AFI Fest Highlights

Following are capsule reviews of today’s screenings in the American Film Institute Los Angeles International Film Festival at the Cineplex Odeon Century Plaza Cinemas: ‘Macho Dancer’

The Philippines, 1988, 100 minutes 7 p.m. Filipino film-maker Lino Brocka is a minor master of violent, sentimental melodramas, usually with left-wing political undercurrents. That description fits this movie, but what makes it unusual is its milieu: the twilit Manila world of gay bars, male hustlers and “macho dancers�--whose soapy, hip-rolling, nude and quasi-nude routines make up a lot of its footage. Brocka spins a typical young-man-from-the-provinces gangster plot, but he doesn’t stint on depicting the underworld nor the political and police corruption that fuels it; if he falls at last into gun-toting melodramatics, its probably the price of knowing one’s metier. RECOMMENDED.