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One of the peaks of subversive Mexican director Arturo Ripstein’s cinema of outsiders, this deliriously perverse portrait of obsessive love dares audiences to see the humanity in the most sordid of antiheroes. A lonely-hearts advertisement leads lusty nurse Coral (Regina Orozco) to Nicolás (Daniel Giménez Cacho), a con man with whom she forges an increasingly intense, twisted bond as they crisscross 1940s Mexico, robbing and murdering the women he seduces. Blending sweeping melodrama with macabre humor and eruptions of berserk violence, Ripstein transforms one of the most infamous true-crime stories of the twentieth century into a haunting vision of how love can give way to madness.

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Film Info
Mexico
1996
136 minutes
Color
1.85:1
Spanish
Spine #1285
DIRECTOR-APPROVED 4K UHD + BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES
New 4K digital restoration of the director’s cut, supervised and approved by director Arturo Ripstein, with 2.0 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack
One 4K UHD disc of the film and one Blu-ray with the film and special features
New interviews with Ripstein and screenwriter Paz Alicia Garciadiego
Panel discussion from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences featuring Ripstein and Garciadiego, hosted by film scholar Cristina Venegas
Trailer
PLUS: An essay by film scholar Haden Guest

New cover by Owen Smith

Cool acquisition, and glad they waited for the DC to materialize (which just happened, outside of festivals, I believe). I watched the original cut earlier this year and liked it a lot, but the extra material in the DC is supposed to turn this even more insane, which is hard to imagine!

Great cover!

A pleasant surprise indeed. Jim Hoberman raved about this back in the day.

Deep Crimson is of course a version of the same true crime case that inspired The Honeymoon Killers.

It's interesting that they didn't include the version that's been circulating forever along with the DC that nearly nobody has seen, especially since this new one contains quite a bit of extra footage. I have no doubt it's an improvement, but still odd

I just picked up Time To Die last week & was thinking about how Criterion could step up its coverage of Latin & South American film. I looked at Ripstein's extensive career and surprised there were no blu-rays for most of his work & that several would be nice Criterion additions. Let's hope this becomes a trend, because Victims In Sin was more than a year ago. (I've been trying to learn Spanish so more titles from Spain would also be nice).

A new introduction with Ari Aster has been added to the release.