
‎‘Nickel Boys’ review by Alejandra Martinez • Letterboxd

Dec 2, 2024 | letterboxd.com | Alejandra Martinez

★★★★★ it's truly a gift to have a film this radical, this empathetic, and this boundary-pushing exist.
Letter from the Editor on the Day After the Election

Nov 6, 2024 | latinamedia.co | Cristina Escobar |Alejandra Martinez |Alejandra Martinez

I watched the election coverage. I’d hoped for a joyous night, expecting a nail-biter. But it was clear early on we were going somewhere darker. I didn’t watch for much longer. I tried to sleep, waking up periodically to check my phone. Each update worse than the last, until we got to here, the day after the election. This morning, to say I felt a swirl of emotions would be an understatement. In therapy, I learned to start by naming what I feel: despair, anger, fear.