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Redundant and unnecessary.

It's an amazing and heartbreaking story.

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.

This movie feels like it was made purely to piss off people who want good shows

El Crimen Del Padre Amaro is a movie about corruption in the Catholic Church and the personal struggle of priests between obedience and temptation. Padre Amaro (Gael Garcia Bernal) is a young ambitious priest sent to a small town to work in his first church. Though he has a genuine passion to serve the spiritual needs of the people in his community, he soon discovers that the other priests are immersed in scandal, from breaking celibacy to hiding guerrillas to laundering money from powerful drug lords to controlling the media. It isn't long before he becomes entangled in his own scandal: a love affair with a devout young woman (played by Ana Claudia Talancón) caught up in her own struggle between religious obedience and the temptations of the flesh.This film does an excellent job of capturing the complexity of human emotion. Much of the action takes place within the characters, which is conveyed through excellent acting and careful attention to detail on the part of the director and cameramen. One of the things the director mentioned in the DVD's director commentary was how he tried to capture the glances of actors, along with their facial expressions. Facial expressions were especially informative during the many close-up shots. This created a very intimate and emotional tone.Bernal delivers a compelling performance of deep internal struggle - private, complex, and emotional – between ambition and love, loyalty to the Church and uneasiness with corruption, and how to deal with a variety moral dilemmas. Is laundering money okay if you use it for a good cause? Is guerrilla warfare justified if you are fighting a criminal oppressor? How do you reconcile between duty to the (corrupt) church and devotion to its teachings? When is abortion justified? Ultimately, the real "crime" of Father Amaro is not the obvious breaking of his celibacy. His crime is his loyalty to a corrupt church rather than his own values, continuously running away and hiding from his situation instead of dealing with it, and letting his ambition get in the way of everything else that mattered to him.

Technically speaking, El Crimen del Padre Amaro is a mediocre movie, at best. The soundtrack is repetitive, the acting overdone and the cinematography not much better than the one at your regular Mexican soap opera. But the most impressive thing about this film is, in my view, its unbalancedness and ability to distort the reality.It starts relatively well, grabbing your attention and making you think about the power of certain institutions over poor and isolated communities. "A nice portrayal of alienation", you'd think. Well, you'd be wrong.As the movie evolves, its partiality and hate towards religion in general (and the Catholic Church, in particular) becomes really clear, and what could be a mature, holistic analysis of the role of religion in people's life rapidly becomes an excuse to harshly criticize the Catholic Church, depicting it only as a web of lies and contradictions. We all know those two things are inherent to most religions, but what shouldn't have been forgotten is that they are just parts of a much more complex reality.Overall, the writer/director's reductionist and exaggerated tale of corruption reveals a complete misunderstanding of the Western society and its relationship with religions. Max Weber must be rolling in his grave.

The release of the film THE CRIME OF PADRE AMARO caused about as much of an uproar in Mexico in 2002 as the publication of the novel, written by Jose Maria Eca de Queiroz, caused in 1875. With its dangerously intertwining themes of spiritual ecstasy and sexual passion, it's not hard to see why. At the heart of the story is a young priest who wrestles in a major way with the tempting hungers of his body and the grace-filled yearnings of his spirit. It does not help that, to pursue his vocation, he is sent to a town sustained by a culture of corruption.One thing actor Gael Garcia Bernal does not know how to do is give a bad performance, and in the movie's title role he captures brilliantly all the agonizing ambiguity that comes with being a young adult male intent on asserting his masculinity while also serving the spiritual needs of his community. Unfortunately, his happily deluded demeanor meets with an equally intense personality in the form of Amelia, a devout young devotee acted with mesmerizing perfection by the gorgeous Ana Claudia Talancon. Amelia idolizes the young priest as a true and noble holy man whose sexuality is made sacred by his presumably pure soul. He in turn dares to drape her in a cape reserved for representations of the Madonna and recites to her from Solomon's "Song of Songs" as they seduce each other. Controversial? Better believe it.As in the film THE HEALER (please see companion review) "The Crime of Padre Amaro" depicts sexuality and spirituality as equally powerful forces of attraction capable of producing very different results, which will not be revealed here. The outcome in "The Crime of Padre Amaro" is shocking in more ways than one and well worth contemplating for a long time.by Author-Poet Aberjhani, author of "Christmas When Music Almost Killed the World"

The movie put out a good subject, even if it is an unwanted one. I think the development in the main characters was lacking. The feelings between Padre Amaro and Amelia seemed out of lust, rather than love. Their love wasn't developed enough to be believable and made the rest of the movie less powerful. I read in one review that the movie showed the non church goer (Ruben's character) pure and in search of truth, rather than any of those apart of the church. I thought that was interesting, and maybe true. To balance it out and have a pure character on the church side may have taken away or maybe added to the movie, who knows. All in all i don't think the movie was as strong as it could have been, but is still good to watch.