"Carancho" (Vulture), Pablo Trapero (2010)

Pablo Trapero came from San Justo, a suburb in the south-west of the Buenos Aires Metropolitan Area.  San Justo is dirty, corrupt and hopeless.  Now it has a new shopping-mall, but it does not appear in "Carancho".  In this movie the only thing that shines on the dark streets is one of the best actors of the world, the incredible Ricardo Darín, playing an ambulance-chaser ex-lawyer working for a shady organization which takes the cases of accident victims, wins them and pockets most of the money extracted from the insurance companies.  All of this, of course, with the full knowledge of the local police and the local hospital authorities.
The movie has some tonal discrepancies, a shift from naturalism to gritty film-noir, and too much despair for my taste, but many scenes are good (even virtuous if predictable; you know what Trapero is doing, and you´re waiting for it as you wait for the serial killer in a horror movie).  It makes for a good time at the cinema, if you can accept a couple of superfluous intimate scenes. The final shot is unwarranted, but Polanski did a lot worse this year, and if an old master can make mistakes, a young filmmaker can be forgiven (3+/5).

 IMDb: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1542852

Make Way For Tomorrow (1937) - Leo McCarey

Amazing film from the Great Depression era, relentlessly dissecting the treatment of old parents by their middle class children in the United States. As Orson Welles put it "it can make a stone cry", indeed.
There is not too much that I can add to the experience of watching this film, but to admire how it takes you from one point of view to another, from understanding the childrens´ motives to despise them. It contains several genial moments, subtle interactions, an acknowledgement of the viewer, some silently spoken lines that are suppossed to be too strong to be heard, and an ending that puts anybody in tears (5/5).