Gael Garcia Bernal was Che Guevara in The Motorcycle Diaries and is just as good as Father Amaro, a Catholic priest filled with doubt about his life's meaning. The good father is sent by a bishop to a small parish where a Father Benito is having a well known affair with a woman with a restaurant in their village. Benito is building a hospital for the poor with money from a drug dealer. Another priest, Padre Natalio is under investigation for his support of left wing revolutionaries. Father Benito's mistress's daughter, Amelia, teaches religion to children. She is only 16 years old and engaged to be married to Ruben who is an atheist while she is a firm believer. Amelia goes to confession to Father Amaro and asks him about love and sin and the man of the cloth soon has impure thoughts about the beautiful teenage girl. Her fiancé Ruben is a journalist and he writes about the corruption, including money laundering involving Father Benito and he is fired by the newspaper due to pressure from the powerful church influence. Amelia breaks off the engagement and begins a sexual relationship with Father Amaro. The moral dilemma is not resolved with a polyannish, everyone living happily ever after nonsense, but with an extremely realistic and heart breaking ending which will remain with you for a long time. The Crime of Father Amaro is a brave and challenging film.

El Crimen Del Padre Amaro is a movie about corruption in the Catholic Church and the personal struggle of priests between obedience and temptation. Padre Amaro (Gael Garcia Bernal) is a young ambitious priest sent to a small town to work in his first church. Though he has a genuine passion to serve the spiritual needs of the people in his community, he soon discovers that the other priests are immersed in scandal, from breaking celibacy to hiding guerrillas to laundering money from powerful drug lords to controlling the media. It isn't long before he becomes entangled in his own scandal: a love affair with a devout young woman (played by Ana Claudia Talancón) caught up in her own struggle between religious obedience and the temptations of the flesh.This film does an excellent job of capturing the complexity of human emotion. Much of the action takes place within the characters, which is conveyed through excellent acting and careful attention to detail on the part of the director and cameramen. One of the things the director mentioned in the DVD's director commentary was how he tried to capture the glances of actors, along with their facial expressions. Facial expressions were especially informative during the many close-up shots. This created a very intimate and emotional tone.Bernal delivers a compelling performance of deep internal struggle - private, complex, and emotional – between ambition and love, loyalty to the Church and uneasiness with corruption, and how to deal with a variety moral dilemmas. Is laundering money okay if you use it for a good cause? Is guerrilla warfare justified if you are fighting a criminal oppressor? How do you reconcile between duty to the (corrupt) church and devotion to its teachings? When is abortion justified? Ultimately, the real "crime" of Father Amaro is not the obvious breaking of his celibacy. His crime is his loyalty to a corrupt church rather than his own values, continuously running away and hiding from his situation instead of dealing with it, and letting his ambition get in the way of everything else that mattered to him.

I enjoyed this movie, not because it was gripping or exciting, but because of what it had to say.I'm not completely aware of everything to do with the Catholic Church, but the controversy in this movie is a necessary one.I've never seen a Gael Garcia movie before and I thought this was good. The most powerful part of the movie is what it leaves you with - the message at the end; the themes of confession, of sin, of mistakes, of being human.If you can't watch something that is quite slow and is not edge of the seat stuff, then forget it. Even the music isn't very memorable. But the movie stuck in my mind.

The movie put out a good subject, even if it is an unwanted one. I think the development in the main characters was lacking. The feelings between Padre Amaro and Amelia seemed out of lust, rather than love. Their love wasn't developed enough to be believable and made the rest of the movie less powerful. I read in one review that the movie showed the non church goer (Ruben's character) pure and in search of truth, rather than any of those apart of the church. I thought that was interesting, and maybe true. To balance it out and have a pure character on the church side may have taken away or maybe added to the movie, who knows. All in all i don't think the movie was as strong as it could have been, but is still good to watch.