“El Tarzan” Lira, an ex-convict, decides to give up his criminal past and reform his life, becoming a bill collector for a bank. But when a corrupt cop blackmails him, he is left with no other option but to return to the once glittering but now dingy underworld of crime he so naturally inhabited.

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.