El Topo (1970)

Recommended

Mexico

Feature Film

Original Title: El topo

Writer/Director: Alejandro Jodorowsky

Cinematographer: Rafael Corkidi

Composers: Alejandro Jodorowsky, Nacho Méndez

Cast: Alejandro Jodorowsky, Mara Lorenzio, Brontis Jodorowsky, Robert John, Jacqueline Luis, Julien de Meriche, Paula Romo

A wandering gunslinger abandons his perma-naked seven-year-old son to be with a woman that he has just met, who challenges him to kill the desert’s four greatest gunfighters in order to earn her love, before becoming a Christ-like figure to a mountain dwelling community of incest-induced cripples, in Jodorowsky’s frequently hilarious, irony-drenched, and generally rather bonkers allegorical western. Iain.Stott

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Y Tu Mamá También (2001)

Recommended

Mexico/USA

Feature Film

Original Title: Y tu mamá también

Director: Alfonso Cuarón

Writers: Alfonso Cuarón, Carlos Cuarón

Cinematographer: Emmanuel Lubezki

Narrator: Daniel Giménez Cacho

Cast: Diego Luna, Gael García Bernal, Maribel Verdú

In the summer before they are due to start at university, two friends – one from a wealthy, powerful family and the other from more humble origins – take a road trip with a sexy twenty-something Spanish woman, who has just received two pieces of bad news, spending their days and nights having sex, smoking weed, and getting drunk, in Cuarón’s socially conscious coming-of-age tale, a gently funny and quietly devastating work. Iain.Stott

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The Maid (2009)

Recommended

Chile/Mexico

Feature Film

Original Title: La nana

Director: Sebastián Silva

Writers: Pedro Peirano, Sebastián Silva

Cinematographer: Sergio Armstrong

Cast: Catalina Saavedra, Claudia Celedón, Alejandro Goic, Andrea García-Huidobro, Mariana Loyola, Agustín Silva, Mercedes Villanueva

After twenty-odd years of working as a maid – living in someone else’s home, having no social life, inhaling all those fumes – Raquel has gone more than a little strange and become filled with petty, irrational jealousies; but when the bubbly Lucy is hired to assist her, she gradually manages to find her innate humanity, in Silva’s thoughtful, well acted, and thoroughly unpredictable parable. Iain.Stott

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