Review: Under The Same Moon

Carlitos (Adrian Alonso) rendezvous with his mother Rosario (Kate del Castillo) by phone at 10am on Sunday morning. She works as a maid in Los Angeles. He lives with his grandmother in Mexico, and works in the office of a woman who smuggles Mexicans into the U.S. Rosario forbid her to ever let Carlitos make the dangerous trek she took for four years to support him. When his grandmother dies, the nine-year-old boy heads north on his own. Director Patricia Riggen and writer Ligiah Villalobos tell a likeable saga of a resourceful lad. The film tracks an overly eventful week between one Sunday morning and the next. Riggen and Villalobos are alert to immigration issues without the didactic italics John Sayles uses. One character, though, offers this tutorial to prepare for a citizenship exam: U.S. history is screwing the Indians, then the slaves and now the Mexicans. Riggen uses a digital moon to illustrate the title motif, though it looms unnaturally large enough to portend a planetary impact scenario. Another slip into overdone legibility is drawing a parallel between the “Walking Person” icon in a street crossing sign and the “Running Family” silhouette that John Hood designed in 1990 for California highway signs. With Eugenio Derbez, Maya Zapata, Carmen Salinas, Maria Rojo, Mario Almada, America Ferrera and Los Tigres Del Norte. 109m. (Bill Stamets)