Today at the AFI Festival

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: ‘Difficult Days’

Mexico, 1987, 88 minutes 7:15 p.m. Alejandro Pelayo’s big-business melodrama painstakingly details the byzantine power struggles and internecine family feuds spurred by the kidnapping of a Mexican industrialist whose chemical processing plant, predictably, exploits its workers and damages the ecology. Pelayo develops a sense of real outrage against injustice here, and he’s an impressive elucidator of complex plots (both cinematic and economic.) But the film is a bit too muted, too genteel, difficult in its story threads, too easy in its psychology.