Mexico
MexFest: A Weekend of Mexican Film and ArtsFriday, 12 July 2013
Last night saw the launch of the second edition of the enterprising MexFest at Richmix in East London– a celebration of all things Mexican (film, architecture, food and music in particular). The opening film was introduced by Baroness Jane... Read more... |
Mexico: A Revolution in Art 1910-1940, Royal AcademyThursday, 04 July 2013
Artists love a good revolution. The social upheaval, the bubbling up of new ideas and the breaking down of old ones, attracts them like flies to fly paper. The Mexican revolution was no exception. During the years 1910-1940, Mexico attracted large... Read more... |
Extract: Mariachi, Machetes, Meths - Manu Chao in MexicoSunday, 12 May 2013
Lake Chapalá begins just south of Guadalajara in the state of Jalisco. In case there’s any doubt we’re in Mexico, a mariachi band are propositioning the families who stroll along the waterfront and doing good business in their silver tunics and red... Read more... |
Brass Band Battle: Serbia vs Mexico, BarbicanMonday, 15 April 2013
Remember the Brass Band Battle of a couple years ago? The one that pitted Romania’s Fanfare Ciocarlia vs Serbia’s Boban & Marko Markovic Orkestar on CD and stage? The concert at London’s Koko was great fun, less a "battle" and more a good... Read more... |
Israel Galván/ Farruquito, Flamenco Festival, Sadler's WellsTuesday, 26 March 2013
The annual Sadler’s Wells Flamenco Festival is a hidden treasure-house of brilliance, too quietly sneaking into London in the unappealing limbo between winter and spring, but surely one of the great global gatherings of the dazzling individualists... Read more... |
Post Tenebras LuxMonday, 18 March 2013
In Post Tenebras Lux (light after darkness, in Latin) Mexican writer-director Carlos Reygadas casts a spell which transforms the ordinary into the extraordinary. The human condition is eye-poppingly explored in this ambitious, sometimes puzzling... Read more... |
DVD: Santa SangreFriday, 09 November 2012
Possessed by the spirit of his dead mother, a young man is driven to murder women who excite him sexually. Sound familiar? Director Alejandro Jodorowsky (El Topo) acknowledges his debt to Hitchcock by placing the mother in a rocking chair; there’s... Read more... |
LFF 2012: After LuciaSunday, 21 October 2012
It’s the suffocating inevitability of what is done to the girl that makes you keep grimly watching. Mexican director Michel Franco’s film is about people with nowhere to turn, expressed most brutally in the bullying of its teenage heroine Alejandra... Read more... |
Santa SangreWednesday, 19 September 2012
Circus and church, and a whole lot of other extremes, come up against each other in bewildering opposition in Alejandro Jodorowsky’s re-released 1989 Santa Sangre, a cult film of which it could truly be said, “They don’t make them like this any more... Read more... |
DVD: The Discreet Charm of the BourgeoisieTuesday, 10 July 2012
The great Spanish surrealist film-maker Luis Buñuel was 72 when he made The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie but it is as madcap a piece of weirdness as ever he came up with. It also won him the 1972 Oscar for Best Foreign Film. One of the great... Read more... |
Casa de mi PadreThursday, 07 June 2012
Comedic curio Casa de mi Padre features Will Ferrell in his most surprising role yet – that of a Mexican rancher who “no habla inglés”. This Spanish-language film is a tongue-in-cheek thriller featuring Ferrell alongside Mexican stars Gael García... Read more... |
Cannes 2012: Making a killing on the Côte d'AzurThursday, 24 May 2012
The last time that actor Brad Pitt and New Zealand director Andrew Dominik teamed up it was for the epic and elegiac western The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. Their new one, in competition in Cannes, couldn’t be more... Read more... |
