The best Odete Lara’s movies

A new incarnation of Cangaceiro bandits, led by Coirana, has risen in the badlands. A blind landowner hires Antônio to wipe out his old nemesis. Yet after besting Coirana and accompanying the dying man to his mountain hideout, Antônio is moved by the plight of the Cangaceiro’s followers. The troubled hitman turns revolutionary, his gun and machete aimed towards his former masters.

An allegory about Brazil's history and the struggle for power since the 1930 Revolution until the advent of the TV.

A young man must choose between two women. The one brings him the money, but the other he loves. Directed by Billy Davis (as J. P. de Carvalho).

Two friends take two prostitutes for a night of pleasure. But the night turns out to be frustrating for all involved, as much bitterness is revealed in their conversation and attitudes, uncovering their anguish and deeper feelings, and the emptiness of their lives.

Dona Xepa is a vegetable stand owner. She dreams about the success of her scientist son. The film is based on the play by Pedro Bloch.

This film shows people with constant psychological and social conflicts: the violence among outlaws, conflicts between man and woman, police and society.

Rio's criminal underworld is run by an unexpected boss: a femme Queen with a taste for power and violence. But heavy lies the crown: what Queen can trust her subjects, however fabulous? When she sets up a stoolie to take the fall for her boy, a plot against Her Majesty arises!

The daily life of a Brazilian escort.

Rhonda Fleming shines as Pamela, an American film star who falls in love with coffee grower Claudio (Rossano Brazzi) while in Brazil. When the two are hastily married, Pamela finds herself entwined in a clash of cultures in this rarely seen romantic comedy.

Music manager has to get three of his artists together for a special show, but soon finds out it isn't an easy task.

Rich woman offers a large sum of money to whomever finds her stray cat.

Four deserters from Paraguay War hide in an old drunkard's country seat. The latter has two daughters who are unhappy with their recluse lives.

Having come out recently from jail, a tramp, willing to make quick money, decides to organize a pool match between two famous retired players.

For his first in a long series of wildly imaginative literary adaptations, dos Santos reinvented Nelson Rodrigues' novel about a pathological gangster with solid gold teeth and a voracious appetite for women and power. Embracing radically modernist narrative techniques, Golden Mouth offers a splintered, refractive portrait of brutal masculinity that returns repeatedly to the same moment from different vantages, each time revealing unexpected perspectives on the brutal yet strangely charming criminal. Lurid and disturbing, Golden Mouth delivers a savage satire of marriage and class pretensions, revealing a similar venality at the corroded heart of the sanctimonious bourgeoisie, the moneyed elite and the working class as they all mercilessly claw their way up and down the rickety and ruthlessly hierarchical Brazilian social ladder. -Harvard Film Archive