Cine Mexico

The Loft’s Cine Mexico series enters its final week with a Fernando de Fuentes classic, a trippy spirit-movie from the ’50s, and a look at Salma Hayek’s early work. The incredibly prolific Alejandro Galindo’s One Family Among Many, an Ariel Award winner for best picture, plays on Friday. The film is an example of Mexico’s "golden age of cinema," with a mid-century Hollywood-style narrative about a vacuum cleaner salesman, an impressionable young woman and her angry father. Saturday, the second of Fernando de Fuentes classic films about the Mexican revolution, Vamanos Pancho, screens. It’s been called the greatest Mexican film of all time, and it’s certainly one of the most disturbing. Not for those seeking a happy ending! On Sunday, Emilio Fernandez’s Maria Candelaria, another contender for "greatest Mexican film of all time," screens. The smoking hot Dolores del Rio stars as the titular Maria, a young woman standing at the wrong vertex of a dangerous love triangle. On Monday, we have El Cambio by Alfredo Joscowicz (who’s currently director of the Mexican Film Institute), hippy-drama from the early ’70s about going back to the land, man, and then finding out that the land is all, like, polluted. The series ends with two films by Jorge Fons: The first is The Bricklayers, about a police investigation that suddenly turns all Abu Ghraib. The final film is Midaq Alley, a sort of Altman-esque examination of the interweaving lives of the inhabitant of El Callejon de los Milagros, in downtown Mexico City. While the film’s complexity and length may seem daunting, it also offers some rich performances and, as an added bonus, an early appearance by the painfully beautiful Salma Hayek.