Occasional tedium has always been a downside of director John Sayles' generally admirable work, but it envelops this Spanish-language film almost entirely. Newly widowed Dr Fuentes (Federico Lippi) decides to go in search of the students he trained to work in the outlying jungle villages of an unnamed Central American country. In the plot's unvarying progression, he finds they have been driven out or more generally executed by the warring army and guerilla forces, both of whom burn villages to the ground. This all goes on for over two hours, until the elderly hero heads for an inaccessible village on top of a mountain, to which the last student doctor, a woman, may have fled. Quite why an elderly man with a dicky heart would ever take a mountain holiday, let alone climb to the top of one, is, alas, the least of this tiresome film's problems.


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