The X-Files popularized the narrative device of the monster of the week in the nineties. In the series, the protagonists faced all sorts of threats that were resolved in each episode. Although the concept had been around for a long time, it was later fictions such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Supernatural that, with self-awareness, developed it the most. The Insidious saga unashamedly embraces this formula through a diverse chronological narrative that gives rise to multiple stories with different protagonists, maintaining as a link the iconic character of the medium (Lin Shaye) and a danger that always arises from the world of the dead: an abyss of tortured souls trapped between our reality and the next. The protagonist of Insidious: The Red Door is a single mother with a traumatic childhood (trauma is a backbone element of the saga) who not only has the ability to travel to this other world, but is also the vehicle for the entities that inhabit it to be able to leave. As in any formula, and in a franchise where all films start from a similar pattern, this new chapter, written and directed by Jacob Chase (Come Play, 2020), is more than predictable in its plot twists. However, the filmmaker includes elements of interest: on the one hand, a certain political discourse that, although timidly and hidden in the horror of sects, addresses the fallacies of populism; on the other hand, the subtext of family inheritances, inherent in the Insidious films, is treated here from a story about women who raise children alone. The proposal maintains the playful and circus-like spirit of the horrors of the whole (the dental examination sequence, for example), but insists on a tone that is too psychological, as if it wanted to unevenly mirror the excellent fictions of Mike Flanagan.

The innocuous Spanish title of this tense Czech drama does not foretell its unsettling content. The original, Sbormistr, a single word meaning “the master of the choir,” offers more clues: the film is an empathetic portrayal of an entirely female community, that of the youth choir in the title, and a single man, this revered and feared master who is also a compulsive sexual predator.

“They promised me heaven / but for now I'm still stuck on earth, fighting to get by”. That's what Promise the sky, Delgrès' song that, besides inspiring the title ofThe promised sky, setting the pace for the final minutes of Erige Sehiri's third feature film, rounding off the discourse that the film has been organically building. The director ofBetween fig trees (2022) focuses on three women from sub-Saharan Africa living in Tunisia, legally and socially marginalized. Marie used to work as a journalist and is now an evangelical pastor, and she gives refuge to Naney, who wants to reunite with her daughter on the other side of the border but cannot escape her transitional state, and Jolie, a student with her sights set on Europe. Joining this trio is Kenta, a girl who survived a shipwreck and acts as a catalyst for the protagonists' fears and expectations.

The end of Oak Street begins with a sunny day of celebration, games, and quintessentially American neighborhood barbecues. An idyllic scene that all viewers will be wary of, either because they know David Robert Mitchell's previous filmography – in particular, the essential text for contemporary horror that is It follows– and they know that the filmmaker has a tendency to touch a raw nerve regarding suburban unease. Or, simply, because they have seen some of the film's posters, where a family flees from the sharp jaws of what appears to be a dinosaur. Whatever expectations one enters to see it with, the film satisfies, and modulates the horizontal pulse with which Robert Mitchell usually tightens the scope in order to bring it closer to the codes of a Hollywood entertainment that the director hesitates whether to challenge or revere.

For her opera prima, Muriel d'Ansembourg has chosen a pair of debut actors: Caolán O'Gorman and Safiya Benaddi are Alec and Nina, two teenagers who meet at high school and who, based on a joint research project on pornography addiction, begin to develop the typical tension of first loves. The conflict arises when the young man, who helps his father shoot adult films on a makeshift set at his home, adopts intolerable behavior, a result of his precocious relationship with sex.Andrew Howard, a Welsh actor who has worked on The Odyssey or Tenet, alongside English porn star Alessa Savage, offer the adult perspective of the story, which explores the contradictions of making the porn industry too much of a domestic affair. The focus, however, is on the young man, an introverted boy who, in some way, lives a double life: although he finds it incredibly easy to dissociate when framing a close-up of his father's penis, when it comes to confronting his own sexuality, he is lost. It will be when he meets Nina that Alec will realize – as the film's title anticipates – who he really is; or, perhaps, who his personal circumstances have made him.The film seeks to make the viewer uncomfortable, not only by showing the pornographic exploitation of the female body – often violated and mistreated in this type of cinema – but also by placing a rather unconventional father-son relationship at the center. Alec lost his mother when he was little and found himself alone with Dylan, who tries to get by with what he knows how to do (apparently) best. Although the moral debate about the characters' decisions is particularly stimulating, the power of the proposal gradually dilutes as it progresses. The good ideas, however, do not disappear, and make Truly naked a seductive debut.

When M. Night Shyamalan, president of the jury for the 2022 edition of the Berlinale, awarded the Golden Bear to Alcarràs by Carla Simón, said that the reasons for this award were the "extraordinary performances, from children to actors over eighty years old", and also their "skilled at sensitively portraying a family and their connection and dependence on the land". Well, then these two arguments could perfectly apply, without changing a single comma, to Living the land, the Silver Bear for Best Director for Huo Meng in 2025, also at the Berlinale.

In 17th-century Japan, kabuki theatre banished women from the stage, leading to the emergence of the onnagata, actors responsible for embodying female characters. Their white makeup and painted lips, and their graceful gestural precision have been influential beyond their borders (David Bowie acknowledged them as a reference for his stellar aura), and even today they are one of the discipline's most prized elements. This is how Kokuho is presented, a melodrama that firmly expands from the sixties to 2014, and which is guided by the tumultuous relationship between two onnagata who are raised as brothers. One, Kikuo, son of a yakuza murdered by his rivals; the other, Shunsuke, the firstborn son of Hanjiro, a celebrated kabuki actor. When the latter decides to name Kikuo as his successor to the detriment of his own son, scandal and jealousy irremediably erode the bond between the protagonists.

Director Renny Harlin (The jungle 2), a relevant name from late last century's Hollywood, signs a new film that is nowhere and raised with international financing that includes the Barcelona-based production company Nostromo. The project has something of a digital update of a seventies disaster co-production due to its transnational nature and also a certain unspecific tone, a commerciality that tries to be for all audiences. On the open sea does not assume the apparent seriousness of somewhat more ambitious films such as the recent Labyrinth in flames, nor does it abuse the black humor of the most festively cruel B-movies.

Any image – whether static or moving – captured for posterity of some more or less prosaic family activity has thermal memory. As if they were the embers of a past that never quite goes out, photos of loved ones in a physical album or in the mobile's image and video gallery retain an intangible but undeniable charm and warmth. Looking at them is like finding some of those little things Serrat sang about in his song: they make us cry when no one sees us.

About the first canto of Mektoub, my love (2017) the shadow of the films weighs that Abdellatif Kechiche was premiered before and after, Blue is the Warmest Color (2013) and Mektoub: Intermezzo (2019). The mistreatment by the director that the actresses denounced and the review of the male gaze in the case of the first and the controversy surrounding the objectification of female bodies that accompanied the premiere at the Cannes Film Festival of the second make it difficult to discover this First song without the sexualization of female characters does not turn out to be uncomfortable. Especially since the film starts with a very explicit sex scene in which the uninhibitedness that could be commendable is clouded by how much more exposed the actress is than the actor. But the scene also places the protagonist, possibly alter ego of Kechiche, like this voyeur who observes more than practices sex while taking photos and dreams of becoming a filmmaker.

No one would say it when looking at one of its frames, but The Last Round in Venice is an adventure film. There is a journey, a romantic quest, and even buried treasure. But the action does not take place in exotic locations, but on secondary roads and not particularly bucolic towns in the plains surrounding Venice, and its protagonists are not intrepid explorers, but a couple of drunks who answer to the names of Carlobianchi and Doriano, and who have spent many years dodging the last hangover with the simple – but effective – method of always adding a drink after the theoretical final round.

Anne Hathaway, lately, is everywhere, and everywhere she looks great. Whether as the kind but sharp Andrea Sachs from The Devil Wears Prada 2, as the sacrificing and regal Penelope from The Odyssey or as, here, a veteran pop diva, intense, pretentious, and in crisis, the actress is always believable. On the other hand, Michaela Coel, with that angular and magnetic face that recalls Nina Simone's, is much harder to watch. Since the success and prestige of the series she wrote and starred in –I may destroy you, from 2020–, she has chosen her screen appearances, small or large, with a magnifying glass. This year, however, we have already seen her in The Christophers, Steven Soderbergh's magnificent chamber piece, and now in Mother Mary, another intimate film, mainly in confined spaces and of a theatrical nature.

Insatiable and Obsession, two horror films indie recents, they put disturbing images of the said "Be careful what you wish for, it might come true". The resemblances between the third feature film by Australian Natalie Erika James and the successful first work of Curry Barker end here, although, in both cases, a stylized visual proposal and a great command of the mechanisms of cinematic terror are put at the service of a story that addresses absolutely contemporary issues in an allegorical key. If in Relic, the filmmaker's estimable debut, the usual haunted house movie tropes framed a tragic tale about the heavy burden of family legacy, Insatiable is a stunning catalog of scenes of body horror which places the consequences of aesthetic violence that affects women, above all, at the center of the story. It is a common theme of what theorist Barbara Creed coined as the New Wave of Feminist Cinema ("The substance by Coralie Fargeat and Raw by Julia Ducournau would be part of it), but James addresses it here with a literalness that connects the film directly to current events.

Not every day one has the luck to witness Willem Dafoe uninhibitedly dancing Greek folklore. The Host, an adaptation by Miguel Ángel Jiménez of Panos Karnezis' biographical novel, offers the viewer not only the juicy opportunity to share intimacies and drinks with the iconic American actor, but also proposes a hypnotic island journey in which the cinematic device surrenders to both a liquid and feverish atmosphere and the irregularly hieratic performances that conceal the protagonist.

With Light Rain Will Come, the Argentine filmmaker Iván Fund cultivated a fairly characteristic, calm, and contained independent cinema, which used striking premises without taking the sensationalist paths of genre films. The fantastic coverage of that film gave appeal to a certain portrait and commentary on slightly strange everyday lives. The Message, winner of the jury prize at the prestigious Berlin Film Festival, is somewhat of a slightly radicalized extension of that proposal. It is about a girl who supposedly communicates with animals and who, accompanied by relatives who monetize this ability, travels by van through rural Argentina, on secondary roads, gas stations, and superstitions. Some sequences depart punctually from the narrative function and give off a certain documentary air.The black and white photography of Fund and company recalls the picaresque adventures of another road movie: Peter Bogdanovich's New Hollywood classic Paper Moon, by Peter Bogdanovich. Fund's work, however, does not stage the usual transformation or evolution of the travelers. In reality, there is not much evolution in any area, nor many adventures. The result ends up seeming like a slender and aesthetically accurate film of atmospheres, sensations, and observations in which part of a minimal story unfolds. This can cause some frustration for those who want clearer answers and more obviously climatic moments.

Netflix has already released a film that went rather unnoticed in cinemas and is worth recovering if you didn't see it. September 5, directed by Tim Fehlbaum, recounts the kidnapping of Israeli athletes during the 1972 Munich Olympic Games. It does so, however, from a very unique point of view: everything is explained from the control room of the American network ABC, which was there to broadcast the major sporting event. The film, therefore, does not aim to be a simple recreation of the kidnapping, but to explain how a tragedy with political and historical implications was covered on television.What the film proposes is a very interesting narrative exercise, because it combines the real images of ABC's broadcast from fifty-four years ago with recreations of the inner workings of television coverage. Practically the entire film takes place in the control room: a dark workspace, full of monitors and occupied by journalists, producers, and technicians specialized in sports broadcasts. Reality, however, forced them all to adapt to the dilemmas and informational difficulties of a much more dramatic event. It was about explaining what was happening inside the Olympic Village while the competitions were still ongoing.One of Fehlbaum's obsessions was rigor and fidelity to events, and therefore the work regarding editing is extremely meticulous. A large part of the images we see through the monitors in the control room are actual footage, which requires extraordinary synchronization with the entire recreation that is built around it. Even the real images of the broadcast with the iconic presenter Jim McKay, who broadcast the events on screen, have been respected. The performances and editing achieve constant interaction and dialogue between reality and fiction.But September 5 goes beyond the hijacking, which becomes the background motor. That broadcast marked a turning point in live retellings of tragedies. The film portrays the social context surrounding the events, with a conflicted Germany that still didn't know how to manage its past. And it also raises the television dilemmas inherent in a broadcast of this nature: the balance between information and spectacle, media responsibility in the face of tragedy and the pain of the protagonists, the medium's own influence on the course of events, and the technical intricacies that had to be overcome at a time when live satellite broadcasts were still incipient. It's fascinating to see how ingenuity compensated for everything technology has since made available to us. And how, despite the passage of years, the most difficult journalistic decisions remain the same.September 5 provokes the unease of a thriller and the emotion provided by the account of real events. A good film that reminds us that the world may have changed less than we think.

In the prologue of the recent translation ofThe Odyssey published by Bernat Metge Universal, Roger Aluja recalls how Ulysses differs from Achilles, the triumphant warrior of the Iliad, in that his glory culminates not in victory in battle but in his subsequent return home. In his appropriation of Homer's classic, Christopher Nolan takes good note of this. As a new example of cinema understood as an immense audiovisual spectacle, the grandeur of The Odyssey lies not in the epic of combat but in the overwhelming weight of external circumstances that a human like Ulysses cannot control. In his darkest film (not at all Mediterranean), Nolan empties the journey of its most joyful adventurous dimension and approaches terror in some of the best passages: the capture in Polyphemus's cave, the disturbing transformation of the sailors into pigs by Circe, the unsettling descent into Hades... Ludwig Göransson envelops it all with a tactile soundtrack that immerses us in Poseidon's oceanic wrath.

Hellish possession (1981) was a key title in incorporating humor as a logical consequence of the spectacle of the most atrocious violence, pointing out the parallelism that can exist between physicality in comedy and in horror. But the modern incarnations of the saga conceived by Sam Raimi are not very interested in applying this particular lesson. In fact, in Hellish possession: in flames, the closest to a gag is found in the sequence of a funeral disrupted by the acoustic intrusions of a neighboring construction site. After this unceremonious funeral, the deceased's widow accompanies her in-laws and brother-in-law to the old family residence, where reproaches escalate to the point that, when the demonic entities that have infected the patriarch begin to wreak havoc, it almost feels like a relief from the tension. At this point, Sébastien Vanicek picks up the gauntlet thrown by Lee Cronin to the previous Evil Dead Rise, centered on exorcising dysfunctional family dynamics and amplifying it to dismember (literally) a home founded on abuse, illness, and neglect. The filmmaker's commitment to a gruesomeness that revives the legacy of French cinematic extremism aims to give a physical dimension to the characters' psychological wounds, but the monotonous tone of the proposal makes the experience resemble, at times, the process of a visit to the butcher shop. It is then, precisely, when we miss Raimi's tickles.

The beauty of truth: hidden gas stations, motels that are not sinister, just vulgar, supermarket parking lots, places of passage... Omaha takes place in locations where no one shoots films because they don't seem to deserve it. Cole Webley, in his debut, thinks the opposite: that cinematic truth beats precisely there, on the margins. That there is also beauty and expressiveness in some non-places. Especially if they serve to explain, as if it were a landscape with emotional and psychological temperature, a road movie about a father and his two impoverished sons (the film takes place during the 2008 crisis) who, after a family tragedy that is never fully explained, wander the back roads of Nebraska.

As children grow and transform into mysterious teenagers, some mothers and fathers may wonder about the strange being that inhabits their home. What are they thinking? What do they do all day? In his second feature film, the German Frédéric Hambalek turns the tables: here it is not the adults who try to unravel the labyrinth of adolescent existence, but rather they are the ones subjected to relentless surveillance and moral examination. Marielle is thirteen years old, and a slap from a classmate gives her telepathic powers: she can suddenly hear every word spoken by her well-off parents, Julia and Tobias, who see how, in an instant, their comfortable existence based on self-deception, double standards, and appearances (fundamental pillars of all adult life) begins to crumble.