Meet the Critic: Alejandro Riera
In the Chicago Critics Film Festival’s new “Meet the Critic” series, we’re introducing our readers to some of the many talented members of our Chicago-area print, online and broadcast critics group, which celebrates the art of film and film criticism.
In today’s feature, meet Alejandro Riera, a Chicago-based film critic and publicist who has worked with the Chicago International Film Festival, the Chicago Latino Film Festival and the Gene Siskel Film Center's Panorama Latinx initiative. A Chicago Film Critics Association Board Member and Communications and Press Manager for the Chicago Latino Film Festival, Alejandro has a knack for spotting great stories and trends and identifying the talent needed to bring those stories to life.
As a writer, he has interviewed major arts and entertainment personalities like Mexican filmmakers Guillermo del Toro and Alfonso Cuarón, Colombian singer Shakira, and best-selling Spanish author Arturo Pérez-Reverte. Ajenadro has also written in-depth feature stories and very opinionated movie, music and theater reviews in both English and Spanish. He thrives in team-driven, deadline-intensive environments and can leverage his skills across a wide variety of platforms: print, TV and radio (as an on-air subject matter expert), and digital.
Read his answers to our inaugural Meet the Critic Q&A below.
How has being based in Chicago informed your criticism?
Time to toot my own horn! When my now wife and myself moved to Chicago in 1988, none of the Spanish-language outlets in Chicago published or broadcast any Spanish-language reviews of any art form whatsoever. No theater reviews, no book reviews, no TV reviews, no concert reviews, no film reviews… you get the picture.
So, when I was hired to be the full time entertainment reporter/film critic for the Chicago Tribune's much missed Spanish-language weekly ¡Exito! in 1993, I took it up myself to change all that. It wasn't easy; got tons of pushback from editors, concert promoters, even ad agencies who specialized in the Hispanic market who hated the idea of their shows being reviewed, so used were they to reporters writing glowing pieces about their events in the city.
The harder those forces pushed, the more uncompromising I became. Latino readers deserved to be introduced to films, plays, musicians and shows that were worthy of their attention, that they may not know about. They also deserved to be part of the general arts conversation, to know that there are other options than the ones offered by the Spanish-language equivalent of mainstream media. So, yes, the need to fill an informational, and critical void, in a community that was for so long taken for granted, in a city the size of Chicago, influenced my approach to criticism. It doesn't hurt that Chicago has so many moviegoing options, either!
What’s a title from our line-up that you’re excited for people to see? (or a title that the festival has programmed in the past that you’ve loved)
I'll go with an oldie but a goodie, partly because while everybody is rightly focused on this year's offerings I want to celebrate this festival's accomplishments (which are many, including how quickly it has positioned itself as one of the city's key film festivals) and shine a brighter spotlight on films that still deserve attention.
Alejandro Landes' haunting, brutal and disturbing MONOS (shown during the 7th edition of the Festival, the year before the pandemic shut it down)—the story of an American engineer Julianne Nicholson held hostage by a group of child soldiers somewhere in what we presume to be high in the mountains of Colombia—still lingers in my mind. Each, boys and girls, vie to be the alpha in the group, even though their lives and sexual relationships are controlled by their drill sergeant. Its narrative follows the path of a river, from the top of the mountain downhill, its flow a reflection of the shifting dynamics of this group of half scared/half feral teens and their hostage. One of the key Latin American films of the 21st century.
What’s a piece that you’ve written that you’re most proud of and why?
Yikes. Tough one. I wrote over 3,000 pieces for ¡Exito! (I pretty much did the job of the entire features department of a major metropolitan daily for ten years before ¡Exito! transitioned into Hoy in 2003), so it would take me a while to dig through those yellowing clippings to pull one. So, let me choose something of more recent vintage: a piece I wrote for the now defunct online magazine Mano Magazine titled “Los Olvidados del Cine Latino” (I deliberately titled it in Spanish; wanted to tip my hat to Buñuel, who I feel is, like Bergman, no longer part of our cinephile conversations).
I was tasked to write about Latino films for a Hispanic Heritage Month special and I pretty much decided to avoid writing the same old “Best Latino films of…” that you see everywhere featuring the same tired Latin American and U.S. Latino films, and focus instead on films like John Sayles' Men with Guns, Hector Babenco's Carandiru and Pablo Trapero's Mundo Grua that I strongly believe have been forgotten. Alas, not only is the magazine defunct but another entity in England purchased the website's name so none of my pieces (and I wrote a lot) are available online. Time to bring some of those reviews and essays back through my Substack account.
Follow Alejandro on Letterboxd and X.