Mexico
Graham Rickson
Playwright and novelist Rodolfo Usigli wasn’t impressed with Luis Buñuel’s 1955 film version of his novel Ensayo de un crimen, unhappy with the changes made by the director and his co-screenwriter Eduardo Ugarte. Especially the introduction of some nuns “who die in a tragic and entirely gratuitous way. There is a good Buñuel and a bad Buñuel. And I got the bad Buñuel.” The fourteenth of the 21 films which Buñuel directed between 1947 and 1962 in Mexico, The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz (Buñuel’s own English title) is a disquieting mixture of black comedy and psychological Read more ...
Sarah Kent
How to Live on Earth should be compulsory viewing in every classroom, boardroom, town hall and government office on the globe. Billed as a “how-to video” the documentary offers hope as well as a realistic view of the dire straits our planet is in.Director Fredi Devas worked with David Attenborough on seasons two and three of Planet Earth, recording the stunning beauty of nature so as to bring home what our gung-ho economic policies are destroying, but without suggesting any realistic alternatives.In How to... Devas takes the next step. Focusing on three key questions – How to value nature? Read more ...
Graham Rickson
Image
¡Feliz Navidad! – Mexican Baroque Music for Christmas Kölner Akademie/Michael Alexander Willens (CPO)Two of the four composers featured in this effervescent anthology never set foot in early 18th century Mexico. However, printed copies of sacred works by the Madrid-based Francisco Corselli and José de Nebra did cross the Atlantic for liturgical use in newly built Mexican cathedrals. There’s some delectable music here, the works by Manuel de Sareumaya and Ignacio Jerusalem especially enjoyable. The Italian-born Jerusalem (1707- Read more ...
Like Water for Chocolate, Royal Ballet review - splendid dancing and sets, but there's too much plot
Helen Hawkins
Christopher Wheeldon has mined a new seam of narrative pieces for the Royal Ballet, having started out as a supreme practitioner of the abstract. After The Winter’s Tale and Alice in Wonderland, he landed in 2022 on the magical realist novel Like Water for Chocolate, set in Mexico at the turn of the 20th century. This for me is less successful than the other two.Which is not to say it doesn’t provide many pleasures along the way, not least its superb stage pictures, which start right from curtain up, when we see a long line of Frida Kahlos in wedding dresses and Day of the Dead masks, who Read more ...
James Saynor
It’s not often we hear barely a single gunshot in a movie set amid Mexican drug cartels, but that may be the way it is for people who actually live amid Mexican drug cartels.In Sujo, Mexico’s bid for the next foreign feature Oscar, we experience violence the way many who inhabit violent places actually experience it – mostly embedded in the fabric of life, only occasionally directly. It’s not a choice many – or perhaps any – male filmmakers might make. But Sujo comes from the female writing and directing duo of Astrid Rondero and Fernanda Valadez, and for them violence arrives in the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Judging by a Sunday Times interview last weekend, Daniel Craig now enjoys wearing brilliantly-coloured sweaters and extraordinary trousers, very much like a man running as fast as possible in the opposite direction to James Bond. He has goodbye-Bond-esque quotes to go with it.Regarding his leading role in Luca Guadagnino’s film of William Burroughs’ Queer, he observes that “male vulnerability is really interesting because, as tough as men appear to be, they’re all vulnerable.” Has M been informed of this?Burroughs’ book was nearly filmed by Steve Buscemi in 2011, starring Stanley Tucci and Read more ...
Pamela Jahn
Jacques Audiard – creator of such subversive crime dramas and alternative romances as Read My Lips (2001), The Beat That My Heart Skipped (2005), A Prophet (2009), and Rust and Bone (2012) – isn’t an aficionado of film musicals. But in blending one into his comic Spanish-language trans gangster thriller Emilia Pérez, the 72-year-old director has made the most beautiful aberration of his career.Set in Mexico and originally to be filmed there, but made eventually (with virtual Mexican backdrops) in a studio near Paris, Emilia Pérez has a telenova plot, features song and dance numbers, is Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
A Mexican drugs cartel boss. A transitioning man. A strikingly beautiful woman lawyer risking all against corruption. Bittersweet songs that the characters suddenly break into, and occasionally dance to. A film in praise of women. And it’s not by Pedro Almodovar.During lockdown, the French director Jacques Audiard concocted an opera with the French chanteuse Camille titled Emilia Pérez, after its main character, based on the 2018 novel Ecoute by Boris Razon. Now he’s turned it into a film musical, but one more like Les Parapluies de Cherbourg than anything MGM ever produced. There are few “ Read more ...
Sarah Kent
El Eco (The Echo) is a small village in Mexico’s central highlands, about two hours drive from Mexico City. But it might as well be thousands of miles away since it feels cut off from the outside world, especially for the women and children eking out a living there.Tatiana Huezo’s visually stunning film opens with Luz Ma and her mother rushing to save a sheep from drowning in one of the deep pools formed by the torrential rains that seem never to stop. With her father working away most of the time, this bright-eyed girl is her mother’s only helper. She can’t be more than 11 but we see her Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
Procul Harum’s “A Whiter Shade of Pale” is given a new lease on life in Mexican director Michel Franco’s moving, complex film, full of fine performances.Saul (a wonderful Peter Sarsgaard), who has early-onset dementia, plays the song constantly. It’s a kind of comfort blanket for him and his fading memory gives those loopy lyrics a new significance.The film starts with a slightly confounding, busy scene in which Sylvia (an unadorned Jessica Chastain), a care worker in an adult day centre, attends an AA meeting in a Brooklyn church with her teenage daughter Anna (an impressive Brooke Timber, Read more ...
James Saynor
“Everything is legal if you have the money,” states the world-weary protagonist of this new film by the Mexican-American director Amat Escalante. And in the wilds of central Mexico, where the movie is set, the comment is unlikely to be questioned. Lost in the Night features characters lost at pretty much any time of the day in a slick, grim, ramifying desert mystery that never quite hits the escape velocity of thriller. At the start, the mother of young labourer Emiliano (Juan Daniel García Treviño) is disappeared by the cops for campaigning against a local mine, and the main Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Despite playing together for almost 25 years, Rodrigo y Gabriela are still taking chances in the live arena and refusing to take the easy path. They certainly didn’t put on a heritage act set in Birmingham this weekend.The Mexican guitarists’ show comprised wholly of tracks taken from their recent In Between Thoughts… A New World album and a handful of unrecorded tunes that have been composed since recording this disc. So, there was no “Diablo Rojo” and none of their flamenco nuevo-tinged covers of “Creep”, “Stairway to Heaven” or even their magnificent take on Pink Floyd’s “Echoes”, not that Read more ...