Arturo Ripstein's remake of The Honeymoon Killers, a true story of multiple murder, has been flourishingly transplanted into a Mexican setting (genteel shabby interiors, barren parched landscapes) and thoroughly individualized. We still have the corpulent nurse -- a perfectly pear-shaped single mother to two small children, and a romantic fantasist whose closest connection to the Real Thing is to thrust the hand of a vegetative patient down the front of her dress. We still have, too, the smarmy con man who targets love-starved money-laden widows, and who enfolds himself in fantasies of his own in the form of an affected Castilian accent and a toupee ("Nobody knows I'm deformed"). And we have a match made in hell when the latter, fantasizing in plain black and white, depicts himself in a Lonely Hearts classified as looking like Charles Boyer. The former has a thing for Charles Boyer, and a glossy photo of him on her bedroom wall, and a readiness to drop off her kids at the orphanage should they get in the way. The spectacle of these two defective people clinging as desperately to each other as to their own distorted self-images is no more -- and no less -- than a ghastly caricature of the average romantic couple. Ripstein traces their highly improvisatory and unlucrative crime spree in elegant and graceful long-takes, with a restlessly prowling, probing, yet always sure-footed camera: more like the motion of an old-fashioned four-wheeled dolly than of the new free-floating Steadicam. This economical and smoothly unemphatic style acts as a buffer against the jolts of this appalling, funny, pitiful, perverse, lurid, and bloody tale. Ripstein has the good sense never to titter at his own jokes, never to gasp at his own surprises, never to drool over his own indelicacies. Deadpan, unflappable, unblinking, he is a totally trustworthy guide through the most treacherous territory. Regina Orozco, Daniel Gimenez Cacho, Marisa Paredes. (1996) — Duncan Shepherd