The Girl (2013)

Absolutely the worst movie.

If the ambition is to provide two hours of instantly forgettable, popcorn-munching escapism, it succeeds.

Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

This movie is all about Abbie Cornish performance ! She delivered Oscar like performance in the movie. She portrays several expressions - Guilt for being bad mother to her son, Stress due to the poverty, circumstances. He has brilliantly expressed the pain and suppressed anger she is going through in her life. Finally comes a situation where she becomes indirectly responsible for a young Mexican child girl to loose her mother. The movie reminds us how we all belong to same humanity and how circumstances changes us. Abbbi redeems herself by showing compassion to the young girl!

Ashley (Abbie Cornish) is a poor Texan mother who loses custody of her son after a drunk driving incident. She desperately wants her son back from foster care. Her father Tommy (Will Patton) lives on the Mexican side of Loredo. She discovers that he traffics illegals over the border. While over in Mexico, she tries to organize a crossing for $500 per person. However the group gets swept away. She's left with a little girl whose mother drowned. Her father's advise is to simply walk away.Director/writer David Riker's story is a simplified idea culminating in what exactly Ashley will do with the girl. The movie depends mostly on Abbie Cornish's performance. She's very stone-faced in most of this movie. I see the frustrated 'stressed' woman that she's portraying. It's a very subtle performance although a few additional animated scenes would be great. The combative little girl is done well.

Watching this movie by myself, I heard my own voice saying "oh my god", is not that I am religious or so but that is the kind of emotion that this film gives. It makes you feel and think, how irrelevant is the color of your skin or the place where you were born; it gives us a reminder about the consequences of our everyday acts. And unless you are a privileged individual who never has experience the partial or total loss of someone you love, then this movie will mean nothing to you, otherwise you will feel angriness, sadness and despair because of the convincing and compelling performances and situation of this young mother and this little girl. Less manipulative than "la misma luna" "Under the Same Moon" (2007), don't misunderstand me, I loved that movie, but "The girl" is a more tragic experience, in a different level than "A Better Life" (2011) One line that stuck with me was: "Just drop her at the corner and don't look back" How hard can that be on real life? What would you do? "The Girl" is one of the reasons I watch movies from all over the world and this one is very close to home, my first language is Spanish. Certainly I did not have idea of whom Maritza Santiago Hernandez is but after this movie I can say that, she has a talent that deserves to be recognized and appreciated and Abbie Cornish gets redemption after the awful "Sucker Punch", she does an incredible job and she could have fool me into believing that she has been speaking Spanish her whole life! Cinephiles get ready for this one!

I was expecting "The Girl" to be mired in the stereotypical contrast of poverty-stricken Mexico vs. the wealthy United States with the protagonist Ashley (Abbie Cornish) coming to make a living off the misery of others, in a manner similar to that of a drug-dealer.My low expectations were thankfully confounded. Instead I was pulled into the evolution of the protagonist as she gets too close to the people who want to cross the border to be an effectual cold-hearted "coyote".Abbie Cornish's portrayal of a poor, white woman bred on low-grade racism is totally credible. But this is only a starting point for her character, as she travels on an emotional journey in Mexico which comes to mirror her life in Texas, but allows her to become something more than she was.