AFI L.A. International Festival: Capsule Reviews

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:

‘Fable of the Beautiful Pigeon Fancier’

Brazil, 1988, 103 minutes 7:15 p.m. Just as in “Letters From the Park,” Gabriel Garcia Marquez based this screenplay on a two-page fragment from “Love in the Time of Cholera”; it’s a sensuous, cruel love story about a compulsive seducer with waxed mustache whose obsessive romanticism brings on catastrophe. Cinema Novo mainstay Ruy Guerra (“Erendira”) has turned into a master of gorgeous surfaces, but he never loses sight of the devastating social satire Marquez has secreted within his Scheherazade-style storytelling and jeweled metaphors. RECOMMENDED.