Brimstone & Glory

"Brimstone & Glory is a highly-recommended, adrenaline-charged feast for the eyes set in Mexico’s fireworks capital Tultapec. Depicting the preparation for, and then immersively entering, the town’s mammoth, mental, annual pyrotechnics festival, this documentary is a bombardment of all the things that make fireworks so alluring: beauty, fear, excitement, and a sense of can-you-bloody-believe-it."

"In Brimstone, it's a manic, freewheeling moment, empowering to the young person holding the flames and foreshadowing the impossibly precarious explosions to come."

"Mixing sheer spectacle with modest but pleasing human-interest threads, Viktor Jakovleski's first directorial feature is a poetical, entrancing documentary that should delight niche viewers across many cultural borders."

"The film ... has a wandering attention span and grows monotonous even at barely more than one hour."

"This is a dizzying, beautiful, awe-inspiring and deeply wonderful film. It has the power to turn grown adults into grinning, whooping kids."

"The heady mix of beauty and lunacy will have you giggling in amazement."

""Brimstone" is less successful as it edges toward an impressionistic immersion into fire and fiesta, but as you-are-there experiences go, it has energy to burn."

"Viktor Jakovleski's sometimes rapturous Brimstone & Glory takes us to Tultepec for two annual rituals that celebrate this livelihood, reveling in their spectacle and observing the days leading up to them."