“It can’t be true,” Ángel, a professor and playwright, mutters as his eyes catch a photograph of his wife and daughters, all of whom have just died. Neighbor Terese, a schoolteacher young enough to be his daughter, thwarts Ángel’s suicide attempt and invites him to dinner with herself, her lover, Alberto, and their young daughter. […]

The following entry is en route to its place in my list of the 100 greatest films from Italy, Greece, Spain & Portugal: Three businessmen go rabbit hunting one day thirty years after being fascist compatriots in the Spanish Civil War. They start bickering from the get-go, kill animals, and end up shooting and killing […]

Made by Spain’s Carlos Saura, this Argentinian co-production is a Chinese-boxed movie: a film about the filming of a musical in which, taking over, art becomes life. Art also is memory, and in this case the film, as well as the film-within-the-film, reflects Argentina’s dark political history and, connected to that history, the theme of […]

The following is one of the entries from my 100 Greatest Films from Italy, Greece, Spain and Portugal list, which I invite you to visit on this site if you haven’t already done so. — Dennis Federico García Lorca’s 1932 play Bodas de sangre was based on an actual murder involving feuding families; for Alfredo […]

Geraldine Chaplin, Carlos Saura’s companion and Charlie’s daughter, haunts in Cría cuervos (1975), but she gives her finest performance in another one of Saura’s most brilliant nonmusicals: Elisa, vida mía. Again Chaplin plays two parts: Elisa, and Elisa’s mother. One must also note that Fernando Rey, tremendous here as Elisa’s father, also delivers his greatest […]