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.

At this point, it's not even worth questioning that Disney has decided to go a step further in its collection of live actions and tackle contemporary classics, as is the case with this Moana, based on the animated film from 2016 that doesn't seem so long ago. In addition to economic reasons, the sense of the remake is justified here in the nostalgic reunion with karaoke-worthy songs: it's the same logic thanks to which The Lion King has been playing on Madrid's Gran Vía for nearly 15 years.

“And you, Alex, what do you want to be when you grow up?”, his mother asked. “Me? Jean-Luc Godard, esclar!”, replied the boy who, not many years later, would rename himself Leos Carax. The anecdote is apocryphal, but it points to the intimate truth of an artist who, in his early days, channeled the fatal romanticism and formal daring of the early stage of the author of "Pierrot the madman, who recognized the affinity by inviting his disciple to participate as an actor in King Lear. Today the short film It's not me presents us with a Carax who, directly, makes it clear he is Godard, speaking to us with the trembling diction that identified the spectral soliloquies of the Franco-Swiss genius, and emulating the essayistic device that he perfected in the atlas that is the series History(ies) of Cinema. A cosplay gens banal, as it became increasingly evident as the project progressed that Godard's purpose was not to pay homage to the art to which he had dedicated his life, but to explain himself, as if his biography consisted of the images that had shaped him, and his natural destiny was to disappear within the audiovisual stream of consciousness that he manipulated at the editing table.

In one of the first scenes of Normal, characters joke about the disaster that could happen if the rifles decorating the walls of a rustic restaurant were loaded. At that precise moment, the viewer understands that the film tacitly commits to making this bloody desire a reality, and one only needs to try to guess in what context the massacre will occur. This is the dynamic that keeps the film going: anticipating the arrival of violence while looking for unexpected ways to make it explode. The person in charge of orchestrating it is Ben Wheatley, a British filmmaker who over the past decade earned a reputation for the joy with which he violated the physical integrity of his characters. The interest in contemplating the consequences that weapons (blades or firearms) have on the human body is, in fact, the most recognizable staging gesture we can detect in Normal, which has its authentic creative strength in the tandem formed by Bob Odenkirk's anti-star charisma and the writing of Derek Kolstad, author of the John Wick screenplay. Both had previously worked together on Nobody (2021), where Odenkirk clashed his ordinary aura with extreme beatings. Normal prolongs their alliance by lowering the dose of pure action in favor of a farce steeped in black humor that, if it surprises for anything, it is for the understanding permissiveness it applies to the moral opacity embraced by those who feel scorned by the system.

After the success of the Minions' appearances in Gru, my favorite villain, and the consequent proliferation of associated merchandise, the rent-seeking Hollywood opted to generate derivative works to cash in on the trend. It didn't seem easy to fill a feature film starring these clumsy agents of chaos with limited rhetoric, but the challenge has been met now that Gru's adventures are already showing signs of exhaustion. In fact, Minions & Monsters can compete to be considered the best film in the cinematic universe to which it belongs.

What else can be said about Robin Hood? From Kevin Costner to Russell Crowe, from Errol Flynn to Sean Connery, or from Disney's fox to Mel Brooks' parody, the legendary outlaw of Sherwood Forest has had so many lives that it's hard to find anything new in him. Perhaps that's why filmmaker Michael Sarnoski's reinterpretation with The Death of Robin Hood is irredeemably twilight. The director of Pig (2021) and A Quiet Place: Day One (2024) demythifies the hero and makes the character, in an advanced stage of his life, question his past: "I told lies so that the foolish would follow me into the darkness," he says at one point in the film. Sarnoski explores Robin Hood's guilt through a narrative that succeeds in reflecting on the ambiguity between truth and falsehood in tales of popular heroism, with a committed Hugh Jackman but with a tone too close to what he already played in James Mangold's Logan (2017). The film's gamble is, in any case, brave: the action (raw, ultraviolent) only takes place at the beginning, before giving way to a more intimate story in a sanatorium where the character arrives badly wounded. Sarnoski points to a false illusion of atonement when he hints at the possibility of a shared life between the protagonist, the prioress played by Jodie Comer, and Little John's daughter, but he doesn't manage to develop the idea beyond certain conventionalisms. The film is in large part disruptive, but also pompous and solemn.

The hope and luminosity of James Gunn's latest film have been left behind. If Superman (2025) bet on the optimistic inspiration of believing in humanity, in Supergirl we are met with a stark portrait of trauma and the thirst for revenge. Kara's excuse for quitting alcoholism is her encounter with Ruthye, an orphaned teenager who needs help to execute her family's killer. This tragedy awakens the childhood memories of a Supergirl who is the polar opposite of what we knew until now: a disaster on legs who, despite responding to normative beauty standards (she is blonde, slim, and beautiful), is not built to be sexualized. Kara is more of a tomboy with depressive traits who has a single concern: the well-being of her dog Krypto.Dark, violent and with an excess of dispensable subplots, Supergirl —which takes the essence and main characters from the comic miniseries Supergirl: The Tomorrow Woman—, is conceived as an interplanetary western with cyberpunk aesthetics. Among multiform creatures and decadent worlds, what stands out most about Gillespie's proposal, beyond an unquestionable visual and sound quality, is the growth journey of two girls who accompany each other on this path to maturity. Growing up doesn't mean accumulating years, but facing the obstacles that life has in store for us. And if it's with company, all the better.

At this point, after nine feature films, it seems difficult for John Carney to change a style forged with the unexpected success of Once nor to detach his stories from musical universes. In Sing Street, the Irish director opts to interweave the lives of two very different musicians. Paul Rudd's character belongs to the working-class lineage, honest but disillusioned with what he could have been if he hadn't prioritized family over his music career. At one of the weddings where he performs with his covers band, he comes into contact with a former boy band singer (Nick Jonas, from the Jonas Brothers) who has become an internationally famous solo artist. And as the explicit title suggests, the plot is set in motion by a practice very common in the industry: stealing songs from other artists.

The pressures in healthcare and blind trust in their protocols lead everyone to assume that Nino, a 29-year-old man, has gone to the health center well-informed. So he discovers, without any preparation or prior suspicion, that he has cancer. Debut director Pauline Loquès stages the impact of this news while suggesting some themes that hover over the narrative: the precariousness of public services, certain climates of egocentrism and impatience that lead people not to listen to each other... However, as the film's title anticipates, the bulk of the efforts are dedicated to portraying its apparently shy, implicitly kind, perhaps emotionally blocked protagonist. Someone who cannot go home as if nothing had happened, also because he has lost his keys and cannot get them back. The small everyday problem also serves as a metaphor.

Like a reserve team player who scores the goal that wins the Champions League for their team. That's how unexpected the success of Obsession. The good feelings that this independent production by filmmaker However, although it seems to have come out of nowhere, Curry Barker has been chasing scares and chills on the internet for some years now. Like other emerging talents in the genre –the Philippou brothers or Kane Parsons, author of Backrooms–, the director made a name for himself with a YouTube channel where he has posted sketches and short films that oscillate between comedy and horror (such as The chair, where we can detect the germ of ideas exploited in

The first feature film as a director by Aina Clotet, Viva, begins with an image in which many women recognize themselves, especially those over 50, but which is not often visible in audiovisuals: a close-up of the protagonist Nora's flattened breast as she undergoes a mammogram. This unusual representation of the female body announces the filmmaker's cinematic positioning regarding two concerns that run through Viva. The first, the direct and unvarnished focus on Nora's medical situation, who has just overcome breast cancer with a mastectomy included, but still lives awaiting a possible relapse. In fact, the film takes place in the following weeks, while she awaits the results of this initial check-up. This temporal arc places the film in direct affiliation with Agnès Varda's Cléo de 5 to 7 (1962), in which the protagonist confronted a similar scenario and the same process of rediscovering herself. The second concern anticipated by this opening scene is the uninhibited relationship with her own body expressed by the character, embodied by Aina Clotet herself.

Above the vibrant opening credits of 15 Loves an actual sound bite can be heard: that of the announcement, by the President of the French National Assembly, of the result of the vote on same-sex marriage, approved in April 2013. Alice Douard's powerful opera prima therefore begins with a historic event (the film takes place in 2014) to portray with sensitivity and empathy an event that belongs to the intimate sphere: the earthquake that a young lesbian couple, formed by Céline (Ella Rumpf, on the rise to stardom) and Nadia (Monia Chokri, a regular in Xavier Dolan's cinema), experiences when deciding to start a family, and the discriminatory legal and bureaucratic labyrinth this entails.

Michel Franco's cinema is the visual equivalent of the phrase “I'm not racist/sexist/classist, but…” Addicted to strong themes, the Mexican director tries (or believes) to find the right distance so that the controversies he stages are imbued with shades of gray. However, when it comes down to it, he almost always lets slip a gesture that reveals his satisfaction at being a provocateur, or a plot twist that condemns the most disadvantaged. It must be said, however, that considering the unhealthy precedents, Dreams relatively easily places itself at the upper end of his filmography. This is because for a good part of the running time, Franco allows the faces and bodies of his actors to express themselves: the relationship between the wealthy American philanthropist played by Jessica Chastain and the virtuoso Mexican dancer she patronizes is driven by a genuine desire that crystallizes in carnal choreographies. In these moments, the film manages to prevent the clear allegory about the balance of power and dependence between the nations represented by the protagonists from crushing the human scale of the effects. But in the universe of the author of Nuevo orden, good things never last long, and the narrative advances with deterministic resignation to bring out the worst in human nature and punish characters whom, for a naive moment, we had believed the director considered something more than an instrument for his thesis.

In one of the most celebrated and viral moments of the interview program for cinema personalities Inside the Actors Studio, host James Lipton speaks with Steven Spielberg about how the divorce of the director's parents when he was young inspired some of his films. “Steven, your father was a computer specialist and your mother was a pianist. And in Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), when the spaceship lands, humans and aliens communicate by making music with computers,” Lipton points out. Spielberg listens and smiles, between surprised and moved: “I would like to say I wanted it to be a metaphor for my parents' relationship, but I hadn't realized it until now”.

Although it is set in present-day New York and stars a charming young couple, Un talento único seems conceived to stir the nostalgia of veteran cinephiles, those who in the 90s enjoyed the regular release of intimate films with characters facing vital, emotional, and moral dilemmas. In this sense, the story of a meticulous piano tuner who suffers from a hearing impairment and discovers an ability to pick locks is reminiscent of the uplifting drama As Good as It Gets – the tuner finds salvation in the love of a pianist – as well as the mix of crime thriller and quirky comedy from Manhattan Murder Mystery.

Before Hollywood's studio system began manufacturing film stars, Europe was ruled by divas, theatrical actresses who achieved massive acclaim and critical prestige, turning them into true national icons of popular adoration. Pietro Marcello revives the figure of Eleonora Duse, a myth in Italy at the turn of the 19th to the 20th century, to explore, from the actress's mature stage, the rise of fascism in her country. A subject the filmmaker had already addressed in Martin Eden (2019), a more balanced and brilliant film in its revision of cinematic historical drama. Marcello understands well that the fascination with divas, also as people, lies in their contradictions and in how they embrace life's most tempestuous dimension.

It is always appreciated when a film doesn't lecture you. This applies to any film, of course, but it is especially relevant when dealing with works that touch on social issues. Iván & Hadoum, in this sense, gets into many tricky situations right from its premise: Iván is a young trans man who falls in love with a colleague from Morocco at the fruit and vegetable greenhouse where they both work in Almeria. That is to say, the film touches on gender, sexual identity, class, and race. But none of these is the narrative axis. In any case, class ends up having more weight, because the friction between the two characters ends up being work-related (Iván has a complacent attitude towards the bosses; Hadoum is combative). Be that as it may, the opera prima as a director by Ian de la Rosa is not about that either: it's about the moment when two people, regardless of their identity, converge until they diverge, like any other pair of human beings in the first stages of falling in love.

From the mid-eighties animated series to the contemporary version, we have accompanied Prince Adam on different adventures, always adapted to the audience of the moment. Travis Knight's proposal, more focused on the fantasy universe than the 1987 one —which solved a tight budget by placing most of the action on Earth—, focuses on the protagonist's identity crisis. After being forcibly exiled from Eternia at ten years old, and living for almost two decades trying to fit in with the human species, Adam finds the sword that allows him to return home. There he meets not only Teela, a childhood friend who functions more as a buddy than a potential romantic interest, but also a host of ghosts from the past that he will have to face if he wants to make his planet a habitable environment.With self-awareness and humor as weapons and a generational update of the superhero, this new He-Man leaves behind the security of knowing his destiny to approach the usual conflicts of the new viewer. The quest for power becomes an introspective journey where doubt and fluctuation lead the way, a journey in which the character embraces the opportunity to ask himself who he is and, above all, who he wants to become. In this collective party that is He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, diversity is the norm and sensitivity a language to discover. Who says the most powerful man in the world can't wear a kitten sweatshirt?

When he was sixteen, Kane Parsons made short films based on a creepypasta (chilling legends that originate and go viral on the internet) called The Backrooms. Conceived as short, stylized horror films Obsession), the renewal of a certain current genre cinema comes from the collision with the strange universe of some of the most talented internet creators.

If he has to choose, Fernando Franco will always choose the most arduous path. His filmography speaks of a filmmaker who doesn't like to make things easy for himself, and who imposes a double challenge on himself: to frontally address uncomfortable issues – the unstable nature of a woman with borderline personality disorder in La herida, the agony of a terminally ill patient in Morir, the sexuality of a person with cerebral palsy in La consagración de la primavera– without falling into the morbid sensationalism that these offer. This purpose makes more sense than ever in La luz, which features the most unassailable protagonist of all those the director has portrayed: a priest who becomes aware of the gravity of the abuses he inflicted on minors three decades ago.