Mexican-era Luis Buñuel

The great Luis Bunuel (1900-83) started out as an enfant terrible of surrealism. His first film, "Un Chien Andalou" (1929), made with fellow Spaniard Salvador Dali, was also cinema's first masterpiece of transgression (it begins with Bunuel himself appearing to slice open a woman's eyeball). He concluded his career as an eminence of European art film, directing the glamorous likes of Catherine Deneuve, Jeanne Moreau and Carole Bouquet in some of their most memorable roles and winning a foreign-film Oscar for "The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie" (1972).

Bunuel's best-known movies were made in France, but his nearly two-decade spell as an artist-in-exile in Mexico, which always has been overshadowed by his splashy start and his exalted twilight period, was a career unto itself. Fleeing his homeland after the Spanish Civil War that brought Franco to power, he spent a few years in the States -- working at New York's Museum of Modern Art and for Warner Bros. in Hollywood, where he supervised the dubbing department -- before settling in Mexico City and restarting his film career in earnest.

Adapting to the pace and strictures of the local industry (and, in many cases, adopting its melodramatic idioms), Bunuel worked at a prodigious rate, cranking out 21 movies in 18 years. During that period, he alternated between major works, including "Los Olvidados" (1950) and "El" (1953), which reestablished his international standing, and lesser-seen, more generic fare.

The Criterion Collection, which already has issued several of Bunuel's French titles, this week releases "The Exterminating Angel" (1962) and "Simon of the Desert" (1965), the culminating glories of his Mexican period.

"The Exterminating Angel" prefigures "The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie" in its coolly withering view of the privileged class, which in both films is subjected to a situation at once droll and nightmarish. In "Discreet Charm," the dinner party can never quite begin; in "Exterminating Angel," it never ends.

An assortment of high-society types gathers at a mansion after an opera. The first sign that something is amiss: Before the party gets under way, all the servants, for some inexplicable reason, are compelled to leave. At the end of the evening, the guests, for some equally inexplicable reason, are compelled to stay. One awkward sleepover later, they realize that they are incapable of crossing the threshold of the living room, as if trapped by a mysterious force field -- or is it a mass delusion?