I always thought of John Leguizamo quite highly. Not only was his "House of Buggin'" TV show the Latino predecessor to the David Chapelle Show, but also his work with "Empire" was magnificent. 
His "Cronicas" - an Ecuadorian film - succeeded in impressing me even further.
Twenty minutes after watching the movie I still can't pin point whether or not I "liked" the storyline or not. All I know is that the scenes were so gritty and sensitive that I couldn't erase some of the images from my mind. The most delicate scene was that of the lynching in the beginning of the movie. The look of fear on the face of the victim as the angry crowd doused him in gasoline. The look of sheer terror when they picked him up off of the floor and set him on fire again but this time tied up so that he couldn't roll around.
The gritty walls. The school children playing in the mud. The wobbly wooden houses on stilts. The man who covered himself with his own shit so that nobody would try to kill him in prison. The shaky camera. Magnificent. Latin American media, prison, the parallels of a poverty-stricken Ecuadorian village and a Miami-ized Spanglish-speaking Latino (Leguizamo,) and the lack of law were a number of central themes.
Check it out. "That's fucked up," you'll be thinking as you try to go to sleep. Peep the English-language website here and download the torrent here.
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