Presented by the International Latino Cultural Center, the 26th Chicago Latino Film Festival runs Friday, April 16, through Thursday, April 29, at Instituto Cervantes, 31 W. Ohio; Landmark’s Century Centre, 2828 N. Clark; and smaller venues throughout the city and suburbs. Tickets for most screenings are $10; $9 for students, seniors, and the disabled; and $8 for ILCC members. A festival pass, good for a dozen admissions, is $100, $80 for ILCC members. Following are selected films screening this week, in English and/or subtitled Spanish unless otherwise noted. For more information call 312-409-1757 or see latinoculturalcenter.org.
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Blood and Rain Damned if this Colombian drama doesn’t end with all the characters blood-smeared under a torrential rainfall. In the opening scene an oily but appealing cab driver (Quique Mendoza) gets his ass kicked by two thugs who work for a local drug lord; the same crew murdered his upright brother two weeks earlier, and they don’t want the cabbie getting any funny ideas about revenge. Meanwhile, a sizzling hot party girl (Gloria Montoya) hops from club to club in search of guys with cocaine (or, preferably, just the cocaine); after landing in the cabbie’s backseat, she gets sucked into his conflict with the bad guys. This works pretty well as a moody urban fable, but the slow pacing becomes a problem as director Jorge Navas tries to manufacture some suspense toward the end. 111 min. —J.R. Jones Sat 4/17, 6:45 PM, and Mon 4/19, 6:30 PM, Landmark’s Century Centre.
Last Stop 174 In June 2000, Brazilians were transfixed by a televised stand-off between Rio de Janeiro policemen and 22-year-old Sandro Rosa do Nascimento, a homeless petty criminal whose armed robbery attempt aboard a city bus had quickly degenerated into a hostage crisis. If this sounds familiar, you’ve probably seen Jose Padilha and Felipe Lacerda’s superb documentary Bus 174 (2002), which used the incident to unpack myriad social and economic ills in Rio. For some reason screenwriter Braulio Mantovani and director Bruno Barreto have decided to give the story another spin, this time as a partly fictionalized melodrama that follows Sandro from childhood to the climactic bus jacking. Barreto dutifully re-creates the 1993 massacre, witnessed by Sandro, in which cops killed several homeless boys on the plaza of a Catholic church, but his fabrications (most notably, a subplot about a poor woman who loses her infant to drug dealers, finds Jesus, and comes back years later looking for the boy) can’t help but pale in comparison to the earlier film’s jarring realism. 107 min. —J.R. Jones Fri 4/16, 9 PM; Tue 4/20, 8:45 PM; and Thu 4/22, 8:45 PM; Landmark’s Century Centre.
