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Mid-century Mexican films are being feted at the Film at Lincoln Center as part of a new partnership with the Locarno Film Festival. Titled Spectacle Every Day: Mexican Popular Cinema, the program spans Mexican cinema from the ’40s through the ’60s, featuring works from directors such as Roberto Gavaldón, Emilio Fernández, Julio Bracho, Alejandro Galindo, and Chano Urueta. The 22-film retrospective takes place at Flc from July 26 through August 8.

Highlights include the 4K restoration of Julio Bracho’s “Take Me in Your Arms” (1954), Alejandro Galindo’s “Wetbacks” (1955), “The Sword of Granada” (1953) which was the first 3-D film produced in Mexico, and Matilde Landeta’s sex work melodrama “Streetwalker” (1951). Landeta was one of the country’s first female directors.

The features screening as part of Spectacle Every Day: Mexican Popular Cinema have been rarely screened stateside. Some even have never before seen theatrically in the United States, per the official press release.

Llévame en tus brazos.When the Locarno Film Festival announced that its 2023 Retrospective section would survey Mexican popular cinema between the 1940s and 1960s, it meant not only that the canon of Mexican film history would also necessarily be the subject of major revision—or, at least, debate—but also that a considerable amount of resources would be expended on the digitization and restoration of films long omitted from official histories. The 36-film program, “Spectacle Every Day—The Many Seasons of Mexican Popular Cinema,” precipitated new digital versions of many varied genre movies produced between 1941 and 1966, some well-known today, but the majority rescued from obscurity. Unlike previous retrospectives put on by the Locarno Film Festival, and reflecting recent shifts in the accessibility and quality of scanning and restoration technologies, this year’s series primarily featured digital copies of the films with only a few notable celluloid exceptions. When I first perused the festival program,...

Although the number has increased over time, there are now twenty-four separate categories with golden statuettes doled out every year at the Academy Awards. Commonly, the statuettes are known as Oscars. But of course, these awards didn’t materialize out of thin air. They have a story stretching back to the inception of the association itself.

The first ceremony took place in May 1929, with the behind-the-scenes team working since two years prior to properly get their trademark statuettes into production. And while the figures themselves remain endlessly iconic as symbols of success and recognition in the film industry, many film fans may be unfamiliar with the man from whom the statue was modeled after: Emilio “El Indio” Fernández.

Who Is Emilio Fernandez?

As the most famous filmmaker to be born out of the Mexican Golden Age, he of course has several seminal titles under his directorial belt: take María Candelaria (1943) and Salón México (1949), for instance.

Mexico has selected five-time Academy Award winner Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s Bardo as its official entry for the Best International Feature Film Oscar race.

The immersive work stars Daniel Giménez Cacho as a renowned Los Angeles-based Mexican journalist and documentary filmmaker who, after being named the recipient of a prestigious international award, is compelled to return to his native country, unaware that this simple trip will push him to an existential limit.

Venice Review: Alejandro G Iñárritu’s ‘Bardo’

The film world premiered in its three-hour original version in competition at Venice in early September. Netflix recently dropped a trailer for the film, which opens theatrically in Mexico on October 27, followed by a limited theatrical release in the U.S., Spain and Argentina on November 4 before rolling out in a global expansion on November 18. The film will debut December 1 on Netflix.

The work reunites Iñárritu with a number of his...

Scream Factory will release The Beast of Hollow Mountain (1956) and The Neanderthal Man (1953) early next year as a 2-disc Blu-ray and DVD combo pack. We’ve been provided with official release details and a look at the cover art:

“This January 2014, loyal fans are invited to combat the winter chills with a double dose of 50s high-camp creature features when Edward Nassour and Ismael Rodriguez’s The Beast Of Hollow Mountain, starring Guy Madison (Blood of the Executioner) and Patricia Medina (Snow White and the Three Stooges), and E.A Dupont’s The Neanderthal Man, starring Robert Shayne (How To Make A Monster), Richard Crane (Devil’s Partner), Doris Merrick (Untamed Women), Joyce Terry (The Beatniks) and Beverly Garland (It Conquered The World, The Alligator People), arrive on home entertainment shelves together in a double-feature 2-Disc Blu-ray™+ DVD Combo Pack on January 28, 2014. This highly collectible home entertainment release features anamorphic...

Up next from our friends over at Scream Factory is a double dose of campy creature feature fun, when The Beast of Hollow Mountain and The Neanderthal Man link up and come home together. Read on for the skinny!

From the Press Release

This January 2014, loyal fans are invited to combat the winter chills with a double dose of 50s high-camp creature features when Edward Nassour and Ismael Rodriguez’s The Beast Of Hollow Mountain, starring Guy Madison (Blood of the Executioner) and Patricia Medina (Snow White and the Three Stooges), and E.A Dupont’s The Neanderthal Man, starring Robert Shayne (How To Make A Monster), Richard Crane (Devil’s Partner), Doris Merrick (Untamed Women), Joyce Terry (The Beatniks) and Beverly Garland (It Conquered The World, The Alligator People), arrive on home entertainment shelves together in a double-feature 2-Disc Blu-ray™+ DVD Combo Pack on January 28, 2014. This highly collectible home...

Black history month is here -- and though it may be a U.S. celebration, the United States isn’t the only country in the Americas with black achievements and cultural contributions to commemorate.

While many people in the United States view Latinos as a race, the societies of Latin America are multicultural and multiracial. More people of African descent live in Brazil than any country in the world besides Nigeria. Another 8 million African-descended people live in Colombia, and millions more in the Caribbean countries of Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Venezuela, Panama and elsewhere.

As Harvard University professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. told Latina.com, “The real Black Experience, in terms of numbers, is all throughout the Caribbean and Latin America… There were 11.2 million Africans who came to the New World in the slave trade and of that 11.2 million, only 450,000 came to the United States.”

So, to kick the month off,...

The Austin Film Society's latest Essential Cinema Series, "CineSur: Films of Latin America," begins tonight at 7 pm with Zona Sur at the Alamo Drafthouse on South Lamar.

In 1962 or 1963, when I still couldn't vote or legally drink in a bar, I lived just a few blocks from the Teatro Panamericano in Dallas, the principal Spanish-language movie theater in el barrio (often dismissively referred to by non-Spanish-speakers as "Little Mexico"). The Panamericano was a beautiful building constructed for the Dallas Little Theatre in the 1930s, and was later purchased by the enterprising J.J. Ródriguez in 1943. While I was more frequently at other theaters experiencing Fellini, Antonioni, Truffaut, Godard, Kurosawa and the products of a dying Hollywood, I have fond memories of seeing Mexican films at the Panamericano.

Macario (Roberto Gavaldón, 1960) was haunting and mystical, while Los hermanos Del Hierro (My Son, the Hero, Ismael Rodríguez, 1961) was an unforgettable Western. While...

Ramon Novarro, Enid Bennett, The Red Lily Early Mexican-born screen heartthrob Ramon Novarro is back on Turner Classic Movies this evening with a presentation of Fred Niblo's silent melodrama The Red Lily (1924). That will be followed by another Ismael Rodríguez effort, Las mujeres de mi general ("The Women of My General"), a 1951 starring Mexican icon Pedro Infante as a rebel general torn between two women, as TCM continues its celebration of 100 years of the start of the Mexican Revolution (which coincides with Hispanic Heritage Month). The Red Lily isn't one of Novarro's best silent films. Both in terms of style and plot, it's quite dated. In fact, it probably felt dated even back in 1924. Historically, The Red Lily is important merely as the the second time Novarro worked with director Fred Niblo, who would guide him the following year in the monumental Ben-Hur, and as Novarro's first effort [...]...