Review of Tommy Guns

Tommy Guns/Nacao Valente is not your run-of-the-mill Saturday movie that might be viewed in terms of what we think we know about film making and storytelling. In all truth, it is a formally radical and sometimes even experimental film in its unique way of employing the viewer's reasoning (and what the viewer knows about genre cinema and its allegories) as a tool to lead them to question themselves and the nature of military cruelty across cultures and generations. In that sense, I had never seen a film that exposed my own prejudices, much less one that was so free of false moralism or the need to satisfy the audience. Nacao Valente risks the opposite: it risks disappointing the audience by suggesting different genre tropes that it will never pursue, it risks confusing the audience by changing the protagonist (and a lot more) half an hour into the film, it risks by mischievously flirting with the political standpoint it ends up condemning, it risks by placing itself for the longest time in the oppressor's point of view, it risks by opening a historical context to a universal vision.

But boy, does the film satisfy! Kudos to Kino Lorber for bringing us this brave gem of auteur cinema which introduces Carlos Conceicao to us as a new name to watch out for. Mandatory viewing for all film lovers!