FilminFocus.com
Essays and Articles
Hecho en México
By Nick Dawson
El Grito de Dolores
Year: 1907
Director: Felipe de Jesús Haro
Cast: Felipe de Jesús Haro et al
The first fictional film made in Mexico, its depiction of Mexico's struggle for independence was harshly criticized on its release because of anachronisms, inaccuracies and a lack of realism. The film was typically screened with live actors delivering the characters' lines from behind the movie screen.
El Anónimo
Year: 1933
Director: Fernando de Fuentes
Cast: Gloria Iturbe, Carlos Orellana, Julio Villarreal
This melodrama about an unfaithful doctor's wife was the first film made by de Fuentes, one of the pivotal figures in Mexican cinema. De Fuentes' sophomore film, El compadre Mendoza (aka Prisoner 13), made the same year, was the first accurate cinematic interpretation of the Mexican revolution.
Salón México
Year: 1949
Director: Emilio Fernández
Cast: Marga López, Miguel Inclán, Rodolfo Acosta, Roberto Cañedo
This sultry noir, about a private dancer who steals from her pimp when he will not split the money they won at a dance competition, was one of many films on which Emilio "El Indio" Fernández collaborated with esteemed cinematographer, a protégé of Gregg Toland.
Una Familia de Tantas
Year: 1949
Director: Alejandro Galindo
Cast: Fernando Soler, David Silva, Martha Roth, Eugenia Galindo
Galindo, like Fernández, was one of the directors most associated with the Golden Era of Mexican Cinema (1935 to 1959). This film about the collision between the old and new Mexico has a slickness and sophistication informed by Galindo's apprenticeship under Hollywood director Gregory La Cava.
Crates
Year: 1970
Director: Alfredo Joskowicz
Cast: Leobardo López Aretche, Brian Nisse, Gonzalo Martínez Ortega
Joskowitz's movie about the eponymous protagonist who gives away all his worldly goods to find enlightenment begins at breakneck speed (as neighbors plunder the items the central character is abandoning) but becomes a slow, thoughtful semi-improvised fable with echoes of the paradise myth.
El Topo
Year: 1971
Director: Alejandro Jodorowsky
Cast: Alejandro Jodorowsky, Brontis Jodorowsky
Along with its frequent midnight movie double partner The Holy Mountain, this cult favorite ranks as the zenith of the career of legendarily loopy Chilean director Alejandro Jodorowsky. A trippy Mexican Western with Biblical overtones, it stars Jodorowsky as the titular hero, a black-clad gunfighter who rides through the desert with his naked son (played by Jodorowsky's son Brontis) on a search for enlightenment.
El Castillo de la Pureza
Year: 1973
Director: Arturo Ripstein
Cast: Claudio Brook, Rita Macedo, Arturo Beristáin, Diana Bracho
Influenced both by Luis Buñuel and the films of the Golden Era, Ripstein's movie was a spin on the true story of a Mexican man in the 1950s who wanted to protect his family from the evils of the outside world, so made them stay inside the family house and make rat poison. El Castillo, like many of Ripstein's films, uses Mexican melodrama to critique the concepts machismo and family, rather than supporting them.
Reed: México Insurgente
Year: 1973
Director: Paul Leduc
Cast: Claudio Obregón, Eduardo López Rojas, Ernesto Gómez Cruz, Juan ángel Martínez
Leduc's movie used documentary tropes to tell the story of John Reed (the subject of Warren Beatty's Reds), the American foreign correspondent who covered the Mexican revolution for Metropolitan Magazine and collected his reportage on the conflict in the book Insurgent Mexico (1914).
Canoa
Year: 1976
Director: Felipe Cazals
Cast: Enrique Lucero, Ernesto Gómez Cruz, Gerardo del Castillo, Carlos Chávez
Cazals took the true-life story of the killing of innocent student backpackers by rabid anti-Communist villagers and filmed it in a documentary style that, like many films after it, also had the feel of a horror movie.
Los Albañiles
Year: 1976
Director: Jorge Fons
Cast: Ignacio López Tarso, Jaime Fernández, José Alonso, Salvador Sánchez
Made during the time when President Luis Echeverria was in power, Fons' anti-thriller was representative of a pessimism that was pervasive in Mexican cinema. Based on the novel by Vicente Leñero, this tale of the murder investigation uses the police procedural genre to highlight the financial and moral corruption rife in the Mexican system.
Doña Herlinda y Su Hijo
Year: 1986
Director: Jaime Humberto Hermosillo
Cast: Marco Antonio Treviño, Arturo Meza, Guadalupe Del Toro
Based on the novel by Jorge López Páez, Hermosillo's film is a smart sexual satire about an understanding mother (Del Toro) who, pretending to be oblivious to the sexual preferences of her doctor son Rodolfo (Treviño), invites his best friend Ramon (Meza) to live in his bedroom "because it's so big." Ironically Del Toro, who excels in the plum role of Doña Herlinda, was only offered because she helped get the film funded. The film marked a dramatic shift in the representation of gay people in Mexican film.
El Bulto
Year: 1992
Director: Gabriel Retes
Cast: Gabriel Retes, Héctor Bonilla, Lourdes Elizarrarás, José Alonso
Retes' psychological drama is based around a simple but inspired device: its protagonist Lauro (played by Retes himself) wakes up after being in a coma for 20 years, prompting an examination of the changes that have occurred (not only in Mexico but also the rest of the world) between the 1960s, with its spirit of revolution, and the 1980s. El Bulto was one of the first of the Nuevo Cine Mexicano to break out.
Like Water for Chocolate
Year: 1993
Director: Alfonso Arau
Cast: Marco Leonardi, Lumi Cavazos, Regina Torné, Mario Iván Martínez
Veteran director Alfonso Arau had an international hit with this bittersweet love story adapted by Laura Esquivel from her own novel. The plot centers on a romance between Tita (Cavazos) and Pedro (Leonardi) which is threatened by Tita's mother's refusal to let her marry before her older sister. However an unusual situation develops which allows the couple to continue seeing each other.
Cronos
Year: 1993
Director: Guillermo del Toro
Cast: Ron Perlman, Federico Luppi, Claudio Brook, Margarita Isabel
This dazzlingly inventive debut from director Guillermo Del Toro — about a golden scarab which grants the owner eternal life, but also a vampire's thirst for blood — starred Ron Perlman (now playing Hellboy for Del Toro) and demonstrated the imagination and flair for the macabre that dazzled the filmgoing world in Pan's Labyrinth.
Amores Perros
Year: 2000
Director: Alejandro González Iñárritu
Cast: Emilio Echevarría, Gael Garcia Bernal, Goya Toledo, álvaro Guerrero
Alejandro González Iñárritu's scintillating debut presented a triptych of Mexico City — set stories — a young man (Garcia Bernal) planning to run off with his brother's wife, a TV producer who has left his family for a young model, and a homeless man (Echevarría) surviving on the streets. A sensation when it premiered at Cannes, the film announced a new vibrant generation of Mexican filmmaking.
Y Tu Mamá También
Year: 2001
Director: Alfonso Cuarón
Cast: Gael Garcia Bernal, Diego Luna, Ana López Mercado
After spending much of the 1990s in Hollywood making such film as The Little Princess and Great Expectations, Alfonso Cuarón returned to Mexico to make this coming-of-age tale about two teenage best friends, Tenoch (Luna) and Julio (Garcia Bernal), who go on a road trip with alluring older woman, Luisa (Maribel Verdú). Gritty and sexual but also poignant and moving, the film was rated C (adults only) in Mexico but was so popular that those not old enough to see it held protests (sometimes naked…).
Japón
Year: 2002
Director: Carlos Reygadas
Cast: Alejandro Ferretis, Magdalena Flores, Yolanda Villa, Martín Serrano
Carlos Reygadas immediately announced himself as a prodigious talent with this beautiful, surreal fever dream about sex and death. An unnamed big city painter (Ferretis) arrives at old woman Ascen's (Flores) remote countryside farm with the intention of taking his own life but, in a curious but oddly logical turn of events, a relationship grows between the two.
The Crime of Padre Amaro
Year: 2002
Director: Carlos Carrera
Cast: Gael Garcia Bernal, Ana Claudia Talancón, Sancho Gracia, Angélica Aragón
Gael Garcia Bernal, the poster boy of new Mexican cinema, stars in the story of a scandalous and tragic affair between a handsome young Catholic priest and a 16-year-old girl from his parish (Talancón) who is infatuated with him. Carlos Carrera's film was hugely controversial on its release (Roman Catholic groups tried and failed to ban it) but it nevertheless became the highest grossing Mexican film of all time and was also nominated for the Best Foreign Language Film Academy Award.