Enrico Garcia Alvarez Movies

The great screen surrealist Luis Buñuel co-wrote and directed this dark, bitterly witty satire. A group of people in formal dress arrives at an elegantly appointed home for a dinner party. However, once dinner is over and the guests retire to the drawing room, they discover that the servants have gone away, and for some reason they cannot leave. There is no explanation why -- there are no locked doors or barred windows preventing them from going home -- but the guests are convinced that they're stranded. Left to their own devices, they slowly but gradually degenerate into genteel savagery, taking an axe to a water pipe for drinking water, killing and eating a sheep that was to be part of the post-dinner entertainment, hiding the bodies of dead guests in the closet, dabbling in witchcraft, and burning the furniture. Buñuel's dry, quixotic wit is abundantly displayed in this film. Leading the cast was Silvia Pinal, the renowned actress who starred in several of Buñuel's Mexican films (she was married to noted producer Gustavo Alatriste, who produced several films with Buñuel). Other than the short subject Simon of the Desert, El Angel Exterminador proved to be Buñuel's last film made in his adopted homeland. ~ Mark Deming, Rovi

This is a well-made religious film on the miraculous appearances of the Virgin of Guadelupe to a converted Aztec, Juan Diego, in 1531. The Aztecs had a temple constructed to the Earth Mother, Tonantzin on Tepeyac Hill when the Spaniards razed it to the ground as a part of their campaign to destroy the native religion. Six years after Quauhtlatoatzin was baptized with the name Juan Diego (played by Jorge Martinez de Hoyos), he was on Tepeyac Hill when a vision of Tonantzin/the Virgin of Guadelupe appeared to him, asking him to construct a church on the site. (Recent excavations show that this world-famous basilica is built over ancient ruins.) The Bishop refused to believe him. So on her fourth and last appearance to Juan Diego, the Virgin told him to gather some roses growing there (roses never grew on the hill, were foreign to this region), wrap them up in his cloak, and take them to the Bishop. When he did so, the roses came tumbling out of the cloak to reveal an imprint of the Virgin on the material. The cloak and its image are still on display in the Basilica today. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, Rovi