THE FORMAL RANGE
Latin American cinema is a vast and internally diverse tradition that Western film criticism tends to approach either through the Hollywood-adjacent (Alfonso Cuarón, Guillermo del Toro, Alejandro González Iñárritu - the so-called 'Three Amigos' of the early 2000s) or through isolated canonical moments (the Brazilian Cinema Novo, the political cinema of the 1960s and 70s). Neither approach adequately represents the tradition. The guide below maps the major national traditions and identifies the essential entry points.
BRAZIL - CINEMA NOVO AND ITS INHERITANCE
The Brazilian Cinema Novo (New Cinema) of the 1960s is the most internationally significant Latin American film movement. Glauber Rocha, Nelson Pereira dos Santos, Ruy Guerra - a generation responding to Italian neorealism and the French New Wave while developing a specifically Brazilian formal vocabulary rooted in the poverty and cultural complexity of the Brazilian Northeast.
Glauber Rocha's Barravento (1962) and Black God, White Devil (1964) are the formal foundation. Rocha's theoretical text 'An Esthetic of Hunger' (1965) articulated the Cinema Novo argument: that the cinema of an underdeveloped country should reflect the violence and poverty of that underdevelopment formally, not aesthetically domesticate it for international consumption. The argument is still the most radical formal position taken by any Latin American film movement.
The contemporary Brazilian thread runs through Fernando Meirelles (City of God, 2002 - the most internationally accessible Brazilian film of the post-Cinema Novo era), Walter Salles (Central Station, 1998; The Motorcycle Diaries, 2004), and Kleber Mendonça Filho (Aquarius, 2016; Bacurau, 2019 - the most formally significant Brazilian film of the last decade).
ARGENTINA - THE DEEP TRADITION
Argentine cinema has produced two major formal traditions. The first is the political cinema of the 1960s and 70s - Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino's 'Third Cinema' movement, articulated in their 1969 manifesto 'Towards a Third Cinema' and embodied in La Hora de los Hornos (1968), a four-hour revolutionary documentary that was shown clandestinely under military rule.
The second is the contemporary Argentine New Wave that emerged in the late 1990s - Pablo Trapero, Lucrecia Martel, Lisandro Alonso, Carlos Sorín - a generation making formally minimalist, psychologically intense films that are the most consistently acclaimed Argentine cinema since the 1960s. Lucrecia Martel is the essential figure: La Ciénaga (2001), The Holy Girl (2004), The Headless Woman (2008) are the three films that most completely demonstrate what Argentine cinema can do formally - slow, precise, formally about the discomfort of class and gender in the Argentine bourgeoisie.
MEXICO - COMMERCIAL POWER AND ART HOUSE AMBITION
The Mexican Golden Age (1930s–1950s) produced a commercial film industry that was, for several decades, the most significant Spanish-language cinema in the world. Luis Buñuel spent a productive decade making Mexican films - The Young and the Damned (Los Olvidados, 1950), El (1953), Nazarín (1959) - that are formally more accomplished than most of his Spanish work and formally central to any understanding of what surrealism in cinema can produce.
The contemporary Mexican cinema that reached international attention in the 2000s - Alfonso Cuarón's Y Tu Mamá También (2001), Alejandro González Iñárritu's Amores Perros (2000) - is formally more accessible than the Buñuel work and culturally more specific. Carlos Reygadas (Post Tenebras Lux, 2012) and Michel Franco (New Order, 2020; Sundown, 2021) represent the contemporary Mexican art house tradition at its most formally serious.
CHILE, COLOMBIA, AND THE BROADER TRADITION
Pablo Larraín's trilogy about Chilean political history - Tony Manero (2008), Post Mortem (2010), No (2012) - is the most formally coherent engagement with the Pinochet era in cinema. Spencer (2021), his English-language Princess Diana film, demonstrates the formal range available when the historical/political register is applied to an entirely different cultural context.
Colombian cinema has developed significant formal ambition in the last decade - Ciro Guerra's Embrace of the Serpent (2015, Academy Award nominee) and Birds of Passage (2018, co-directed with Cristina Gallego) are the most internationally visible entries. Venezuelan, Peruvian, and Ecuadorian cinema are developing traditions with growing international festival presence but limited UK distribution.
The Brazilian Cinema Novo (New Cinema) of the 1960s is the most internationally significant Latin American film movement.