Perhaps too much so, even for a narrative built on an instant connection: Writer-director Aitch Alberto shoves them together so insistently that we’re barely allowed to get to know them as individuals first, or to savor the heady process by which interest becomes fondness becomes something like profound, lasting love. The bond they form is intense and immediate.

Where Ari is angst and self-doubt, Dante, the son of a relatively well-to-do academic couple (Kevin Alejandro and Eva Longoria), is all sweetness and light - a veritable manic pixie dream boy, down to his cutesy habit of going barefoot whenever possible. Aristotle is a working-class loner simmering with a quiet rage and resentment he himself doesn’t entirely understand, which we learn because he basically describes himself as such in the overlong opening voiceover.īored one stifling summer day, he goes for a dip in the community pool and surfaces to find newcomer Dante (Reese Gonzalez) peering down at him, looking positively angelic in the sunlight. Venue: Toronto International Film Festival (Discovery)Ĭast: Max Pelayo, Reese Gonzales, Eugenio Derbez, Eva Longoria, Veronica Falcón, Kevin Alejandroīased on the acclaimed YA bestseller by Benjamin Alire Sáenz, the drama centers on two Mexican American teenagers in late-’80s El Paso. It tells when it could show, shouts when it could whisper, underlines its own themes in blunt lines of dialogue - and in its rush to explain itself, Aristotle and Dante denies us too much of the thrill of getting to unlock its sweet pleasures for ourselves. Because while Aristotle might prefer to keep himself bottled up, Aristotle and Dante, from its opening moments, is a film so anxious to be understood that it can’t seem to stop getting in its own way.

When he finally reveals himself, it comes as a hard-won moment of catharsis, a cool rain piercing through after days of unsettling heat. For most of the 90-plus-minute run time, he hems and haws, as terrified of being seen as he is of going ignored. It takes Aristotle (Max Pelayo) almost the entirety of Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe to express how he really feels.

Aristotle and dante series