A film with some great moments but a lot of confusion

 The strange Brazilian film Bacurau (2019, dir. Kleber Mendonca Filho and Juliano Dornelles) is worth watching up to a point, depending on your tolerance for gruesome shootouts and assassinations ripe w/ gore. The film is highly atmospheric and tantalizingly strange, even if a lot of it remains unclear and unresolved. IN short, the film is about a small town or village in a remote region of Brazil that local politicos have cut off from its main water supply for a reason never fully explained, though we can surmise it may have something to do w/ a land seizure for development. The highlight of the film is the re-creation of this village life, with family rivalries, political pressures, festivities, and mourning ceremonies. The villagers - one suspects that most or all were not professional actors - are the stars, with all of eccentric charm: the village elder and leader, the village doctor (a woman w/ a serious alcohol issue), the young woman returning - along with a tank load of water and a cache of needed medicines - from a Brazilian city, a guitar-playing guy who looks just like Dylan, et al. At about the mid-point the film kicks into action as we learn that a team of assassins - most of them American - has been assigned to eradicate this village (we never learn why). Improbable as this seems, it does inevitably produce some tense scenes of ambush, assault, and resistance. So it's a film comprising many fine moments, but at its core the film is a mishmash of unexplained and unresolved rivalries and conflicts. It would be better just to watch and appreciate the film for its strengths and leave the rest unexamined.