Mexican Pop Sensation Shines Anew in Daring Time-Travel Adventure

When Lucero sweeps onto the Netflix screen this June 11 in Nuestros Tiempos, Mexico’s “eternal sweetheart” turns back two clocks at once—her twenty-year absence from film and the fictional calendar that catapults her character from 1966 into today.

A Long-Awaited Curtain-Up

For viewers who grew up with “Lucerito” singing on Sunday variety shows and later anchoring prime-time telenovelas, the silver-screen silence since 2004 felt almost unnatural. Standing on the red carpet outside Mexico City’s Torre Reforma, the 54-year-old star told EFE she waited for a script that felt “as alive as the people who watched me grow.” Nuestros Tiempos—a family-friendly science-fiction comedy from director Chava Cartas—finally met that standard.

Lucero plays Nora, a brilliant but unheralded physicist whose 1960s time-machine prototype hurls her and her musician husband, Ramón (Benny Ibarra), straight into twenty-first-century Mexico. The role lets her revisit the wide-eyed optimism that made her famous while poking gentle fun at outdated certainties. Film historian Charles Ramírez Berg notes in Mexican Cinema: Reflections of a Society that stars who span several media—television, radio, music—anchor cultural memory in ways younger performers rarely match. Lucero’s return, he argues, “reconnects Mexican audiences with the last era when an entire household tuned to the same channel at eight o’clock.”

Bridging Vinyl and Streaming

Lucero’s own life reads like a timeline of Latin-American pop culture. Her teen ballads—¬“Veintidós” and “Ya No”—still play at quinceañeras; her grown-up anthem “El Privilegio de Amar” topped charts in 1998. Now, she stands before a new crowd that knows music through algorithms, not cassette covers. “The film asks what happens when wonder meets Wi-Fi,” she told El Universal. Nora’s journey through dating apps, influencer slang, and e-payments mirrors Lucero’s professional leap from Televisa studios to Netflix’s global engine.

Co-star Benny Ibarra, another 1990s icon, signed on when he learned Lucero was cast. “There’s a shorthand when you’ve shared dressing rooms for thirty years,” he said to EFE. Their chemistry revives the heyday of Mexican musical cinema: think Pedro Infante trading quips with Libertad Lamarque, updated with smartphones and LED scoreboards. Cultural scholar Julia Tuñón calls this mix of nostalgia and novelty “double-exposure storytelling”—layers of old and new that let multiple generations see themselves at once.

Comedy with a Rear-View Mirror

Director Cartas—known for Infelices para Siempre—conceived the project after rifling through his grandmother’s photo boxes. “I wondered how a woman who wrote her college thesis on punch-card computers would feel about TikTok,” he said during a Milenio round-table. The script uses time to travel less for spectacle than social x-rays: Nora confronts a present where women lead labs yet still fight sexism, and men raised on machismo must recalibrate. Cartas slips pointed jokes about plastic waste, political correctness, and aging pop stars between quick-fire one-liners, trusting comedy to disarm. At the same time, it provokes—an approach praised by sociologist Rossana Reguillo for “making the hard conversations palatable without trimming their bite.”

Lucero embraces this balance. On set, she often improvised reactions to “future shock” props: electric scooters, vegan tacos, and immersive video games. “You can rehearse lines,” she told El País, “but you can’t rehearse the gasp when Nora sees herself on a 4K screen after living in black-and-white television.” Her performance echoes Mexico’s broader collision between analog memories and digital speed—an experience familiar to any migrant who returns home to find pay-phones replaced by QR codes.
An Icon for the Next Loop of Time

Nuestros Tiempos lands amid a streaming boom that has turned Mexico into Latin America’s busiest production hub. By casting a household name from the VHS era, Netflix signals confidence that stories rooted in local memory can travel globally. Early test screenings in Los Angeles and Madrid drew mother-daughter pairs who quoted Lucero’s soap opera catchphrases while their teenage companions laughed at the futuristic gags.

Industry analyst Gemma Solís predicts the film “will remind platforms that longevity equals bankability.” Lucero’s career, she notes, has weathered format shifts from vinyl to Spotify and rabbit-ear antennas to smart TVs. That resilience underpins the movie’s core message: technology may bend time, but human bonds—family, friendship, first love—remain the compass.

As credits roll, a montage shows Nora teaching 2024 teenagers the twist while they teach her the trending dance “La Rebelión.” The scene crystallizes Lucero’s artistic mission: to braid past and present into a single contagious rhythm. For viewers who first adored her in shoulder pads and scrunchies, and for newcomers meeting her in Dolby Atmos, Nuestros Tiempos offers a rare cinematic handshake across generations—proof that some stars orbit endlessly, lighting each era with a familiar, welcome glow.

Also Read: Mexican Roots and Futbol Hopes Collide in a Vibrant Comedy

Sources: Red-carpet interviews with Lucero and Benny Ibarra for EFE (2026); Chava Cartas press conference covered by Milenio (2026); Charles Ramírez Berg, Mexican Cinema: Reflections of a Society (University of Texas Press, 2024); Julia Tuñón, “Dobles exposiciones,” Cuadernos de Cine Mexicano (2025); Gemma Solís, market report for Screen América (2026); cultural commentary in El Universal and El País archives.