The crimes of Martha Beck and Raymond Fernandez, who were executed in 1951, were the inspiration for this murderous 1996 romance about a couple pretending to be brother and sister to exploit lonely hearts for financial gain. Coral (Regina Orozco) is a nurse whose search for her personal Charles Boyer ends when she meets confidence man Nicolas (Daniel Gimenez Cacho) through an ad. Coral knows that her weight may make her unappealing, but her powers of persuasion get results. Nicolas’s personality, by contrast, hinges on his appearance, though his compulsive need to wear a toupee (also a focus of the news coverage of Fernandez) seems overemphasized by writer Pax Alicia Garciadiego and director Arturo Ripstein. Restless, fluid cinematography and the frequent presence of mirrors make for beautiful, impressive images that certainly reflect the characters’ self-esteem. But the motif gets to be a bit much as the couple execute their sloppy scams, which are doubly frightening because they rarely turn out to be lucrative—confirming that the lovers’ motivation is something much more complicated than greed. In Spanish with subtitles. 109 min.