The Mesilla Valley Film Society is a non-profit organization with a working board of directors and a volunteer staff, which presents alternative, foreign and independent film and video to the southern New Mexico and El Paso/Juarez areas.

The Skin I Live In

The Skin I Live In is a scary, sexy and terrifically twisted horror film from the artist known as Pedro Almodóvar, Spain’s stylish maestro of kink and flamboyant emotion. Skin reunites Almodóvar with Antonio Banderas for the first time since 1990’s Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! Director and star still bring out the wicked, badass best in each other.

Banderas plays Dr. Robert Ledgard, a widower plastic surgeon who uses his isolated mansion to hide a suicidal patient whom we see only in a head bandage and a body stocking. She’s called Vera (Elena Anaya), and when Robert is not experimenting on her with synthetic skin grafts, he’s observing her behind glass with a voyeuristic perversity that evokes Hitchcock’s 1958 masterpiece, Vertigo. Banderas is magnetic with a vengeance, the fire in his eyes a constant threat to the surgical precision of the scientist he plays. He’s a new-century Dr. Frankenstein and twice as bone-chilling for that. Vera has no memories; she’s a blank canvas on which Robert (and by extension the audience) does all the painting.

You can tell Vera badly wants out; she even tries to seduce Robert, who looks guilty but tempted. Robert’s housekeeper, Marilia (the excellent Marisa Paredes), is a fierce guard. That is, until her hood son Zeca (Roberto Álamo) breaks in (wearing a tiger mask) and decides to take carnal advantage of this beautiful bird in a gilded cage.

There’s a teasing allure in the way Almodóvar uncovers the secrets Robert hides. Adapting Thierry Jonquet’s novel Mygale, director and co-writer Almodóvar never lets the creeping terror obliterate the bruised humanity of the characters. Few directors have Almodóvar’s skill at swerving from outrageous camp to unspeakable terror without tipping into absurdity. Even when the film’s frigid elegance, perfectly captured by cinematographer José Luis Alcaine, becomes off-puttingly clinical, Almodóvar’s passion burns through. The skin he lives in is alive to challenge no matter what warped form it takes. rollingstone.com

Take Shelter

If you’ve seen Michael Shannon in Revolutionary Road or HBO’s Boardwalk Empire, you know he’s an actor who means business. In Take Shelter, a film that prides itself for the distance it keeps from multiplex formula, Shannon gives himself over completely to a complex role and leaves you shattered. He plays Curtis LaForche, a crew manager for an Ohio sand-mining company, husband to Samantha (Jessica Chastain) and father of their six-year-old daughter, Hannah (Tova Stewart), who is deaf.

Lately, Curtis has been having visions of an impending apocalypse, disturbing visions that estrange him from his family and his co-workers. Chastain’s quietly implosive performance breaks your heart as she searches Curtis’ eyes for the man she married. Writer-director Jeff Nichols, who worked with Shannon on Shotgun Stories, seems to breathe as one with this gifted actor. That’s all I’m going to say about Take Shelter, the better to let you get lost in its dark poetry and enveloping mystery. Nichols throws curveballs, but his film is unique and unforgettable, with brilliantly done sequences that share Curtis’ visions with the audience. Take Shelter has been nominated for ‘best feature’ for this year’s Independent Spirit Awards.  rollingstone.com

The Puzzle

A woman who obsessively pieces together jigsaw puzzles might not seem like the most promising subject for a movie.

And yet The Puzzle, from first-time Argentine writer-director Natalia Smirnoff, has its low-key charms. It’s the kind of movie that creeps up on you, and this is due almost entirely to its lead actress, María Onetto, who looks as though she actually could solve one of those 8,000-piece puzzles. María del Carmen (Onetto) is living out a dullish life as a housewife-drudge. When we first see her, at an extended family dinner gathering, she’s so busy scurrying back and forth from the kitchen that I mistook her for a maid. (My confusion was, I think, intentionally elicited.) María finally emerges from the kitchen with a 50th birthday cake and, surprise, it’s for her.

Her husband Juan (Gabriel Goity) is kindly but gruff. He’s very happy in his life to be waited on and doesn’t really pay too much attention to María’s emotional temperature. She also has two rambunctious, live-at-home sons, one of whom is seriously dating a vegetarian and wants to go with her to India.

María’s newfound expertise at jigsaw puzzles leads her to a wealthy bachelor, Roberto (Arturo Goetz), who is looking for a tournament partner. Without letting on to her family what she is up to, María meets twice a week with Roberto in his lavish home and together they practice their abundant skills in preparation for a local tournament.

It’s inevitable that Roberto should warm to María, who on the surface is rather remote and starchy. She is also attractive and without guile. Her skills, and her unorthodox way of solving the puzzles, give her a satisfaction missing from the rest of her not altogether unhappy life. But Onetto doesn’t overdo the joyousness. She doesn’t overdo anything, and this might seem like too inward an approach to character. It is only later on, when she loosens up a bit and allows her successes to sink in, that María seems womanly in a way that makes us realize she was like that all along.

There are wonderful nuances all the way through. It’s both funny and touching that one of María’s favorite puzzles is an enigmatic portrait of Nefertiti. With her own enigmatic allure, María is the queen of puzzlers. csmonitor.com

The Interrupters

No concept in the critical lexicon has been more devalued and debased than "inspirational." The term has been so misused; it’s just about lost all meaning. A film that makes that word real and vital has to be special. The Interrupters is such a film.

A surprisingly moving documentary, The Interrupters paradoxically succeeds because it refuses to soften reality. A look at people trying at the ground level to stop street violence in Chicago, it tears at your heart with its depiction of the intractability of the problem. But it simultaneously insists, and makes you believe, that change is possible one person at a time.

The organization that moved both men is a Chicago-based group called CeaseFire, which believes that violence is both learned behavior and akin to an infectious disease: People who give in to it infect other people. The goal is to stop violence at the source, the group motto a deceptively simple one: "Stop. Killing. People."

CeaseFire employs a small cadre it calls violence interrupters, individuals who have become expert at defusing incendiary situations. As Tio Hardiman, director of CeaseFire Illinois puts it: "We’re not trying to dismantle gangs. Our goal is to stop killings. We’re trying to save a life."

Needless to say, not just anyone can do this work, and when the interrupters succeed it is because they’ve been there themselves: They’re people with major street credibility who’ve lived the violent life and left it behind. As Hardiman says at one of the group’s large weekly meetings, "There’s over 500 years of prison time at this table. That’s a lot of wisdom." latimes.com