For years I've had a copy of the grimly surreal, false-color poster for the Mexican heist noir CUATRO CONTRA EL MUNDO in my collection of Mexican film posters, while waiting in vain for the film, which features (among others) Mexican noir stalwarts Leticia Palma and Victor Parra, to surface for a screening in the USA.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nfs2J_eoTOs
Non-subtitled version of CUATRO CONTRA EL MUNDO

The film was screened at the Morelia Festival in 2014, with the scene image above used as a teaser for its screening at the Berlinale the following year. Yet in the intervening years no "new" vintage Mexican noirs have made it to US screens--even the films screened by Eddie Muller in NC 18 were simply the residue of the original batch of Mexican noirs (mostly directed by Roberto Gavaldon) that had been screened at Morelia in the early years of the 2010s.

A new batch of films from directors Alejandro Galindo and Juan Bustillo Oro have been presented at Morelia in 2021 and 2022; there is reportage on those from Criterion authors Imogen Smith (now, of course, editor-in-chief of the NOIR CITY e-zine) and Will Noah. In her most recent essay (1/23), Smith covers Galindo, with a few side trips into more familiar films from better-known directors (e.g. Bunuel's EL). Will Noah, writing earlier (2/22) covers the work of mercurial director Juan Bustillo Oro, who eventually linked his initial horror film impulse into an idiosyncratic version of noir as a kind of south-of-the-border Val Lewton, most notably in the 1950 film with Arturo de Cordova, EL HOMBRE SIN ROSTRO (1950), which was the concluding film in our MIDCENTURY MADNESS series at the Roxie last year.

Here are the links to those articles:

Smith on Galindo
https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/8053-bright-lights-dark-dreams-alejandro-galindo-in-morelia?utm_source=braze&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=current-newsletter&utm_content=february-05-2023

Noah on Bustillo Oro
https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/7713-macabre-in-morelia-exploring-the-dark-side-of-juan-bustillo-oro

Good work from these authors, but it seems absurd that these films cannot get brought to the US in a more expeditious manner. We keep hearing about rights issues regarding vintage Mexican films, but that didn't prevent the original batch from making appearances: if Eddie doesn't "stay in lane" with a 1949 series for NC 21 in early '24, maybe he can try to bring some of these films to his audienes around the US. While it's nice to read about them and discover that they're in sufficient shape to be screened, it's also high time that they show up in the USA.