The Phantom of the Monastery is best approached not as a timeless horror film, but as a subversive precursor to Mexican art cinema. Beneath its religious imagery lies a bold exploration of desire, guilt, and repression, anticipating Buñuel’s later work and embracing ambiguity over explanation.

The opening sequence of Cerrar los ojos (Close Your Eyes, Víctor Erice, 2023) made me feel like I was immersed in a Jorge Luis Borges story. Although not technically the case, this is befitting for a Spanish-Argentinian co-production under the assured hand of one of cinema’s last living masters: Spanish director Víctor Erice.

La secuencia inicial de Cerrar los ojos (Víctor Erice, 2023) me hizo sentir como si estuviera inmerso en un relato de Jorge Luis Borges, lo cual me pareció apropiado para una coproducción hispano-argentina a cargo de uno de los últimos verdaderos maestros del cine: el director español Víctor Erice.

In its obituary for the sui generis director David Lynch (1946-2025), who recently gave up the ghost, The New York Times barely mentioned The Straight Story (David Lynch, 1999), a film that is more often than not regarded as an anomaly in Lynch’s filmography.

Among the thousands of books that have been written trying to elucidate Hitler, there is a remarkable one by Ron Rosenbaum, Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of His Evil.

Before the first consumer-grade videotapes came out in the mid-1970s, it stands to reason that movies were not that readily available for the general public.

Recently I saw what will most likely be my favourite film of the past year and foreseeable future, especially in light of the pandemic: The Painted Bird (Václav Marhoul, 2019), from the Czech Republic.

Elegy to my mentor and friend, Carlos Biro, published in Mexican newspapers.

‘Frailty, thy name is woman’ When Shakespeare wrote those words for ‘Hamlet’, he could not have imagined there would someday be a woman such as Maria Felix.

Sara Rosario Gonzalez is a 32-year-old restorer of rare books at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles who unexpectedly finds herself on the verge of a heartbreak, but as Yxta Maya Murray shows in her latest novel, “The Conquest,” the human yearning to overcome loss can sometimes be the inspiration that leads to great art.

In the history of cinema, filmmakers have often faced seemingly insurmountable difficulties to produce meaningful films, and time and again they have turned those challenges into creative opportunities that have expanded the palette of cinematic language.