Sin Nombre (15)

Already buffed to a shine by film festival acclaim, Cary Fukunaga's debut is a striking, and often quite gruelling, account of survival and flight in poverty-stricken Central America.

It also offers an insight into the Mara Salvatrucha, a gangster brotherhood of tattooed thugs whose initiation rituals alone make the blood run cold. Casper (Edgar Flores), a Mara lieutenant, turns fugitive when he kills a fellow gang member during a robbery of illegal migrants heading north on the roof of a freight train. By doing so he saves the life of Sayra (Paulina Gaitan), a young Honduran travelling with her father in search of a new start in the US. Fukunaga proves very adept in merging his different plotlines – a test of loyalty, a chase, a tentative love story – while never taking his foot off the pedal; his film shares with Amores Perros both a raw energy and an understanding of how cheap life comes in the squalid dens and desperate escape routes of Mexico. Flores and Gaitan are terrific.