Weekend Movie Forecast: Up or Drag Me to Hell

Set in post-genocide Rwanda, Munyurangabo follows two young men as they make their way from Kigali, the Rwandan capital, to the farm where one of the boy's parents live. His guest brings a machete along. A.O. Scott at the Times says the film "allows weighty themes of vengeance, justice and forgiveness to hover around the characters and their actions rather than trying to dramatize them too pointedly. As a result Munyurangabo at times drifts from oblique understatement toward inscrutability and vagueness. But it also conveys a powerful sense of individuality and place, bringing home the sensual and material reality of Rwanda, a country that functions, for many in the West, as a near-abstraction, a synonym for unimaginable cruelty.

Unlike Terry George’s earnestly melodramatic Hotel Rwanda, [director Lee Isaac] Chung’s film, the first narrative feature in the Kinyarwandan language, leaves the violence off screen and in the past. But the enormity of the 1994 massacres — during which at least 800,000 Tutsis and dissident Hutus were killed, many by their own neighbors acting on the orders of the Hutu nationalist government — is if anything underscored by the absence of graphic physical evidence."