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Humanity’s obsession with crimes (especially true crimes) has existed since, well, crimes were taking place. One of the most popular shows centered around true crimes, Crime Patrol, has been airing on TV for the past 2 decades with a whopping 2000+ episodes under its belt. Then there’s Netflix, which has sort of carved a niche for itself by unpacking the reasoning behind a crime with shows and movies like Mindhunter, Extremely Wicked Shocking Evil and Vile, Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story, House of Secrets: The Burari Deaths, The Indrani Mukerjea Story, and Sector 36. Somewhere along the way, the aforementioned obsession evolved into a fascination for killers, with people dressing up as these real-life monsters on Halloween. In Her Place takes this intrigue regarding killers to the next level, but does it have anything new to say about this subgenre? Let’s find out.

Maite Alberdi’s In Her Place,...

The wonderful Raymond Carver story “Neighbors” perfectly evoked the strange out-of-body feeling that can come from occupying another person’s home when they’re not in it — the transient thrill of living someone else’s life, and the accompanying sense that it’s a little bigger and brighter than your own. That pang, at once delicious and dismaying, colors “In Her Place,” a peculiar mixture of true-crime riff, domestic melodrama and feminist fable that marks an uneasy venture into fiction for celebrated Chilean docmaker Maite Alberdi, who landed Oscar nominations for both “The Mole Agent” and “The Eternal Memory.”

There’s more shared DNA than you might think between Alberdi’s latest and her previous documentary work. In particular, the mixture of procedural storytelling, old-school genre tropes and whimsical human comedy that shaped the hard-to-classify hybrid “The Mole Agent,” a whodunnit-fashioned nursing home study, surfaces again in “In Her Place.

If Chilean auteur Pablo Larraín displayed one constant over the course of a stunningly multifarious filmography since his breakout sophomore feature “Tony Manero” (2006), it’s his inquisitiveness pitched at the fault lines of politics and family. He sinks his teeth deep—so deep—into that curiosity in his luminous and pensively funny political satire “El Conde,” a fiercely original genre outing that imagines notorious Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet as a centuries-old vampire and inventively considers the perpetual, shape-shifting nature of evil that goes unpunished.

A long-dead dictator who’s in fact undead and still poisoning the veins of the nation while his kin pecks at his wealth like voracious vultures? What a perfectly gothic playground for Larraín, one that aptly dwells in the shadows of a nondescript stony mansion and liberally draws blood out of the director’s own greatest hits. Expect the sardonic humor of Larraín’s political period masterwork “No” here,...

“Los Espookys,“ one of the funniest comedy-horror series you’ll find on television at the moment, is back and bigger than ever with season two.

Created by Fred Armisen, Ana Fabrega, and Julio Torres (HBO comedy special “My Favorite Shapes”), season two of the bilingual, six-episode HBO Original comedy series “Los Espookys” premiered on September 16 on HBO and HBO Max.

The series follows “a group of friends who turn their shared passion for horror into a peculiar business, providing horror to clients who need it, in a dreamy Latin American country where the strange and eerie are just a part of daily life.”

With the six-episode season drawing rapidly to a close, Bloody Disgusting spoke with the series creators and stars about the season, its genre-bending evolution, and more.

Photograph by Pablo Arellano Spataro/HBO

Julio Torres, who plays Andrés, explains how his appreciation for horror shapes the series.

“I...

Any description of “Los Espookys” will ultimately come up lacking, because the English language cannot create vibes that ring out with the coolness, vitality, and weirdly fused nerd-punk energy of “Los Espookys.” The HBO comedy has the same sense of care and texture and human creativity as hand-drawn animation, which is not to say that it looks unreal. But there’s a heightened quality to its visuals that perfectly matches who the characters are and the spirit of the show’s humor. You can tell the Los Espookys crew and even the hound-dog parking attendant Tico (Fred Armisen) are of, and have power over, their unnamed Latin American home. The costumes and the production design are central to creating the look and feel of Julio Torres, Ana Fabrega, and Armisen’s series about (if we must reduce it to a plot) a group of friends who run an agency that...

Pablo Larraín’s “Jackie” may be getting Oscar buzz, but it’s not his only film up for contention. His Spanish-language picture “Neruda,” starring Luis Gnecco and Gael García Bernal, has also been well received by critics, especially at the 2016 Fenix Awards — it took home four prizes, including Best Picture and Best Editing.

The drama, which is also Chile’s official Oscar entry for Best Foreign-Language Film, tells the story of poet Pablo Neruda (Gnecco), arguably the most famous communist in post-wwii Chile. When the political tides shift, he is forced into hiding with tenacious police inspector Oscar Peluchoneau (Bernal) hot on his trail.

Read More: How The Fenix Awards Became Mexico’s Secret Weapon at the Oscars

The third annual Fenix Ibero-American Film Awards took place on December 7 in Mexico City and honored the best in film from Latin America, Spain and Portugal.

Another big hit of the night...