Ten Favorite Movies Directed by “The Three Amigos”
(I’ve been trying to research the term “The Three Amigos” to see whether I ought to question it. It refers, at least in the English-speaking world, to the three most prominent Mexican film directors of our moment—Guillermo del Toro, Alejandro González Iñárritu, and Alfonso Cuarón—whose friendship is indeed real and dates back to the 1980s, when a Twilight Zone-style anthology series called La Hora Marcada introduced them to each other. This essay by Abel Muñoz Hénonin helps place the three of them and their careers in their social context and suggests that the term might have originated from a book about their films by Deborah Shaw. Here, in any case, are my ten favorite of those films, in order of preference.)
Children of Men (directed by Alfonso Cuarón, 2006)
The Devil’s Backbone (directed by Guillermo del Toro, 2001)
Y tu mamá también (directed by Alfonso Cuarón, 2001)
Pan’s Labyrinth (directed by Guillermo del Toro, 2006)
Amores perros (directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu, 2000)
Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) (directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu, 2014)
Cronos (directed by Guillermo del Toro, 1993)
Roma (directed by Alfonso Cuarón, 2018)
Gravity (directed by Alfonso Cuarón, 2013)
Sólo con tu pareja (directed by Alfonso Cuarón, 1991)
— January 9, 2021