Mexico

Review
Highly stylized
Noted Mexican filmmaker Arturo Ripstein (Deep Crimson) presents a highly stylized, almost stagebound, erotic melodrama about life in the 1940s in Mexico (filmed in the lush style of 1940s melodramas). It’s based on the story by Max Aub and penned by Alicia Paz Garciadiego. The narrative is in the form of a repetitious parable that is overlong, hitting many dull spots and at times insufferable to watch. It stays on message to show a series of themes (colonialism, class warfare, racial and idealogical divisions and revolutionary fervor in both Franco’s Spain and Mexico) based on real historical events and combines it with the fictional story of the willing enslavement to the upper-class of the peasant Indian Mexican named Nacho (Luis Felipe Tovar).
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From IMDb

Love story between a young girl and a police man, both of them had connections with drugs but in opposite ways. This will create a conflict that love will try to overcome.

Heli (Armando Espitia), the protagonist of Amat Escalante’s 2013 Palme d’Or nominee of the same name, is a young Mexican who lives with his father, his son, his young wife (Linda Gonzalez) and 12-year-old sister, Estella (Andrea Vergara). He’s prone to bad luck, keen on his naps and, when a census taker comes to the house, hesitates about how many people live there with him. However, when 17-year-old army cadet Beto (Juan Eduardo Palacios) falls in love with Estella and makes plans for the two of them to run away together, Heli’s cataclysmic knee-jerk reaction will plunge the family into pitiless and brutal violence.Read More »

Synopsis: A young worker eager to earn money as a boxer enters and grows into star ring. His idol is Kid Snuff boxing, he does not know, but I admire both reaching imitate everything. Be conquered by a cabaret singer, former lover Kid, breaking up with his girlfriend with whom he is truly in love. There comes a point in their fight with Kid for the championship of Mexico, but to discover the relationships with singer, repents and returns with his girlfriend. Decides to leave the ring, whatever the outcome of the fight. Win Kid Snuff and the other is on the floor. When the doctor acknowledges, is that has died from the blows.
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Tea is an essay film documenting an artistic gesture surrounding Alighiero Boetti’s One Hotel in Kabul, Afghanistan. What does it mean to return to a place while visiting it for the first time? How a guest can become a host due to a years-late arrival? How far, really, is Afghanistan from Mexico? These questions, as they pertain to the relationship between Boetti and Mario Garcia Torres, are considered in the film.Read More »

A small Mexican village faces the disappearance of a corpse. The dead man’s brother goes out to find his detective friend, a cowboy. However, he is killed by a gang that seeks to get the insurance money from the policy put on the dead man by his aunt. Meanwhile, a strange fish-man monster is stalking our heroes with the intent to kill! Can the cowboy solve the mystery in time?
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Quote:
Unlike William Wyler’s inferior 1939 film adaptation, Luis Buñuel’s Abismos de Pasión is more than a literate extrapolation of Emily Bronte’s gothic masterpiece Wuthering Heights, which certainly must count as one of the five greatest novels of the English language. Though not overtly surreal, Buñuel’s minor classic is fraught with the kind of feverish contradictions typically heir to his cinematic dogma. Critic Manny Farber observed in his eulogy for Val Newton (published in The Nation back in April of 1951) how Jacques Tourneur’s The Leopard Man gives “the creepy impression that human begins and ‘things’ are interchangeable and almost synonymous and that both are pawns of a bizarre and terrible destiny.” Farber felt the Surrealists had never been able to transform the psychological effects of their dramas into a realm of the non-human but, four years later, Buñuel would accomplish something similar with his very Latin rendition of Bronte’s classic. The film’s dreary exteriors (the trees without leaves, the buzzards on constant alert) evoke a landscape of spiritual unrest, a breezy gateway between the living and the dead. While the film arouses the dreaminess of the original text, death signifies more than the lead couple’s transcendence of the flesh—it’s also a fascinating wish fulfillment.Read More »

Quote:
Diego (Cirilo Recio) is a cross-eyed, middle-aged man who works as a doorman in a government building and spends the day counting the persons who pass in front of him. His younger wife Blanca (Laura Saldaña) works in a fast-food sushi bar. They do not have much to say to each other after a hard day’s work and so they wile away the hours watching televison. They do have an active sex life with Blanca usually leading the way. One day he arrives home to find her waiting for him nude on the floor with her legs spread wide open.

But the downside of their marriage is her jealousy. When a co-worker’s son is kidnapped, Diego walks her home and embraces her in kindness. Blanca finds out about this gesture and explodes in anger. Her apologies usually consist of sexual favors.

When Karina (Claudia Orozco), Diego’s daughter from a previous relationship, shows up and wants to stay with them, Blanca refuses and he is forced to set her up in a hotel room. She is trying to end a relationship with an addict who has gotten her into drugs. Karina’s inability to deal with the real world puts an incredible amount of pressure on her father in the mysterious last sequence of the film which takes place at a gigantic rubbish dump outside the city.Read More »

Plot Synopsys:
A famous cabaret in Mexico City, Salón Mexico was staffed by ficheras, women who charged clients for dancing and, more often than not, for sex. Fernández’s celebrated melodrama tells the story of one such dancer, Mercedes (Marga López) who must fight off the attentions of an abusive pimp while working to finance the schooling of her younger sister. A danzón contest offers salvation, but will Mercedes see her chance of redemption cruelly snatched away? Deliciously dark with noir overtones, its fine performances are matched by Gabriel Figueroa’s superlative cinematography.Read More »

A group of scientists in search of lost Atlantis are plane wrecked on an uncharted island full of stock footage monsters fresh from One Million BC. Occasionally we get an original papier mache monster peaking out from behind an alcove, but for the most part this is typical Mexican filmmaking for the period. With Armond Silvestre and Alma Delia Fuentes.Read More »