China Zorrilla Movies

Two aging Spanish widowers find their fading passion for romance unexpectedly rekindled during a visit to Rome's Trevi Fountain in this romantic comedy starring China Zorrilla and Manuel Alexandre. ~ Jason Buchanan, Rovi

With poignance and compassion, Carissa Carlos's gentle drama Besos en la Frente observes the heartbreaking conflict of intentions and signals between two friends with a considerable age difference between them. China Zorilla stars as the octogenarian Mercedes Arévalo, a Buenos Aires resident who in eight long decades of life has never once experienced a satisfying adult love affair or relationship. On an emotional level, Mercedes is very much still an adolescent girl. The future suddenly brightens when into her life waltzes a dashing young Uruguayan screenwriter, Sebastián Miguez (Leonardo Sbaraglia), rebounding from a romantic split and temporarily visiting the metropolis in search of new scriptwriting assignments. In time, a meaningful friendship blossoms, and Mercedes in fact invites Sebastián to move into her house. He accepts, perceiving the arrangement as innocent and harmless, but in reality, Mercedes has fallen deeply in love with her new roommate and tries to actualize her feelings with an unchecked display of physical affection. ~ Nathan Southern, Rovi

This humanistic melodrama purports to be the first film from Argentina to deal with the effects of AIDS in a straightforward manner as it examines the psychological effects of the disease upon a well-to do heterosexual couple preparing to wed. It is Pablo who is diagnosed HIV-positive. Although he swears he has been faithful to his fiancee, the pregnant Mariana, she is devastated and breaks up with him. She does decide to keep the baby though. Pablo, finds himself increasingly despondent and unable to escape his depression until he discovers photography. His favorite subject becomes plain streets filled with working-class people. Meanwhile Mariana throws herself into her theatrical work, spending most of her time with her students. ~ Sandra Brennan, Rovi

This award-winning film by André Melançon -- set on a ranch on the pampas of Argentina -- tells the story of three children spending a summer with their grandfather. The youngest, Felipe, makes friends with a puppy; his older brother, Daniel, breaks and train his first horse; their 13-year-old sister, Laura, struggles with the transition between childhood and growing up. The kids find it difficult to adapt to their proud and stubborn grandfather, and he learns that he has to change his ways and try to understand them as they all experience the joys and sorrows of growing up and growing old. ~ Alice Duncan, Rovi

Though they live together at their grandmother's country estate, each of the women in Nunca Estuve en Viena has a very different life. The youngest granddaughter, Adela, is not yet married. The oldest has been married off to a wealthy man, and the middle daughter has been adopted by the grandmother as her full-time servant, nurse, secretary, etc. They have a piano-playing brother whose tuberculosis keeps him in and out of sanatoriums. Adela has gotten involved with the estate's handsome gardner, an aspiring theatrical set designer. Their relationship really heats up for a while, but is eventually ended when the gardener's male lover, Adele's uncle Marcello, offers to help him get settled in Buenos Aires. Meanwhile, Adela has gotten pregnant. The autocratic old grandmother receives the shock of her life when, on the same day, she discovers that her beloved youngest granddaughter is about to have a child out of wedlock, and that her son Marcello is gay. ~ Clarke Fountain, Rovi

In this outrageous Spanish-language farce, the grandmother in a middle-class Argentine family opts to go to a neighbor's house and baby-sit, without telling anyone of her whereabouts. In the mean time, the sons of the family discover the corpse of another elderly woman and mistake the body for that of the matriarch; lo and behold, the grandmother eventually turns up once again and questions the identity of the woman in the casket, scaring everyone half to death. ~ Nathan Southern, Rovi

This comedy satirizes Latin American soap operas in following a dysfunctional family. Mama Cora is a senile woman in her 80s who lives with her oldest son and his wife. Cora manages to make life unbearable with her presence. She is asked to baby-sit for the neighbor's kids for a few hours, but the parents return to find the old woman has gone. All four of Cora's children mistakenly identify another woman's body to be that of their mother at a Buenos Aires morgue. ~ Dan Pavlides, Rovi

After a hitman assassinates someone involved in financial dirty-dealings, he goes back to the boss who had ordered the killing, and is asked to murder another man "who knows too much." And so the hitman proceeds to spy on his target through a window - and observes him in a sexual relationship with the widow of the man he had just killed. Eventually, he has everything set up for the assassination and when he bursts into the man's apartment, he suddenly finds something totally unexpected that changes everything he had thought up to that moment. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, Rovi

Unlike the suggestive title, this is a mixed-up trilogy of tales about a woman dying of cancer and the kidnapping of a petroleum magnate, the woman's memories about the tycoon, and the woman's imaginary vision of herself as someone living in the 1930s married to an arms dealer. All three stories intertwine to such a degree that the viewers, along with the dying woman, may start to confuse present reality from past indiscretions from wishful thinking. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, Rovi

It is not widely known that Argentina, which is thought to have harbored many ex-Nazis (such as Josef Mengele), is also the home of a large and well-established population of Jews who fled the pogroms of Russia near the turn of the century and settled in the Argentine countryside. This film tells the story of those early settlers, many of them new to farm work and all of them new to the horse-riding traditions of the region's cowboys ("gauchos"). Based on the book by Alberto Gerchunoff who was one of these immigrants. ~ Clarke Fountain, Rovi

This well-acted psychological drama was wildly popular in its native Argentina, in part because it was based on the best-selling novel Heroina by Emilio Rodrigue. With a dispassionate, measured tone, it tells the story of a well-to-do girl, Penny (Graciela Borges), who seeks psychiatric help after making a suicide attempt. She has made attempts to socialize with working-class people rather than her own peer-group but is unable to break through to them. Perhaps it is her own emotional stiffness. Things become much more lively for her once she gets to the analyst's couch. ~ Clarke Fountain, Rovi