Death in Granada

The fate of Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca under the brutal Franco regime is the subject of this political thriller. Esai Morales plays an expatriate writer named Ricardo who returns to his hometown Granada in 1954 to find out what happened to Lorca (Andy Garcia), his boyhood hero. With Franco's forces still in power, Ricardo meets a lot of official resistance, takes a few beatings, and defies the wishes of his own host (Jeroen Krabbé), an army colonel who was thickly involved in the torture and assassinations of the 1936 revolution. The closer the intrepid journalist gets to the truth of Lorca's disappearance, however, the more gray that truth becomes, and the more obscure the line between heroism and villainy. This film by Marcos Zurinaga suffers from a bit of miscalculation--Morales's character is simply not interesting enough to hold the center of the story and be our window into the great Lorca--but it is nonetheless startling and tragic in its revelation of complicated truths. As Lorca, Garcia is the picture of nobility, and supporting roles by Krabbé, Edward James Olmos, and Miguel Ferrer add a great deal of dramatic texture. --Tom Keogh