A Mexican trailblazer

Los Olvidades
NFT, SE1
***

Mexico may have its political, economic and social difficulties but that hasn't lessened its sex appeal.

Like Gael García Bernal, the poster boy for his homeland's film industry (with his own strand in the NFT's current season, Mexican Cinema Now), Mexican cinema is masculine, bolshy, complex yet endearingly flawed - and exceptionally good-looking.

Since Alejandro González Iñárritu's Amores Perros snarled on to our screens in 2000, Mexico has been enjoying a golden period of unusual films.

Iñárritu and his cohorts have a good example to follow: Luis Buñuel's 1950 exercise in cinema vérité Los Olvidados (The Young And The Damned), a loose, fierce, fictionalisation about Mexico City street gangs.

Based on Buñuel's impressions of his adopted home as well as actual cases and shot for a pittance, Los Olvidados follows a gang of abandoned young in the city slums as they grind down the weakest of their number with Darwinian efficiency.

The international critics raved; the Mexicans walked out in outrage. The politics are, sadly, still relevant - but so is the adulation.