Religious persecution of Jews, by Catholics, in 16th-century Mexico -- handled without the usual Joan of Arc histrionics, moral victories, and rooting interests. Directed by Arturo Ripstein with a surrealist's inscrutable poker face, and photographed by Jorge Stahl with a clear, sculptural light bathing the stiffly costumed figures and the rugged wood, stone, plaster surfaces, this movie walks very softly, passively, fatalistically. There's a spooky sense of formality and unmaliciousness about the torture of the Jews and an equally spooky sense of fickleness about their resistance. Religious conviction, here, is not an assertion of free will or faith, but rather a kind of compulsion, like kleptomania, which is easy to deny, under pressure of torture or the third degree, but which is impossible to eradicate. Cynical disguised as clinical, Ripstein's view of the dogma-against-dogma conflict is drawn perversely to such bizarre rituals as the grisly self-circumcision in the forest and the public castigation of blasphemers in which differently designed duncecaps are assigned to each category of sinners: witches, adulterers, fornicators, etc. With Jorge Luke and Diana Bracho. (1975) — Duncan Shepherd