Julia (Martina Guzman) wakes up, and it's clear things aren't right; there's blood on her hand, bruises on her body. She showers, dresses, goes to school, comes back home ... and realizes just how wrong things are, with a dead man on the floor of her kitchen and another badly-wounded man near death. She's arrested. Taken to prison. The charge is murder. She's alone. She's frightened. She's pregnant. She'll be kept in the special ward for pregnant prisoners or mothers who already have had their children, incarcerated along with them. Julia stands in her cell, in shock and in silence; on the wall behind her, you can see a child has drawn a house in crayon, bright red on the grey cinderblocks.

When a movie's credit sequence is based around endless photographs of a blissful family, it's not hard to guess that the family will be ripped asunder before too long. And if that family is outrageously good-looking, disaster is practically assured. Both are true of Born and Bred, an Argentine film packed full of pain and suffering that nevertheless fails utterly to connect with its audience.

In reality, the most powerful moments of the film are the pre-crisis scenes. While there's nothing inherently interesting about watching a happy family interact in an outrageously adorable manner, or in seeing the man (Santiago, played by Guillermo Pfening) and wife (Martina Gusman as Milli) having great sex (If the perfection of their union was ever in doubt, those simultaneous orgasms cleared things right up.), the fact that we know something awful is about to happen infuses these everyday sequences with a wonderful, itchy tension. On several occasions the entire family is offscreen, communicating through friendly shouts from different parts of their gorgeous home. Suddenly realizing the unnamed horror might be heard and not seen, you're holding your breath in wicked anticipation, both praying everyone will walk safely back into shot, and secretly hoping for the scream of terror or pain that means the wait is at an end.

Director Pablo Trapero's sprawling film Rolling Family, about four, count-em four generations of a squabbling Argentinian family all crammed into an RV for a road trip, is enough to make you nostalgic for that Robin Williams movie. Most of the conventions of storytelling and narrative cohesion have been abandoned in favor of a reality-television style authenticity, dropping us directly into the middle of a boiling lobster pot of family tension, with all the relationship wrinkles and shorthand that you might expect from such a thing. For someone like myself, who enjoys a triple-threat phobia of crowds, family functions and hot, confined spaces, watching the film was like some kind of CIA-honed discomfort that has all the hallmarks of torture, but evades it on technicalities. A certain fluency in Spanish is almost a necessary lubricant when it comes to handling the film's rapid-fire inter-generational squabbling, which starts soon after the opening credits and never stops. Without it, your eyes will be ping-ponging back and forth aggressively, as you struggle to keep track of names and faces while the caravan rolls on.