Cinco de Mayo Movies

From rampaging mummies to Salma Hayek's global debut, 5 great movies to toast Cinco de Mayo

What should a cineaste watch while celebrating Cinco de Mayo? There are mucho options, to be sure, but here are five diversas peliculas that run the gamut from warm and fuzzy to fast and furious.

Like Water for Chocolate
One of the highest-grossing Mexican films of all time, director Alfonso Arau’s seductively delicious 1992 delight — based on the popular novel by Laura Esquivel, his wife at the time of the movie’s production — is an imaginative mixture of magical realism and romantic melodrama.

Tita (Lumi Cavazos), the youngest of three sisters in 1910 Mexico, falls in love with the handsome Pedro (Marco Leonardi). But she is bound by family tradition to remain unmarried, to care for her domineering widowed mother (Regina Torne). So Tita sublimates her passion into her cooking, often with fantastical results, in a decades-spanning tale that passionately extols culinary skills as art and alchemy.

Midaq Alley
Veteran Mexican director Jorge Fons audaciously (and, more important, successfully) transposed the acclaimed novel by Egyptian-born Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz from 1940s Cairo to then-contemporary Mexico City in this award-winning and heart-wrenching 1994 drama, the first film to make global audiences take note of the fiery phenom that is Salma Hayek.

Fons and scriptwriter Vicente Lenero deftly entwine multiple storylines while following the fates of Rutilio (Ernesto Gomez Cruz), a gruffly macho tavern owner who develops a taste for handsome young men; Chava (Juan Manuel Bernal), Rutilio’s adult son, who impulsively defends his “family honor” by nearly murdering the object of his father’s affection; Alma (Hayek), a strong-willed beauty who is lured into a squalid life of prostitution; Abel (Bruno Bichir), an earnest but penniless young barber who loves, but cannot save, Alma; and Susanita (Margarita Sanz), a spinsterish apartment-house owner who looks for love in all the wrong places.

Desperado
At once a straight-shooting action-adventure and a tongue-in-cheek riff on such high-testosterone entertainment, Desperado is Robert Rodriguez’s immensely entertaining 1995 follow-up to his near-legendary El Mariachi, the micro-budget 1992 sleeper about a hapless musician who’s mistaken for a notorious hit man in a hard-scrabble border town.

This rock-the-house semi-sequel stars Antonio Banderas as the mariachi, who has evolved from a clueless innocent into a jaunty badass. How bad are we talking about? Early in the action, Banderas' mariachi, all decked out in bandit black, scampers across the bar in a dingy cantina, a blazing gun in either hand, mowing down bad guys as he twirls his arms this way, that way, any way, like a flamboyant bullfighter facing death in the afternoon.

Eventually, he runs out of bullets — even a fabulist such as Rodriguez is willing to acknowledge the basic concept of supply and demand — but that doesn't stop him for long. In just a blink of an eye, he's reloaded and ready for more action.

And when a particularly poor marksmen fails to hit his intended target, the Mariachi razzes: "You missed me!" There is only one rational response to such a spectacle: "Wow! Cool!" Just as there is only one logical reaction to Salma Hayek (yes, her again) as a sexy bookstore owner (no kidding) who becomes the mariachi’s ally and lover: bubba-hubba!

Pulling Strings
Think of it as an old-fashioned love song rearranged to a mariachi beat, and you’ll know what to expect from this improbably charming bilingual rom-com. Currently on DVD and VOD after a 2013 theatrical release, it serves as a swell showcase for Mexican TV and film star Jaime Camil, who’s perfectly cast and effortlessly engaging as a Mexico City single dad and struggling (but non-lethal) mariachi who falls for a U.S. embassy worker (Laura Ramsey) while seeking a visa for his young daughter (Renata Ybarra).

The plot has something to do with the search for a missing laptop containing classified information, and something else to do with the sometimes stormy relationship between the embassy worker and her meddlesome mom (Stockard Channing). But the contrived storyline is merely an excuse for the two leads to sample everything that is photogenic and/or scrumptious in Mexico City, which the movie would have you believe is the best place in the world for attracted opposites to fall in love.

Wrestling Women vs. The Aztec Mummy
There was a point during the 1960s when it seemed like the only Mexican movies getting wide circulation in the United States were indifferently dubbed, ultra-low-budget horror flicks that local TV stations employed to plug holes in weekend and late-night program schedules. There were vampires movies in which rubber bats were held aloft by conspicuously visible strings, genre-mixing misadventures in which masked wrestlers grappled with mad sculptors and va-va-voom vampires — and this jaw-dropping, mind-numbing 1964 camp classic, a kinda-sorta sequel to The Robot vs. The Aztec Mummy (1958) that surpasses its predecessor as a must-see Z-movie for the heartiest connoisseurs of Le Bad Cinema.

It’s all about, well, you got these women wrestlers named Loretta Venus (Lorena Velázquez) and Golden Rubi (Elizabeth Campbell). And they tangle with this evil Asian crime lord named the Black Dragon, who’s trying to retrieve a golden necklace from an ancient tomb that’s inconveniently guarded by Tezomac, the reanimated mummy of an Aztec sorcerer who can turn himself into a bloodsucking bat or a humongous tarantula. But then …

You think I’m making this up, don’t you? Well, get a load of this. And don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Salma Hayek and Antonio Banderas in Desperado.

Desperado movie scene with Salma Hayek and Antonio Banderas

Courtesy photo

Salma Hayek and Antonio Banderas in Desperado.

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Movie Review

Matt Damon and Ben Affleck team up for Netflix crime thriller The Rip

Photo by Claire Folger/Netflix

Ben Affleck and Matt Damon in The Rip.

For as closely tied together as Matt Damon and Ben Affleck are, it might come as a surprise how few times they’ve led a movie together. They’ve appeared alongside each other in Good Will Hunting, The Last Duel, and Air, but the only time they were on equal footing in a story was Kevin Smith’s Dogma. So the fact that they are the two true stars of the new Netflix movie The Rip makes it a rare opportunity for the longtime friends to square off against each other.

Damon and Affleck play Lt. Dane Dumars and Detective Sgt. J.D Byrne, respectively, the two highest ranking members of a Miami police department squad that specializes in drug and drug money raids. A tragedy to begin the film already has the team - which includes Detectives Mike Ro (Steven Yeun), Numa Baptiste (Teyana Taylor), and Lolo Salazar (Catalina Sandina Moreno) - on edge, with the FBI and DEA breathing down their neck.

Going off a tip, Dumars gathers the team to raid a house in nearby Hialeah that is supposed to have a stash of a relatively small amount of money. But when they get to the house occupied only by Desiree Molina (Sasha Calle), they soon discover that there’s close to $20 million there instead. The team, required by law to count the money on site, must not only fight the urge to skim a little off the top for themselves, but also worry about the Cartel and other agencies that might want a slice of the pie.

Written and directed by Joe Carnahan, the film is a surprisingly effective crime thriller made even better by its high-quality cast, which also includes Kyle Chandler as a DEA agent. The story is designed for the audience to not know who’s trustworthy until the last possible second, and the various twists and turns it takes are well done, with barely a hint of narrative cheating.

Taking place entirely at night, the mood is set right from the start, with the only surprise being that Carnahan didn’t add in rain for extra effect. He keeps things tense with a number of subtle elements, including having the house located in a seemingly deserted cul-de-sac. This allows for the characters to remain on high alert at all times, with anything out of the ordinary - an unexpected noise, a flashing light, etc. - adding to the stress of the situation.

The only element that could have used a bit more of a punch-up is the characterization. The story is set up to cast suspicion on almost everybody, making it tougher to understand exactly what type of person each of them is. As the two leads, more time is spent with Dumars and Byrne, leaving everyone else with slightly underwhelming arcs. It’s to the credit of the actors that everyone else below Damon and Affleck is still compelling.

Damon and Affleck play their sometimes friendly, sometimes adversarial roles well, showing an ease together that’s a result of their friendship and the acting skills they’ve honed over 30+ years. Taylor, an Oscar hopeful for One Battle After Another, and Oscar nominee/Emmy winner Yeun have a pedigree that elevates their supporting roles. Chandler, Moreno, and Calle each get just enough to demonstrate why they were cast in their respective roles.

Damon and Affleck have had their individual ups and downs throughout their careers, but when they choose to work together, the results are usually good-to-great, as they are in The Rip. It’s a different take on a crime thriller that features a story that will keep viewers guessing until the very end.

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The Rip is now streaming on Netflix.

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