Alikasan This movie is not only badly acted by everyone, specially John Leguizamo, who appears lost in this movie. The script is so negative, with none of the main characters having any redeeming qualities; they are all as dis-likable as the main character. A pedophile child killer, who's always on camera looking as though he's orgasmic, makes the film always uncomfortable to watch. The reporters are exaggerated cartoon-like characters, ramming the message down our throats that the only care for ratings and fame and not the people involved, so many times, that it becomes an insult to anyone's intelligence. The lack of subtlety in this movie is rampant. Don't waste your time with this trash of a movie; anyone with this outlook should not be encouraged to ever make another film.

leilapostgrad Remind me never to be a journalist in South America. Not only are you putting your physical well being in danger, but the psychological trauma must be unbearable! John Leguizamo gives the strongest performance of his career as Manolo Bonilla, a Miami journalist who goes to Ecuador to investigate a serial killer called "The Monster" who has raped and murdered over a hundred children.Cronicas opens with the funeral for three of the latest victims. When a child runs into the street and is hit by a car, the driver of that car, named Vinicio, is attacked by a mob that beats him, douses him in gasoline, and sets him on fire. All the while, Manolo is filming every second of the attack, but he eventually intervenes and saves the man's life.Vinicio is sent to prison where he covers himself in his own excrement to keep from being attacked by other inmates. Manolo offers to help Vinicio get out of prison if he gives him information about "The Monster." Through the power of the media and the sway of public opinion, Vinicio is set free. But has justice actually been served, or has this reporter helped to free a vicious serial killer? Cronicas is dark, twisted, and positively rife with dramatic irony… the kind that makes you want to scream at the screen, "Noooooooooooooo!!!!!!" But the actors never listen, do they?

noralee "Crónicas" is an updated, Latinization of Billy Wilder's cynical 1951 film "Ace in the Hole (The Big Carnival)," where a tabloid reporter selfishly manipulated an emotional story of a trapped miner.Where films like "Medium Cool" and "The China Syndrome" showed reporters as heroes getting radicalized by the stories they are covering, writer/director Sebastián Cordero effectively creates a hot, grimy, gritty environment for an ethically-challenged tabloid TV reporter who gets too mired in a serial murder investigation in the slums of Equador that recalls the hysteria and circus around the Atlanta child killings.The irony of the power of today's ubiquitous media is shown to searing effect, including the power to manipulate it for personal purposes by all sides. The cat and mouse negotiations between the reporter and a questionable source (the enthralling Damián Alcázar) are as tense as those in "The Silence of the Lambs," and in an ugly environs that we can practically smell through the screen.John Leguizamo is completely believable as a swaggering, self-promoting celebrity TV reporter for a popular show covering scandals across the southern hemisphere, flitting from his Miami base to drug lord hostages in Columbia to salacious murders, in and out of English. We are alternately sympathetic to his efforts and his bouts of conscience, then repelled by him.He is flanked by somewhat stereotypes of a lanky, battle-hardened cameraman who eagerly focuses on close-ups of violence and gore and an ambitious woman producer who plunges into research and infidelity with equal verve, who utilize the most shiny, high tech communications gear to capitalize on their tunneling through the muck of human nature, though even they finally reach their ethical boundaries.The focus is kept tightly on the reporter's responsibilities, as the producer comments ruefully: "We got the only honest cop in Latin America." The script and the camera certainly play with us, in edits of slowly revealed information that change our impressions of the facts, and as the reporter tensely tries to both get a scoop and do as much of the right thing as his ambitions allow.As an intelligent thriller, this film certainly puts a brutal spin on the issue of a reporter protecting his sources, even as the worst of the implications happens off camera.The background song selections fit the mood, though I have some feeling that the Spanish lyrics had significance.The English subtitles had some errors.

bastetg4 It's hard to rate a movie that you find intensely disturbing and a bit nauseating. I saw this at the Philadelphia Film Festival, and the friend who saw it with me was equally disturbed - we both wanted to give it a rating of F***ed Up. Then again, if you spend the next two hours talking about how much a movie bothered you, that means it was well acted and directed, right? The reporter (Leguizamo) crosses the boundaries of morality and goes too far in pursuit of his story, and the movie ends on a very unsatisfactory note. Still, the bad guy is very good at being a psychopath, and the reporter and his crew are very good at being morally bankrupt. See Cronicas, but brace yourself for unpleasant subject matter.