The biggest problem with this movie is it’s a little better than you think it might be, which somehow makes it worse. As in, it takes itself a bit too seriously, which makes most of the movie feel kind of dull.

I didn’t really have many expectations going into the movie (good or bad), but I actually really enjoyed it. I really liked the characters and the banter between them.

All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

The film may be flawed, but its message is not.

One of the ideas behind communism was that the genders were supposed to be equal. Tomás Gutiérrez Alea's "Hasta cierto punto" ("Up to a Certain Point" in English) looks at how far that was coming in Cuba. The movie focuses on a theater director who falls for a female dockworker, but his machismo complicates their relationship. The main point that I derived from the movie is that ingrained cultural values can't get legislated away. Much like how anti-discrimination laws won't wipe out racism, the institutionalized gender equality that came about in Cuba after the revolution didn't abolish men's macho attitudes towards women. Can these things EVER get fixed?! Anyway, it's a good movie. Gutiérrez Alea, known as Titón to his friends, was representative of the 1960s-1970s movement known as New Latin American Cinema. He later directed "Strawberry and Chocolate" (the first Cuban movie to deal with homosexuality).