Fundamentally, Cuarón is a leftist scold who holds these squealing runts up by their tails as a caution about the kind of vermin capitalist society spawns. Finally, Y tu mamá is a dead-end movie because it turns out that the intuitive woman who tries to open the boys up does so only because she knows she's dying of cancer, and after the boys get back to the city we're told that they never saw each other again. But since they're teenagers and the movie is set in the present, doesn't that mean Cuarón is claiming to see the future? Though Cuarón has spoken critically of the Marxist bureaucracy that used to control the Mexican film industry, his Marxist-derivative outlook is as bleak as that of outright Marxists since the fall of the Soviet Empire. The only positive takeaway from Y tu mamá is that the boys would have been better off if they'd had the soul to stay home and join Julio's sister in that protest march.

Prisoner of Azkaban may have inherent imaginative limitations as a romance, but given the intellectual disposition of the director it might have been a lot worse.

You can find this review and a lot besides at The Kitchen Cabinet.

Alan Dale is the author of What We Do Best: American Movie Comedies of the 1990s and Comedy Is a Man in Trouble: Slapstick in American Movies.