Quinceanera

This Sundance prizewinner may come on like an East Los Angeles knock-off of My Big Fat Greek Wedding and Tortilla Soup, but filmmakers Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland cite Shelagh Delaney’s A Taste of Honey from the 1960s as their prime inspiration. Teen pregnancy, gay pride and the collision of Mexican-American tradition with contemporary consumer culture are the prime topics in this low-budget feel-good charmer that opens with one 15-year-old’s formal coming-of-age celebration, a quinceañera, in LA’s Echo Park, and closes with that of another, a year later. Studious Angeleno location shots add considerably to a perky comedy of cultural crossfire, and there is a glowing good-naturedness in several of the key performances—Emily Rios as the pregnant teen Magdelena, J. R. Cruz as her earnest but baffled beau, Jesse Garcia as her unabashedly gay cousin Carlos and old-timer Chalo Gonzalez as Uncle Tomas, who serves as genial grandfatherly savant to several of the younger characters.