MOVIE REVIEWS / L.A. FESTIVAL : Foreign Classics Highlight Weekend

Following are reviews of selected screenings in the Los Angeles Festival’s final weekend:

The Realm of Fortune

Mexico Sunday at 8 p.m., Melnitz Theater, UCLA This 1986 social melodrama has the inevitability of a nightmare. Director Arturo Ripstein’s tale--from a Juan Rulfo story--shows a truly horrifying rise, decline and fall: a sentimental, bumbling, childishly selfish town crier becomes a swaggering cockfighter, seducer and high-stakes gambler. But his wealth proves more squalid than his poverty. . . . Ripstein, with corrosive cunning, traps his protagonist in a quagmire of fetid success, a no-exit of splendid misery. The movie has a hypnotic rhythm, wonderfully seedy decor, and a crazy fairy-tale inevitability; some of Ripstein’s jokes are as savage as Bunuel’s.