The 28th Chicago Latino Film Festival continues Friday through Thursday, April 20 through 26. Tickets for most screenings are $11, $10 for members of the International Latino Cultural Center of Chicago; a festival pass, good for 12 general admissions, is $100, $80 for ILCC members. Following are selected screenings; for a full schedule see latinoculturalcenter.org.
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Chinese Take-Away In the opening scene of this Argentinean comedy, a cow drops out of the sky and kills a young woman on a rowboat just as her lover is about to propose marriage. It’s a gag straight out of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, but somehow writer-director Sebastian Borensztein manages to enlarge the movie’s scope beyond the narrow parameters of farce. The irascible owner of a Buenos Aires hardware store (Ricardo Darin of The Secret in Their Eyes) grudgingly takes in a lost and confused Chinese tourist who speaks no Spanish but has a local street address tattooed on his arm. Both men are haunted by traumatic pasts, and the fact that this story element works at all says a great deal about Darin’s magnetic presence and the breadth of Borensztein’s black humor. In subtitled Spanish and purposely unsubtitled Mandarin. —J.R. Jones 90 min. Screens as part of the festival’s “Tribute to Argentina.” Tickets are $75, $65 for ILCC members, and include a reception after the screening. Wed 4/25, 6 PM, River East 21
Under My Nails A young nail technician (Kisha Burgos) is both frightened and excited by the violent sex she overhears in the apartment next to hers, and even climbs out on her window ledge to spy on the husband and wife going at it. After the wife disappears, the heroine is swept into a similarly rough relationship with the husband (Ivan Camilo) and begins to suspect him of having murdered his spouse. With all the creepy S-M overtones, this erotic thriller from Puerto Rico initially reminded me of Michael Rowe’s disturbing Mexican feature Leap Year (2010), but eventually it settles into the more mundane did-he-or-didn’t-he dynamic of such Hollywood chestnuts as Gaslight and Suspicion. Ari Maniel Cruz directed; the dialogue shifts continually from English to Spanish, both subtitled. —J.R. Jones 100 min. Thu 4/19, 6:45 PM, and Sat 4/21, 7 PM, Landmark’s Century Centre
