Pizza, Beer, and Cigarettes

In Buenos Aires several young men work for a taxi driver; he picks up fares and they rob them and split the take. The share always comes up short. They decide to work on their own. They try it in the street, on a bus, in a restaurant and at a nightclub. None of it brings the money expected. The girl among them is pregnant and near her time; she wants to leave the country and that takes money. They plan one last job. Bruno Stagnaro and Adrián Caetano direct. It is an Argentine production. The film is counted among the first examples of the new wave that appeared in Argentine cinema at the end of the nineties. It was made on a very low budget and largely in real locations; some of the cast are not professionals. The language it uses is street speech; the film corrects it nowhere and requires subtitles. The matter it treats is economic collapse; the narrative shows the unemployment of the Argentina of that period directly. The characters are incompetent and the narrative does not romanticise them; every plan fails. The ending is hard and unprepared; the narrative offers no way out. Who it is for: viewers who like Latin American independent cinema and realist crime narratives. Who it is not for: the technical quality is crude, the language difficult, and the ending without hope.