Heavily favored by Mexican critics to this day, Life Sentence is a taut and fatalistic portrait of an Everyman struggling desperately to free himself from the barbed and crooked path of the flamboyant criminal past that constantly pulls him back to the once glittering but now dingy underworld he so naturally inhabited. The sweat and nicotine of Seventies paranoid cinema leaves acrid stains on Vicente Leñero’s crisp script whose flashback structure Ripstein skillfully exploits to ratchet the tension while gradually revealing a cruel symmetry between past and present. With its breathless narrative unfolding entirely within the sprawl and steel of late Seventies Mexico City, Life Sentence brought a new urban contemporaneity into Ripstein's cinema.