Sir Patrick Stewart, a giant of modern theater and cinema, has died at 86, according to his spokesperson, Kelly Bush Novak. The actor passed away Wednesday at his home in Los Angeles after a "brief and difficult struggle with Alzheimer's and Lewy body dementia." Stewart, forged in London theater, brought a Shakespearean touch to two major fantasy film franchises: Star Trek, where he played Captain Picard in series and films, and the X-Men saga, where he was Professor Charles Xavier, a role he reprised last year while filming the new installment of The Avengers: Doomsday, yet to be released.

In 2024, a zombie film produced in Catalonia by a Catalan team with a budget tight for the usual standards of action cinema became the most-watched non-English language film in the history of Amazon Prime, brushing against the number 1 spot in the weekly top 10 in the United States. Apocalypse Z: The Beginning of the End, which adapted the first book of the zombie trilogy by the Galician writer Manel Loureiro, was an unexpected phenomenon even for those responsible for it, from the director Carles Torrens (Barcelona, 1984) to the Barcelona-based production company Nostromo and the streaming platform itself, which immediately ordered a sequel, arriving this Friday –just in time for All Saints' Day– after passing through the Sitges Festival.

A new chapter in the long and tortuous history of the Iranian regime's repression of filmmaker Jafar Panahi. The 26th branch of the Tehran Revolutionary Court has sentenced the director of A Simple Accident to five years and one month in prison and has ordered the seizure of his assets, according to Variety, which cites the Iranian news agency Emtedad. It is unclear what charges the filmmaker is accused of. The court has also banned Panahi from using social media for two years. This is the first final sentence for Panahi since he won the Cannes Palme d'Or in 2025 for A Simple Accident, which was also nominated for two Oscars.

The first film that Stephen Frears (Leicester, 1941) saw in the cinema, when he was very small, was Walt Disney's Pinocchio. “When the whale swallowed him they had to take me out of the cinema, it scared me a lot”, recalls the director of Dangerous Liaisons and The Queen, one of the great masters of British cinema. A versatile director with a sense of humor and a genuine interest in people and their stories, Frears receives this Friday in Manresa the Honorary Award of the Clam, the International Social Film Festival of Catalonia, where on Saturday he will offer a masterclass conducted by Àlex Gorina. Frears' visit is the highlight of a festival that will screen until November 1st essential films of the season such as the Palme d'Or Fjord, by Cristian Mungiu, or The debut, by Jesse Eisenberg.

Jordi Sánchez-Navarro, researcher and professor of information and communication sciences at the UOC, is also director of the Anima’t section of the Sitges Festival, author of the book Tangible imagination. An essential history of animation cinema (UOC, 2020) and, needless to say, a great expert in animated film. That is why it is valuable that on October 15th, upon leaving the screening of Wildwood in Sitges and still overwhelmed, he affirmed that it was “surely” “the best animation film stop-motion of history”. And once seen, it is difficult to contradict Sánchez Navarro.

The audience at the Sitges Festival, so noted this edition for the bad habit some spectators have of applauding every violent death whether it is pertinent or not, has once again shown that, when it wants to, it can be the great asset of this festival. And it has done so with a simple and natural gesture, of elemental justice: awarding the best film of the festival, Wildwood, an extraordinary film that is already history of animation cinema, if not of cinema in general. The film from the animation studio in stop motion Laika, a true technical and cinematic prodigy, has taken the festival's Audience Award, but the official section jury has completely ignored it in its list of winners and opted to award a minor and derivative work like the French Sanguine, the second feature film by Marion Le Corroller, which underlines with a fluorescent pencil its critique of the labor exploitation of capitalism with elements of body horror borrowed from much superior recent titles like Cru or The Substance.

As it enters its final stretch, the Sitges Festival welcomed this Friday one of its prodigal sons, Duncan Jones, the son of David Bowie who debuted as a director in 2009 with Moon and won the award for best film of the festival. “I am very happy to return to Sitges, it is an incredible festival,” exclaimed an euphoric Jones who was carrying a backpack, a nod to his new film: Rogue Trooper, his first fully animated feature, which brings to the cinema a great icon of British comics that emerged from the legendary talent pool of the magazine 2000 AD.

A great comedy actor and enormous filmmaker, Danny DeVito (Neptune, New Jersey, 1944) has another brilliant but lesser-known facet: a producer with a keen eye. In the 90s, he produced titles such as Pulp Fiction, Get Shorty, Erin Brockovich (his only Oscar nomination), Out of Sight and Gattaca, which triumphed at the Sitges Festival in 1997. Nearly three decades later, DeVito visits the festival this Thursday to receive the Grand Honorary Award and present a new film as a producer, the horror comedy Drag. But this time it is a more personal project, as DeVito co-produces it with his son Jake and his daughter Lucy, who also plays one of the two sisters in the film who have the worst night of their lives when they break into the house of a famous artist.

In a Hollywood where socialism is a taboo word and even Paul Thomas Anderson resists talking about politics after having made a film as political as There Will Be Blood, directors like Boots Riley (Chicago, 1971) are a rare exception. "In case it isn't obvious from watching my film, I am a communist and I believe that the people should democratically control the wealth that labor generates. And to change things, obviously it is necessary to fight. We need general strikes," he stated this Wednesday at the Sitges Festival after presenting the fantasy comedy I'm a Virgo.

Two scout leaders, ten scout children, a mountain refuge isolated by a snowstorm, and an unexpected apparition. These are the elements with which directors Paula Serra (Palamós, 1998) and Clàudia Serra (Barcelona, 1998) build the thriller horror film 11, a story about childhood and evil that thematically coincides with the leitmotif of this edition of the Sitges Festival, where this opera prima, darker than it seems, is also the only production in its original Catalan version in the competition.

Saturday evening, just before Peter Jackson (Pukerua Bay, New Zealand, 1961) received the Grand Honorary Award at the Sitges Festival, the usual montage of scenes from the honoree's filmography was screened which, in this case, culminated in the iconic image of King Kong walking towards the town of Sitges that is never missing from any festival session. “For me this is truly incredible –said an emotional Jackson–, because two important things coincide: that the King Kong from 1933 is my favorite movie of all time and that Sitges is my favorite festival in the world”.

There are Hollywood couples who try not to mix love and work to protect their relationship, but that is not the case for Kevin Bacon (Philadelphia, 1958) and Kyra Sedgwick (New York, 1965), married since 1988: they have shared the screen on numerous occasions and have even directed one another in films and series. In Family movie, which was presented this Saturday at Sitges, the actor from Mystic river and the actress from The closer go further and make cinema a family affair: the film is directed by Bacon, produced by Sedgwick, and stars both of them and their children, Sosie and Travis. Of course, they filmed it at the family home.

Recovered from the open-heart surgery that saved his life, Nicolas Winding Refn (Copenhagen, 1970) maintains his characteristic ironic smile, but his discourse is more direct and urgent. The director has traveled to the Sitges Festival to present Su propio infierno, which arrives in theaters on Friday. It is his most stylized and radical film, a symphonic horror tale that delves, led by Sophie Thatcher and Charles Melton, into an urban neon-pink dystopia where a killer murders with impunity and a soldier searches for his missing daughter. A fascinating work from a prodigal son of Sitges who, inevitably, has eclipsed the festival's official opening film, Found alive, by Carlota Pereda.

When Diego Luna (Toluca de Lerdo, Mexico, 1979) was just two years old, his mother, the artist and set designer Fiona Alexander, died in a car accident. Upon reading Brenda Navarro's novel Ceniza en la boca (Sexto Piso, 2022), the actor and director recognized the echo of his own experience in a character as different from him as Lucila, the Mexican teenager who migrates with her younger brother to Spain –first to Madrid, then to Barcelona– to reunite with the mother who abandoned them eight years earlier. But above all, he was fascinated by the clash of perspectives: “The daughter sees her mother's departure as an act of abandonment, but the mother feels she is making a great sacrifice for her children. As a father, I cannot stop thinking about how painful it must be to live away from one's children and start from scratch in another place. But I am also a son, and the absence of the maternal figure is a subject that has occupied my thoughts every day of my life”.

The Hollywood of the golden age has lost one of its last icons. Eva Marie Saint, who died at her home in Los Angeles at 97 years old from natural causes, was an actress of dramatic prominence and defiant beauty who worked with all the great names of her era: Marlon Brando, Alfred Hitchcock, Paul Newman, Elia Kazan, Cary Grant, Elizabeth Taylor, Gregory Peck... A career that spans seven decades of film history but which shone especially in the 50s, when she debuted with On the Waterfront, a masterful face-to-face with Brando that earned her the Oscar, and also when in 1959 she starred with Cary Grant in Hitchcock's classic North by Northwest.

It was the only possible Golden Shell. Tender loving care, which will surely be the last work of the British filmmaker Mike Leigh, has won the award for best film at the San Sebastian Festival. It is a recognition that should not be interpreted only as a tribute to a great director in his farewell to cinema due to health problems –he suffers from myositis, which weakens the musculature and hinders movement– that have prevented him from collecting the award in person. On the contrary, this minimalist film about two social workers and the parents of one of them is extraordinary and deeply humanistic, one of the best works by an author who is a champion of cinematic realism and who, for more than five decades, has dedicated himself to portraying life in all its painful complexity and beauty.

According to a 2024 study by the Ministry of Equality, at least 114,576 women engage in prostitution in Spain, a third of whom are in Catalonia, which would be the region with the most prostitutes in Europe. At the San Sebastian Festival, the official section presented this Friday El castillo, a Movistar+ series that seeks to explain the reality of prostitution based on the boom that occurred at the end of the last century with human trafficking for sexual exploitation when, coinciding with economic growth and increased immigration, Spanish pimps went from exploiting two or three women to the massive and wild importation of immigrants from poorer countries and controlling them through a debt that was increasing in a perverse way.

Five years after receiving the Donostia Award, Marion Cotillard has returned to the San Sebastian Festival, but this time to compete for the Golden Shell with the family thriller crossed by politics 7h40 ce matin-là. In the film, she plays a former leftist revolutionary who, after 15 years in prison, reunites with the son she abandoned for armed struggle, who is now an adult working as a mechanic in a garage. Like in the thriller about cults Karma, which she presented at the last Cannes Festival, Cotillard moves away from her glamorous image as an official Chanel ambassador. Here she is a tough and opaque woman, who seeks a job as a waitress in a provincial town to be close to her son and watch him; sometimes she talks to him, but without ever revealing her identity, like a silent spy with a secret agenda.

Brad Pitt, the big star of this edition of the San Sebastian Festival, arrived in the city on Sunday, signed autographs for twenty minutes at the doors of the Hotel María Cristina and has spent three days on vacation before attending to the promotional commitments that brought him to the Basque event, where he was already present in 2009 to present Inglourious Basterds. As he did then, the actor took the opportunity to visit the Chillida Leku museum and the Comb of the Wind, this time in the company of his current partner, Inés de Ramón.

What an exciting and deeply humanistic film has been released the British Mike Leigh to the official competition of the San Sebastian Festival. Tender loving care is one of the best works by the director of Secrets and lies (1996), a portrait of two women and the parents of one of them whom Leigh shows in all their imperfect beauty, without condescension or idealizations. In previous films such as Naked (1993)and Hard truths (2024) this has resulted in rawness and harshness, but in this case, tenderness dominates. Like another of the great titles of this season, Suddenly(Suddenly, in the original French), by Ryusuke Hamaguchi, Tender loving care is above all a film about the importance of taking care of each other, but also about the limits of this love.