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Spanish
Language Films
BROWSE SPANISH FILMS: Contemporary Spanish films: ALPHABETICAL
INDEX - 1 -
2 - 3 - 4
- 5 - 6
- 7 | New
releases | Spanish-language film collections
| Spanish & Latin American film directors
| Spanish & Latin American actors &
actresses | Books about Spanish
language cinema
El Mariachi |
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Action / Thriller (1992)
Mexico / USA
Director: Robert Rodriguez
Starring: Carlos Gallardo,
Consuelo Gómez |
Review: Filmmaker
Robert Rodriguez captured the world's attention with this little
1992 film, made for only $7,500 (not counting the cost of a little
prerelease polish) and originally destined for the Spanish-language
video market. An enterprising studio executive saw the enormous
Spielbergian talent in Rodriguez's work and decided to get El
Mariachi out to the international public. A tight, inventive,
highly entertaining movie from start to finish, the story concerns
a guitarist mistaken for a hired killer and forced to fight a
local crime boss and his army of goons. Rodriguez makes clever
use of every available prop, from guitar cases to a beat-up bus
to a funny-looking dog. But his promise as a director--he went
on to make Desperado
and From
Dusk till Dawn--is evident in every scene.
Review by Tom Keogh
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Like Water for Chocolate / Como agua para chocolate
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Drama / Romance (1992)
Mexico
Director: Alfonso Arau
Starring: Marco Leonardi, Lumi Cavazos |
Review: Expect
to be very hungry (and perhaps amorous) after watching this contemporary
classic in the small genre of food movies that includes Babette's
Feast and Big
Night. Director Alfonso Arau (A Walk in the Clouds), adapting
a novel by his former wife, Laura Esquivel, tells the story of
a young woman (Lumi Cavazos) who learns to suppress her passions
under the eye of a stern mother, but channels them into her cooking.
The result is a steady stream of cuisine so delicious as to be
an almost erotic experience for those lucky enough to have a bite.
The film's quotient of magic realism feels a little stock, but
the story line is good and Arau's affinity for the sensuality
of food (and of nature) is sublime. You might want to rush off
to a good Mexican restaurant afterward, but that's a good thing.
Review by Tom Keogh
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A Tale of Ham and Passion / Jamón, Jamón |
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Drama / Comedy (1992)
Spain
Director: J.J. Bigas Luna
Starring: Stefania Sandrelli, Penélope Cruz |
Review: Salted pork shanks as
leitmotiv in a dark comedy about an absurd love triangle: this
is what post-Franco cine is all about (food and sex). Spanish
tortillas (i.e., potato omelets) are also big in this one.
Director José Juan Bigas Luna's Jamón
Jamón is intelligent, wry, and--despite the formulaic
narrative that melodrama must essentially contain--unpredictable.
At times his film exudes a certain Almodóvar flavor, but
there is an edge, perhaps a heavy-handedness, to the dark humor
that is either Luna's success or his downfall. The film garnered
the Silver Lion at the Venice Film Festival, after all. Try to
follow: sexy Penelope Cruz (Belle
epoque) is growing up with her mother outside town on
the highway, on the wrong side of the highway. Together they run
a truck stop where cars and life literally race past. Cruz is
in love with Jordí Molla, by whom she is pregnant. Molla's
bourgeois mother, played by Anna Galiena (Being
Human), thinks he can and should do better. (Of course,
neither Cruz nor his mother knows of the erotic, hmm, avian interludes
Molla enjoys on the side.) To save her son from the lower classes,
Galiena hires Javier Bardem, a muscular, pretty man (whose regular
consumption of the pork he distributes for a living has enhanced
his sexual appeal) to pursue Cruz. The dark comedy finds a proper
ending to the triangle in a grotesque but comedic landscape of
death. This is not a cookie-cutter movie but rather one that will
resonate with both your light and dark sides. After each surprise,
you'll chuckle, feel guilty, and chuckle again.
Review by Erik Macki
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The Age of Beauty / Belle epoque |
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Comedy / Romance (1992)
Spain
Oscar for Best Foreign Language
Film
Director: Fernando Trueba
Starring: Fernando Fernán Gómez, Jorge Sanz |
Review: This Spanish fluff from
1992 won an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, but
its significance goes about as far as you can throw a flower petal.
The story finds an elderly artist (Fernando Fernán Gómez)
giving shelter to a deserter (Jorge Sanz) from the royalist army
in provincial Spain, 1931. While on the premises, the young man
naturally notes the beauty of all four of his host's daughters.
Each takes her turn at seducing him, but this isn't late-night
cable TV so much as it is a series of brief character sketches
filled out by the way each woman takes charge. It's a clever idea
made more clever by the fact that these sundry beauties are acting
on the libertine impulses to which their free-thinking father
subscribes in principle but has sheepishly abandoned for love.
But the film, directed by Fernando Trueba, is rendered so lightly
it could almost be mistaken for calendar art.
Review by Tom Keogh
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Tie me up! Tie me down! / ¡Átame! |
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Drama / Crime (1990)
Spain
Director: Pedro Almodóvar
Starring: Victoria Abril, Antonio Banderas |
Review: Perhaps
only Pedro Almodóvar could come up with a story about a
mental patient who stalks and kidnaps an ex-porn star--and turn
it into a tender love story. But that's exactly what happens in
Tie
Me Up! Tie Me Down!, a lively installment from the Spanish
director's wacky middle period (after the scruffy early films,
and before his mature melodramas). Two of Almodóvar's sexiest
stars, Antonio Banderas and Victoria Abril, play the leads: a
cracked young man with dreams of bourgeois domesticity, and an
actress who used to specialize in porno and heroin. Despite that
fact that he binds her limbs with cord when he leaves the house,
he always returns with a cheerful "I'm home!" For all
Almodóvar's outrageousness, there's a touch of classical
Hollywood in his construction. And while this movie is not for
the politically correct, it does play by its own warped rules.
Review by Robert Horton
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Rojo amanecer |
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Drama / Thriller (1989)
Mexico
Director: Jorge Fons
Starring: Héctor Bonilla, María Rojo, Jorge Fegán |
Description: The
setting is October 2, 1968 in Mexico City. There are only ten
days left before the Olympic Games and a small student revolt
has turned into major political turmoil. A meeting will take place
that day in Tlatelolco (the largest housing complex in the city)
and the situation is extremely tense. A typical middle-class Mexican
family (living in Tlatelolco) becoms tragically involved in the
events when the meeting is brutally interrupted by the army and
100s of people are killed in the square in front of their apartment
building. About one of the darkest days in the political history
of Mexico.
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Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown /
Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios |
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Comedy / Drama (1988)
Spain
Director: Pedro Almodóvar
Starring: Carmen Maura, Antonio Banderas |
Review: Pedro Almodóvar
broke into the art-house mainstream with this wild, manic comedy
about a gaggle of women and their various problems with men, be
they married lovers, cheating husbands, fiancés, or terrorists.
Almodóvar's long-time leading lady, Carmen Maura, stars
as an actress (famed for her laundry detergent commercial as the
mother of a sloppy serial killer) who's just been dumped by her
married lover. In the midst of trying to track him down for a
face-to-face confrontation, she crosses paths with her lover's
son (Antonio Banderas), his unbalanced wife (Julieta Serrano),
and his new girlfriend (Kiti Manver). Adding more fuel to the
fire is the hapless friend (Maria Barranco) who got involved with
a Shiite terrorist and is now being hunted by the police. Almodóvar,
a master of farcical screwball comedy, manages to keep all these
balls in the air in dizzy, hilarious style without once losing
his momentum. Chock full of the director's over-the-top stylization,
in terms of both story and sets, the film is a hilarious yet heartfelt
marriage of kitsch and drama, verging on parody but never going
entirely over the top. Maura is absolutely breathtaking as the
unhinged lover, dispensing wise advice to others while trying
to keep a semblance of sanity, and the supporting cast is quintessential
Almodóvar, including a brief but memorable turn by Banderas
in what could have been a bland, go-nowhere role. Nominated for
the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar in 1989.
Review by Mark Englehart
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In a Glass Cage / Tras el cristal |
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Drama / Horror (1987)
Spain
Director: Agustí Villaronga
Starring: Günter Meisner, David Sust, Marisa Paredes |
Description: Klaus
(Gunter Meisner of The Boys of Brazil) is an ex-Nazi, a
doctor whose war-time post in a concentration camp enabled him
to commit the most appalling sex crimes against boys. After the
war, living incognito in Spain, he again gives in to his depraved
desires, until shame and despair drive him to an unsuccessful
suicide attempt.
Now confined to his room and kept alive on an iron lung, he is
ministered to by his resentful wife Griselda (Marisa Paredes of
All
About My Mother) and her daughter Rena (Gisela Echevarria).
Into this environment comes Angelo (David Sust), a strange, handsome
young man who offers his services as a nurse. Against Griselda's
judgement, Klaus insists that the visitor be allowed to take the
post.
A perverse relationship develops between Angelo and Klaus, becoming
ever more macabre as Angelo reveals he has found diaries detailing
his employer's war-time activities. Words turn to deeds, Klaus's
shame turns once again to desire, and a new spate of child killings
begin.
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The Realm of Fortune /
El imperio de la fortuna |
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Drama (1986)
Mexico
Director: Arturo Ripstein
Starring: Ernesto Gómez Cruz, Blanca Guerra |
Synopsis: Dull-witted Mexican
peasant Ernesto Gomez Cruz comes into possession of a rooster
severely injured in a cockfight. He restores the bird's health
and wins several bouts, then runs afoul of gambler Alejandro Parodi,
who has the rooster's ribs cracked so it can never win again.
Taking Cruz under his wing, the gambler teaches the peasant how
to be tops in the speculating field. In the company of Parodi's
girlfriend Blanca Guerra, who functions as a human good-luck charm,
Cruz becomes successful, but Guerra tires of living in Cruz's
shadow and kills herself. More than a little influenced by Luis
Bunuel, the Mexican Realm
of Fortune (El
Imperio De La Fortuna) won several awards in its country
of origin, though it has only fitfully seen the light of day in
the US.
Review by Hal Erikson, All Movie Guide
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