Remembering Selena

Seventeen years ago today, Texas-born Mexican-American singer-songwriter Selena Quintanilla -- a budding superstar poised to make a major breakthrough with first English-language album -- was taken from us all too soon at age 23. Here is a link to a 1996 Los Angeles Times story I wrote after visiting the San Antonio set of Selena -- the biopic that Gregory Nava intended as a tribute to the fallen star. Even though, as Nava admitted to me at the time,"this is a movie I wish I wasn't making." And here is Selena herself, live and in concert -- at the Houston Astrodome.

TIFF Review: Backyard

An impassioned yet prosaic fact-based melodrama, Backyard registers undeniable impact by providing a dramatically sound, emotionally satisfying partial solution to a mystery that remains unresolved in the real world. Trouble is, this all-too-neat wrap-up may cost director Carlos Carrera points with the very audiences most likely to appreciate the verisimilitude that prevails throughout much of this picture about the unsolved murders of hundreds of women over the past several years in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. Still, the drama -- recently selected as Mexico's foreign-language film Oscar submission -- should enjoy a warmer reception than Bordertown, the underachieving 2006 Jennifer Lopez vehicle that covered the same territory. You can read my Variety review here.