Cloaked in the magical-realist atmosphere of its original source material—Mexican novelist Juan Rulfo’s much-adapted cockfighting novel—Arturo Ripstein’s is a baroque and brutish retelling. This decadent fable captures the vertigo-inducing highs and dizzying lows of fortune with tragicomic timing.
A tense and high-wire portrait of Mexico in the ’70s, Life Sentence has Arturo Ripstein expertly manipulating the flashback structure to take us restlessly between a troubled past and an atoning present. Pedro Armendáriz Jr. offers an intense performance as a man dogged by his criminal history.
Bishops forced Arturo Ripstein’s controversial ‘70s drama to stay out of Mexican cinemas for years—thanks in part to the film’s sleazy yet sublime portrayal of the erotic life of a priest and his mistress. The Black Widow stars Mexican icon Isela Vega as the film’s irresistible femme fatale.
