Salón México

Inspired (like Aaron Copland's suite of the same name) by the eponymous Mexico City dance club, this engagingly exotic melodrama focuses on the trials and tribulations of a reluctant cabaretera (López), struggling to pay her sister's boarding school fees and determined to conceal her profession and her pimp lover. Tragedy will out, and not without a heap of escapist moralising (catch the sister's air force hero fiancé!); despite the hackneyed plotting, however, Gabriel Figueroa's noir photography and the splendidly glamorous seediness of the nightclub scenes make for passable entertainment.