GurlyIamBeach Instant Favorite.

Matialth Good concept, poorly executed.

Humbersi The first must-see film of the year.

Rosie Searle It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

Claudio Carvalho In Mexico, the wealthy, religious and leery middle-aged Francisco Galván (Arturo de Córdova) is battling in the justice to retrieve the possession of real-estates that belonged to his ancestors in the beginning of the Twentieth Century. When he sees the young Gloria Milalta (Delia Garcés) in the church, he becomes obsessed by the woman, unsuccessfully courting and stalking her. He follows her and sees Gloria with her fiancé and his acquaintance, the engineer Raul Conde, having lunch in a restaurant. Francisco schedules a ball in his mansion and invites Raul and along the night, he seduces Gloria. They get married and in the honeymoon, Gloria discovers that Francisco is virgin and has a sick jealousy for her. Along the years, the emotionally unbalanced Francisco oscillates between a passionate husband and a disturbed paranoid until the day Gloria leaves him and he has a mental breakdown. "El" is a very simple and melodramatic film of Luis Buñuel about sick jealousy and paranoia. The plot shows the usual trademark of this great director, with religious element and the surrealistic paranoia of the lead character in the church, but is not original like most of his features. Arturo de Córdova and Delia Garcés have stunning performances, giving credibility to their characters. My vote is eight.Title (Brazil): "O Alucinado" ("The Hallucinated One")

Michael_Elliott El (1953) *** 1/2 (out of 4) A wealthy, highly religious middle aged virgin (Arturo de Cordova) marries a woman (Delia Garces) he believes to be his true calling but things soon start to fall apart when the man becomes overdone with jealousy and obsession. This was my first Luis Bunuel film and while the story isn't anything too original, the direction certainly puts it in a league of its own. The claustrophobic ending was very well handled and highly memorable as was the performance by de Cordova who really gets inside this characters head.

zetes SLIGHT SPOILERSEl is similar in style to other productions made by Bunuel in Mexico. It reminded me of both Los Olvidados and Nazarin. Unlike in the early or late films, the style is more realistic and more akin to melodrama. In fact, all three of these films each contain a single surrealist scene. Los Olvidados has the dream, Nazarin has the fantasy where the wife bites off her husband's lower lip, and El has, well, El's surrealist moment comes near the end and is too good to give away. If you've seen the film, I'm sure you know to what I refer. El can be divided up into three easily identifiable sections, each about a half-hour each. The first is told from the point of view of an aristocrat who catches sight of a beautiful woman in church. It's love at first sight, but he soon finds out that she is the wife of a friend of his. At this point, I was fully expecting a cheapy adulterous romance picture, a soap opera. That was the genre that was dominating Mexican cinemas at the time. Luckily, the film doesn't follow a predictable route. There is at this point an elipsis of time, as that first man runs into the woman. He innocently offers her a ride home. Grudgingly, she accepts. On the ride home, she tells him of how her husband's jealously is destroying her. He's an extremely paranoid man, and he has actually threatened to murder her on two separate occasions. She finds opposition everywhere as she is looking for help. The third section of the film is told from the point of view of the husband. His jealousy is starting to lead him off a cliff. The title of the film actually refers to him. "El" is the masculine, singular, definite article in Spanish.Bunuel had a gift for endings. El's is as good as that of Nazarin or Viridiana. By the way, a bit of trivia about that final image: the actor in the cloak at the end of the film, walking down the path, is not the same one who played Francisco in the rest of the film. It's Bunuel. 9/10.

nunculus This tale of a pathologically jealous husband, whose delusions of cuckoldry teeter over the edge into madness, ranks with BELLE DE JOUR and the early surrealist films as the first rank of the Bunuel canon. The ending, which has audiences screaming out loud in a mixture of gruesome delight and horror, would probably drive Brian DePalma to death by alcohol if he saw it. Brian, don't watch, okay?