Everything Else

Academy Award–nominated actress Adriana Barraza (Amores perros, Babel, Blue Beetle) stars as a lifelong bureaucrat in Mexico City whose daily routines of order, specificity, and denial are tracked with Jeanne Dielman–like focus in this narrative feature by longtime documentarian Natalia Almada. As a woman who has exiled herself within the world, scarred by a tragedy years ago, Barraza gives a hypnotic, haunting performance. Even within this heroine’s withdrawn life, violence is never far from the soundtrack. “Almada has a documentarian’s eye for how truth reveals itself in seemingly nondescript details” (48 Hills).