Spanish

Synopsis:
Dean Selmier plays an expatriate American in each story of this trilogy. Francisco Rabal and his family star in the first feature filmed at the Rabal family home in Madrid. An over aggressive American soldier tries to put the moves on his wife and daughter before he is clubbed and thrown into the swimming pool. Part two finds a hippie couple slain at the country home of a wealthy local (Alfredo Mayo) after the young woman is offered to him for money and the boy makes love to the man’s wife. In part three, an American man, a Cuban girl, two Spanish students and a chimpanzee throw a dance party before the American plants a bomb that destroys everyone. (allmovie)Read More »

Quote:
Argentinean helmer Eduardo Mignogna is best known for mellers like the award-winning “Autumn Sun” (1996) and “The Southern Lighthouse” (1998), but the ambitiously-structured crowd pleaser “The Escape,” based on his own novel, shows him extending his range almost too far. Pic pays the dramatic price for mixing popular genres — including jail-bust thriller, meller and gangster drama — and, though well-crafted and entertaining, sometimes feels contrived and manipulative. Final sensation is of a great story cannily told, and these simple old-fashioned virtues, plus the current interest in Latino cinema, could be enough to generate offshore interest outside standard Latino territories.Read More »

AllMovie wrote:
In this amazing and complex Argentine historical drama, much of the true story of the 19th-century assassin Juan Moreira comes to the screen. At the time of its release, this Argentine film was the most popular locally made film ever to be shown there. Juan Moreira was a popular folk hero on a par with Billy the Kid in the U.S., and many stories and songs have been written about him over the years. In the movie, the innocent herdsman Moreira (Rodolfo Beban) is thrown into jail at the behest of an important cattle-baron. He emerges from jail a changed man. After killing the cattleman who had him sent to jail, he at first hides among a tribe of native peoples then moves into a brothel.Read More »

Eduardo is an obsessive, efficient worker in the oil industry, disconnected from any type of emotion. He seems to have enclosed his history in one of the rooms of the house in which he lives in Rio Grande. His lonely routine is altered when he is called to go to Ushuaia for a few days. Getting there and meeting an old friend and his family becomes a real test in his life and opens a door that allows him to rebuild his past, his present and, perhaps, his future.Read More »

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A mercury spill within the village of Choropampa during 2000 from a silver mine in the Andes is carried downslope to those living immediately below, producing blindness and other forms of sickness. In Altiplano the event is portrayed within a fictional Turubamba, Perú, where non-Spanish-speaking indigenous people center their lives around a Catholicism that puts much stress on the Virgin Mary. A clinic run by foreigners provides cataract operations, but none of the ophthalmologists is a general practitioner. When some die, they revolt against the only outsiders they know—the physicians, not the miners. Read More »

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El Bola, a 12 year old boy a.k.a. “Pellet” is a 12 year old boy raised in a violent and sordid environment. Embarrassed by his family life, he avoids becoming close to classmates. The arrival of a new boy at school changes his attitude towards his classmates, and friendship. The heart of the story is the change in El Bola’s life, at almost all levels, after befriending this new classmate.Read More »

Andersen’s “Little Match Girl”, Bresson’s donkey, the relationship between a German guerrilla and an Argentine pianist, and Helmut Lachenmann trying to stage an opera with the orchestra of the Teatro Colón on strike. In the middle of all that, Marie and Walter try to survive with their daughter.Read More »

This is an adaptation of one of the most important novels of Argentine literary modernism, Roberto Arlt’s El juguete rabioso (1926). Similar in many ways to Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1917), this novel (and the film) chronicles a young man’s journey through a life of poverty on the margins of society in Buenos Aires among anarchists and gangsters during the first years of the 20th century. The novel is essential reading for an understanding of subsequent Argentine literature, yet it is little known outside of Argentina. In El beso de la mujer araña AKA Kiss of the Spider Woman (1976), Manuel Puig was very consciously drawing the whole conceit of the homosexual ‘traitor’/’lover’ and the political prisoner directly from this book.
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Quote:
Near the provincial town of San Julian, three vibrant characters undertake seemingly mundane journeys that turn out to be subtly life changing. A lonely, fastidious traveling salesman quests for the perfect cream cake to win the widow of his dreams. A grizzly grandfather hitchhikes to town to find his forgotten lost dog and seek forgiveness. A poor young mother hopes to win the grand prize–a microprocessor–as a contestant on a TV game show. In the end, the three will get more or less what they set out for, but it will come to them in ways that they never expected.Read More »