Spanish

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Using music of the genre, a short look at Tex-Mex music, how it expresses love found and love lost, and how it comes straight from the heart.Read More »

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Rodrigo Catano seeks to impose in his family a Porfirian order. One day a door to door salesman, Roberto del Hierro, comes into the house to sell an American vacuum cleaner from the “Bright O’Home” company. Maru, Mr. Catano’s daughter, watches Roberto while he demostrates the new machine. Roberto leaves and says he will come back to explain Mr. Catano about the vacuum cleaner. Mr. Catano is very upset because a man has been in his house without him been present. Nevertheless, with fast and inteligent talk, Roberto sells him the vacuum cleaner and, later on, a refrigerator. Maru is captivated by Roberto and they fall in love. Mr. Catano is furious when Roberto announces to him he will marry Maru.Read More »

This film has been called the “Uruguayan ‘Slacker’”, a reference to Linklater’s movie. It has also been called a landmark film in a (low-key, small-scale) renaissance in Uruguayan cinema – a national cinema with a terrible memory problem (“El Dirigible”, from 1994, was routinely cited as “the first Uruguayan film”, which is very false, but understandable when one sees how little movies that country has managed to preserve).

Whatever its place in film history, it’s worth a watch, and rings very much true.Read More »

In Madrid, the family of Don Luis, his wife Dolores and their children, Manolita and Luisito, share the daily life of the Civil War with their maid and neighbours. Despite having failed his exams, Luisito wants his father to buy him a bicycle. However, the situation forces them to delay the purchase and the delay, like the war itself, is to last much longer than expected.

The movie, and the book it was drawn from, show how daily life was conducted during the war. Unexpected things happen, but people find ways to survive. Above all, it is a story of survival and adaptation.Read More »

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Based on the novel by Rafael Azcona, screenplay by Azcona and Marco Ferreri. Rodolfo and Petrita each live in separate quarters in dilapidated Madrid, while looking to have a little apartment (or “pisito”, in Spanish). Unfortunately their low salaries prevent them from acquiring one. Soon, Rodolfo’s co-workers urge him to marry the old and frail Doña Martina, who is the main tenant in the apartment he boards in. According to Spanish rent-control law, he could inherit the lease from his spouse. Thus begin his misgivings and Petrita’s.Read More »

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A Colombian writer returns to his native Medellín to mourn his lost youth and, while he’s at it, pick up a new one. That, more or less, is the tale that Barbet Schroeder’s new movie has to tell. Schroeder has made some spicy pictures in his time, but this one feels lacklustre by comparison, and the two main performers-Anderson Ballesteros as the hustler and German Jaramillo as his aging mentor-tend to drift through their scenes, trying not to notice the hellfire around them. Whether they are genuinely ground down by the woes of the world or simply exhausted by years of casual sex is hard to work out; to be fair, few directors could make a film about moral anesthesia without sinking into glumness, and Schroeder does a pretty good job of insuring that no one in the audience will book a Colombian vacation in the near future.Read More »

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Life in the Argentine pampas is nasty, brutish and short, judging by the intense, compelling drama “La Rabia.” Impressive if challenging-to-watch work by helmer Albertina Carri (“Los rubios,” “Geminis”) observes adultery, violence and animal slaughter largely through the eyes of two disturbed children, while use of jagged animation and luminous landscape shots transmutes the base material into something more sublime. “La Rabia” is certain to sweep through fests, but could have trouble finding distribution in some territories due to unfaked deaths of various animals which, per opening credits, “lived and died as they naturally would.”Read More »

A little-known Spanish take on Homer’s Odyssey.Read More »

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As Cotopaxi spews ash, issuing an eerie penumbra over Quito, a young woman confronts dormant familial conflicts. Desperate for a place to store her things as volcanic disaster looms, Caridad turns to her long-estranged father Galo for help. Galo abandoned Caridad’s mother long ago and is eager to make amends, but questions concerning the nature of his transgressions linger, straining communication between father and daughter and casting grave doubts over the possibility of reconciliation.Read More »