In the brilliant filmic trajectory of Lee Chang-dong –which began in 1997 with Green fish, when the South Korean was 40 years old and an established novelist–, existential drama has always coexisted with an incisive study of contemporary social reality. This combination reappears in A Possible Love, a Netflix production in which the director of Oasis and Burning approaches the idea of class struggle, or what remains of it. Inspired by a real case of mass layoffs that took place in a large South Korean industry more than ten years ago, Lee composes a striking emotional X-ray of life within global capitalism.

Luckily, as the review format in this newspaper is set up, those of us who write them do not have to detail in the listing which genre the film we are reviewing belongs to. If that were not the case, with films like Blue heron we would have a hard time. What a cunningly strange and indefinable film. What exactly is this debut by the Canadian Sophy Romvari? It begins looking like intimate and impressionistic indie cinema, continues by introducing quasi-documentary and essayistic elements, and the narrative ends up folding in on itself in a narrative device almost like fantasy cinema that unites past and present within the same images.

Olivia Wilde's third feature film (after the hilarious the hilarious Booksmart and the uneven Don't Worry Darling) dismantles the myth that the original is always better than the copy. Wilde and her team of screenwriters (two excellent comedic actors, Rashida Jones and Will McCormack) imbue the text of Cesc Gay's play, The People Upstairs, and its film adaptation, its film adaptation, Sentimental, with breakneck speed and contagious energy. The story is the same: two couples of neighbors, a single space, a married couple's apartment, and a very indecent sexual proposition. But the script variations by Wilde and her team, as well as the dizzying speed of an edit that accelerates the characters' clashing reactions, transform The Invitation into a neurotic comedy that recalls an era of American cinema, that of films by Elaine May, Paul Mazursky, and Mike Nichols, where the comedy genre also served to address adult issues; in this case, the questioning of marriage and heterosexual romanticism.

In the comedy Anaconda, a frustrated filmmaker who wants to make a sequel to the 1997 film of the same name claims that he cannot just show a giant snake killing people: his film must be about something, it must address themes like grief. Such are the things of Hollywood mainstream: movies must belong to a specific genre so they can be sold more easily, but it must be noted that they explain something more, something important. Like Whalefall, a work in which the survival thriller is intertwined with family drama about (exactly) grief.

Towards the end of Salve Maria, the latest film by Mar Coll, the character of the mother with postpartum depression played by Laura Weissmahr went away for a few days to the Pyrenees, and there her intrusive thoughts contaminated the film with visions halfway between folk horror and a sickly tale by Mariana Enríquez. Well then, Nightborn seems to start, more or less, at that same point: a couple of new parents move to an isolated house in the heart of the Finnish forest to raise a baby with whom the mother seems unable to connect. Normal, because something strange (if not directly creepy) is happening to this creature. Or perhaps the problem lies with the mother, and the whole thing could be a brutal allegory of a maternal-filial bonding disorder.

"I am not a victim of my own decisions," snaps Gabrielle (Léa Drucker) at one point in A Woman's Life, a surgeon in her fifties, dedicated to her work, married and childless, who watches as life changes around her: her mother has Alzheimer's, her accomplice at the hospital decides to spend more time with his family, she finds herself attracted to a younger writer... A Woman's Life could have fallen into the umpteenth portrait of a middle-aged woman who is condemned with a certain bitterness or regret for prioritizing her professional career over motherhood. The director and co-screenwriter Charline Bourgeois-Tacquet, on the other hand, builds a solid and complex female character as rarely seen in cinema, an attractive woman without being very likable, who embraces the freedom to choose and does not regret the consequences; capable of loving in many ways without falling into sentimentality, and with that dedication to work that seems to be allowed only to men. With a structure of eleven chapters, A Woman's Life is also a film destined to expand the fan base of Léa Drucker, the great dark horse of French cinema, one of those actresses capable of elevating the material they work with. Despite the good work of Bourgeois-Tacquet, it is inevitable to think that, in the skin of another actress, the character of Gabrielle would be much less interesting and convincing.

Sixteen years ago, David Fincher directed one of the essential films of the 21st century based on an impossible premise: the creation of Facebook. The Social Network demonstrated the filmmaker's ability to turn a screenplay –a written and spoken text– into a dizzying spectacle, transforming prosaic events like an awkward bar conversation into images worth watching. Almost two decades later, Aaron Sorkin, the screenwriter of that milestone and angry spokesperson for progressive consciousness in the United States, has dared to write and direct the sequel, replacing Fincher and also the actor (Jesse Eisenberg), who embodied Mark Zuckerberg in an exemplary way, now played by a Jeremy Strong full of tics.

Directed by Israeli journalists and filmmakers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor –who participated in the making of the Oscar-winningNo other land–, Naza dissects the death machine deployed by the Israeli army to perpetrate the Gaza genocide. The protagonists of the documentary are 24 soldiers who offer direct testimonies of a war campaign executed remotely using artificial intelligence systems. A chronicle of horror that is surprising for the coldness of the chroniclers, who seem detached from the human drama contained in their words. If in the poetic The Profession of Arms Ermanno Olmi illustrated the implications of the appearance of firearms at the beginning of the 16th century, Naza studies with clinical rigor the new martial paradigm in which human beings are reduced to numerical factors or erasable pixels on a digital screen.

From Goya to Honoré Daumier, art has never stopped reminding the powerful that it has the capacity (and, perhaps, also the obligation) to strip them bare, deprive them of their human dimension, and turn the mockery of the calamities they leave behind as a legacy into catharsis. A sentiment that Digger makes its own in a literal way at the end of a twisted path of excess and an accumulation of layers of fiction that the film's marketing has wanted to keep secret until the last moment. The message is crystalline and poignant, but the way in which Alejandro G. Iñárritu stages it also seems like a justification. Or, rather, a clarification: this is not a farce, but a commentary on the meaning of making a farce.

How can you make a movie about sick teenagers without the most skeptical audience accusing you of being overly optimistic? The people behind Sunny dancer choose to give the lead role to a character who is also skeptical, and angry, and understandably resentful. So the audience will discover a summer camp for young people with cancer through Ivy (Bella Ramsey), a teenager who has overcome leukemia and who did not want to go there at all. In the best of cases, the audience will accompany Ivy along a certain journey from emotionally blocked cynicism to a certain reconciliation with her own emotions and with the beauties and pains of the world.

Any film about rock, at least the ones worth watching, is not about rock. Furthermore, now that this musical style has for years been material only attractive to cultural archaeologists, films that talk about it no longer even need it as an excuse or narrative trigger. Rock is just the background music that accompanies tales from the past that challenge historical contents from a social or political angle.

It seemed impossible, but in this thriller of extreme survival there is a star that shines with more intensity than Brad Pitt: Uber, the canine actor who plays Odin, an ex-combat dog who faithfully accompanies his master, a retired Special Forces officer (Pitt), on an odyssey through the remote mountains of Alaska. The sensitivity with which David Ayer (a specialist in gritty police cinema, and who had already directed the actor in Fury) describes the deep bond that can be established between a human being and their dog, underscored by the natural chemistry that arose between Pitt and the animal, is the only thing that can be saved from a film that transforms the sense of wonder of adventure cinema into a high-end version of a survival reality show.

Can a film be made around Lorca without Lorca? The second feature film by Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi it seems that it is proposed, at the beginning, from this paradox arising from the need to convert the absence of the murdered poet into a significant off-screen space. The black ball interweaves three stories, the one that adapts the unfinished homonymous play by the Granada native, set in 1932; the one that is inspired by The dark stone, by Alberto Conejero, with whom Lorca's lover, Rafael Rodríguez Rapún, acts as the protagonist, which takes place in the year 1937; and the one, set in 2017, that reconstructs some elements of the past through a young historian who seeks to unearth family secrets. Los Javis thus film an ambitious historical fresco in which a genealogy is reclaimed queer with the Civil War as a conditioning framework for the gay experience. To make it clear how, despite the fascists' obsession with erasing Federico García Lorca even physically from the collective memory, his legacy remains alive across generations and countries.

When this critic saw the Filipino horror anthology Shake, rattle & roll in the wee hours of the morning and in a copy of dubious origin, he could not have imagined that years later one of the monsters that appears in it –the Manananggal, a winged creature capable of separating its torso from its legs– would have a prominent role in a Hollywood animated film for all audiences. But that is precisely what The Forgotten Island proposes, which stars two girls, Jo and Raissa, who have forged their friendship based on a shared fascination for the folkloric creatures of their land. On the night they are to part ways to embark on the path to adulthood, a portal opens right in front of them that leads them to the mythical island of Nakali, where they throw a formidable party… of which they remember nothing the next day, and they must ask for help from dog-boys and baby-demons to scratch together the clues that will allow them to retrace their steps and return home.

Resident Evil, the video game, revived the living dead back in the 90s, but if the franchise endures it is because it is a mutant and a vampire: a mutant because it never stops changing and a vampire because it sucks from the best horror whatever suits it best. Aside from the zombies of George A. Romero, it has reinterpreted The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, David Cronenberg or European gothic in a remix vertebrated by a clear idea: to make the player go through all sorts of things in a video game horror attraction.

Anthony Maras draws on a play by David Haig to stage the eve of the Normandy Landings that precipitated the end of the Second World War. The story is articulated around the decisive presence of James Stagg, the Scottish meteorologist who convinced General Eisenhower to delay D-Day from June 5 to June 6, 1944, thus avoiding a storm that could have radically changed the outcome of events.

What poetic justice and what irony surrounds Coyote vs. Acme. Poetic justice because Warner had this film finished in 2023 and decided not to release it due to a tax benefit scheme. The pressure from the workers who had been involved in the film led Warner to finally sell it off to another studio (Ketchup Entertainment) after years of not knowing what to do with it. And here begins the involuntary metaphor: Warner tried to destroy a film about a poor wretch, the Coyote chasing the Road Runner, who takes legal action against a giant corporation, the brand of all kinds of gadgets Acme, which has mistreated him for years by selling him defective products. A film trampled by the system about a character tired of being run over (and incinerated, blown to smithereens, thrown off a cliff...) by the system. This meta dimension is now an inevitable part of the film.

Perhaps almost all Hollywood romantic comedies are fantasy films, but a point of interest in the good-witch tragicomedy Practical Magic was the use of purely fantastical elements to metaphorically address traumas such as the fear of the death of a loved one. The late sequel Practical Magic 2 is one of those works that make no sense on their own. And it falls into dynamics similar to those observed in The Devil Wears Prada 2: the characters have not evolved and, furthermore, they relive the dilemmas of the previous work as if they were new. In parallel, the protagonists carry out a fairly generic mission. Their first adventure, a bit strange, included a criminal plot that complicated (and enriched, or made less predictable) the narrative journey. This time everything is more comfortable and timid.

In this evocative debut feature, Lucía Aleñar Iglesias expands the universe created in her award-winning short film of the same name. The Madrid-born filmmaker starts from a physical space (a house in Mallorca, by the sea) to reveal, little by little, the interiority of a family plunged into grief: a granddaughter (Zoe Stein, as unsettling as she is moving), a grandfather (Lluís Homar, in an unusually restrained performance), a mother, and the ghostly presence of the grandmother, who has just passed away. From Cría cuervos to Verónica, stories of (and with) ghosts have constituted ideal frameworks for coming-of-age and transition-to-adulthood narratives, but Aleñar Iglesias avoids the clichés of the subgenre with an aesthetic, formalist, and rigorous proposal that emulates a worn-out postcard and features a prickly central character, Cata (Stein), who defies all definition.

Over time, filmmakers like D.A. Pennebaker or the brothers David and Albert Maysles have approached musicians like Bob Dylan or the Rolling Stones with the intuition that observing what was happening around them would be worthwhile. From this impulse, some documentary masterpieces have emerged, such as the portrait of the elusive Dylan in Don’t look back, which almost shares a title with Oasis: Don’t look back in anger. There is, however, a crucial difference between the examples cited above and the film made by Dylan Southern and Will Lovelace: neither Pennebaker nor the Maysles really knew what would happen when they turned on the camera, whether they would capture the moment a man becomes an icon or whether they would record an outburst of violence. In contrast, Southern and Lovelace are clear about where the venture is heading; at the very least, because it is highly likely that any hitch in the reunion of Liam and Noel Gallagher, fifteen years after the fallout that precipitated the breakup of Oasis, would have meant the automatic cancellation of the project.