Through the decades, we’ve seen filmmakers play with the documentary genre. While there are plenty of quality docs that rely on the talking head interviews and archival footage, folks like Alonso Ruizpalacios are going for a much more inventive and bold take on the format, as seen in the new film, “A Cop Movie.”
The trailer for “A Cop Movie” doesn’t showcase your typical documentary. In fact, you’d be hard-pressed to differentiate the footage you’re watching on screen from any other narrative features about police officers. And that’s the beauty of what Ruizpalacios does with his film. “A Cop Movie” showcases one of the most controversial police forces in the world by enlisting two accomplished actors, Mónica Del Carmen and Raúl Briones, to act out police officer roles that are based on real-life accounts from Mexico City. This allows for the filmmaker to take big stylistic swings, which results in one of the most interesting docs you’ll see all year.
In our review of the film from this year’s Berlin Film Festival, we praised “A Cop Movie” (giving it an ‘A’) and pointed out how the filmmaker is making a name for himself in such a short time. “With three films to his name, Ruizpalacios has become a shrewd chronicler of one of the most complicated places on earth,” our critic wrote. “Through his eyes, Mexico City loses the gritty haze with which foreigners have depicted it, as well as the unrealistic gloss that Mexican mainstream media puts on it, and emerges as the complex and paradoxical land that it is. One can only hope he continues to point his sharp gaze beyond the obvious in order to examine not only its history but its quintessential problems.”
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“A Cop Movie” debuts on Netflix and in select theaters on November 5. You can watch the trailer below.
Here’s the synopsis:
A genre-bending documentary that sheds light on one of Mexico and the world’s most controversial institutions, the police force and the causes of the impunity crisis plaguing the justice system.