Twilight

The second of Mexican noir’s flores del mal after The Kneeling Goddess, Twilight fittingly inhabits a world of darkness and shadows, where rational thought rails against irrational desire—and fails. Arturo de Córdova stars again as a successful white-collar professional whose views on Mexico’s progress become distracted by a destructive passion for his best friend’s wife, the alluring Gloria Marín. “Don’t stay in the light, come into the shadow,” she murmurs. Astoundingly shot by cinematographer Alex Phillips, who frames Marín with eroticized close-ups that recall Dietrich and von Sternberg, this nocturnal noir finds poetry in despair.