Julio Bracho’s formally daring masterpiece, one of the most important melodramas of the decade, follows a fisherman’s daughter (the incomparable Ninón Sevilla) through a nightmare of exploitation and misery—along the way becoming a famous soubrette—in order to erase her father’s debts while she tries, again and again, to reunite with her true love (Armando Silvestre).

Tin Tan (Germán Valdés) and Gilberto Martínez Solares were a renowned cinematic duo, and The King of the Neighborhood (1949) is among their most celebrated collaborations: a delightfully charming comedy, as Martínez Solares himself described it, “about a good man who wants to be bad.”

The classic “grotesque farce” that launched a widely adored 33-film collaboration between the legendary Cantinflas (Mario Moreno) and director Miguel Melitón Delgado, The Unknown Policeman is a marvelously joke-a-minute comedy about mistaken identity.

Directed by Antonio Momplet and starring Julián Soler and the ever-stunning Maria Félix (pulling double duty as a blonde and a brunette, by turns sensual and powerful), Amok is a pictorially ravishing literary adaptation of love, madness and death during World War II.

A seminal masterpiece of the comedia ranchera, The Three Garcías follows Luis Antonio (iconic singer Pedro Infante), José Luis (Abel Salazar), and Luis Manuel (Víctor Manuel Mendoza) as a trio of quarrelsome cousins who compete for the attention of a beautiful American.

This musical-inflected pro-labor union comedy from Alejandro Galindo—a pioneering chronicler of the travails of workaday Mexicans—charts the chaos that erupts when a bus driver and his ticket-ripping coworker are suspended after deviating from their route. Starring David Silva and Fernando Soto “Mantequilla.”

María Félix and Fernando Soler star in this moody World War II-era espionage-melodrama that unfolds in a Mexico City teeming with dapper con artists, double agents, and refugees on the run.

Part biographical documentary, part pulpy boxing film, The Great Champion marvels at the life and unparalleled stamina of Luis Villanueva “Kid Azteca” (also known as Kid D.F., Kid México, or Kid Moctezuma), played by the welterweight champion himself.

Pueblerina, a key film from Emilio “el Indio” Fernández, is among his most eloquent variations on the rural melodrama, underpinned by themes of injustice, revenge, and redemption.

Fernando Méndez’s wildly entertaining gangster melodrama captured the magnetic on-screen presence of Víctor Parra (Wetbacks) and the hip gestures and jargon of an entire generation.

Alberto Gout, perhaps the master of the Rumberas film, reached the genre’s apex of depravity with Sensuality: a deliriously kitsch-smitten melodrama of sexual subjugation and perverse pleasures starring Ninón Sevilla.

This strikingly nuanced portrayal of sex work was the third and final feature film by Matilde Soto Landeta, one of the first women to helm a feature in Mexico.

Pelota player Marcos becomes a mob target when the brother of one of the adoring women in his orbit blackmails him into throwing some important matches. The action and subplots pile on fast and thick in Robert Gavaldón’s surrealistic film noir.

Cesar Romero is caught between Rebeca Iturbide (The Three Garcias, The Night Falls) and Katy Jurado (High Noon) in the first 3-D feature film ever produced in Mexico, a visually inventive and frequently funny swashbuckler set in the twilight years of Moorish Spain.

Writing in his autobiography, Buñuel recalled the basis of The River and Death, a bloody and scathingly contrarian pueblo-western made in the middle of his filmmaking career in Mexico (1947-65): “I’ve always been fascinated by the ease with which certain people can kill others, and this idea runs throughout the film in the form of a series of simple and apparently gratuitous murders.”

Alejandro Galindo’s high-strung melodrama-western about border crossing and undocumented immigrants is as timely and lacerating today as it was in 1955. Starring David Silva and Víctor Parra.

One of the greatest macabre comedies of Mexican cinema stars the uproariously brilliant Arturo de Córdova (The Kneeling Goddess) as an affable taxidermist who for 20 years has been psychologically tormented by his puritanical wife (Amparo Rivelles) until one day he starts planning the perfect murder….

Independently financed by Alejandro Galindo, The Mind and the Crime is a police procedural like you’ve never seen—boldly outlandish whatsit that veers radically from horror-noir to forensic realism to abstract-surrealist collage to police propaganda and back again.

This endlessly suggestive supernatural chiller concerns a housekeeper/witch (Isabela Corona) who concocts a beyond-the-grave revenge scheme after her goddaughter is murdered by her own philandering mad-doctor husband, who experiments on corpses.

In this cult film classic, which inspired so many other wrestling productions in its wake with its sui generis combination of exciting fight sequences, clever special effects, and sense of humor, El Santo is tasked with thwarting a group of lady vampires from kidnapping a professor’s daughter and marrying her to the devil.

For their third B. Traven adaptation together, Roberto Gavaldón and lead Ignacio Lópes Tarso recruited the frequent Luis Buñuel scenarist Julio Alejandro to craft this unsettling, surrealist-tinged melodrama with a certain Hitchcockian fondness for double lives.

Perhaps the pinnacle of Mexican camp, The Batwoman is a zippy, action-packed, delightfully deranged comic book movie that draws on everything from Batmania and The Creature from the Black Lagoon to the world of lucha libre to Mexico’s tourism industry. Starring Maura Monti.