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.

In a gag that combines the absurd humor of Top Secret! with the clear-line animation and vivid colors of Steven Universe, the climax of the very funny and at times brilliant Jim Queen includes a Trojan (and very cute) unicorn from whose voluminous anus muscular gay men emerge. Christopher Nolan would have been horrified by the idea, but there is no better outcome for the wild odyssey through the Parisian gay multiverse (from gyms to nightclubs, from cruising spots to saunas) that the two protagonists experience – Jim, an egomaniacal influencer with perfect abs, and Lucien, his young admirer – to find the cure for heterosis, a new and terrible virus that transforms gay men into heterosexuals.

In a country like Catalonia, built politically from a critical consciousness towards the police, few actions have received more consensus than that of the Mossos d'Esquadra in the face of the attacks of August 17, 2017, in Barcelona and Cambrils. That is why Cronos is possible, a film with the vocation of reaching a wide audience in which these events unfold only from the police perspective. A model common in Hollywood that screenwriter Alberto Marini brings to our context, insisting on the human (and not superheroic) dimension of the protagonists, and director Fernando González Molina orchestrates with more efficiency than personality. The goal is to recreate those fateful hours that everyone vividly remembers in the form of a thriller that is realistic (that is to say, with many exterior locations) and loaded with emotions.

In a scenario like the current one, where fantasy and horror occupy a prominent place in cinephile debate and are the focus of much of the criticism, the figure of Eli Roth is almost anachronistic: a director who has found his place in the industry by practicing the less sophisticated forms of the genre, without asking for permission (or forgiveness) for his fondness for primary impulses. This philosophy reaches its purest expression in "Sweet taste of death (Home of the brave in the original title), a low-budget film made outside of Hollywood, with Roth controlling all fronts, from directing to production, including acting (who knows if out of vanity or simply to save on an actor's salary), and conceptualized from a bloody occurrence: a disturbing ice cream vendor who controls the will of children in a suburban town and urges them to massacre their parents, teachers, and adult authority figures. There's no need to look for meaning, because there's nothing to analyze outside of the orgy of excesses gore, which never reaches the expected euphoria, perhaps because the staging is clumsy even for the low standards of the director of Hostel (2005), and the images are diluted with artificial intelligence, a fact that has caused viral indignation, but which at its core connects with the lack of consideration of the lineage of exploitation cinema that Roth defends with more will than success.

It's strange that no one has yet invented a word to define and encompass all apocalypse fictions, now that every week, if there isn't a movie, there's a series. Just as someone one day pulled actioner out of a hat for action films or survival for extreme survival ones, an apocalypter, to say something, might facilitate labeling for the viewer. Today's is Ridley Scott's latest. And the truth is, it's hard to determine the purpose of this film, where it's going, what it intends, what it exactly wants to tell us. What is clear to us is that it's no longer enough to make Jacob Elordi as handsome as possible: now he also has to know how to fly planes, fix any contraption, cook well, be affectionate with children and animals, seem like the best possible son-in-law, and seek fraternity among the dregs of the world even if the Armageddon has arrived. A post-apocalyptic saint. Oh, and also include existentialist shots of him flying his rickety little plane over National Geographic-beauty landscapes with a deep, sad gaze, as if reminding us that if he's such a good person, it's because he actually feels very lonely. It's to be appreciated that this time Ridley Scott isn't filming with a multi-camera, that resource that often sacrificed intentional planning. The director of Alien knows when an image is powerful. And it would be good if he were also more demanding with those that are weak or cliché.

Cinema is one of the creative foods of Charli XCX. This is how the title of his latest album declares it –Music, fashion, film–, on whose cover Martin Scorsese appears, and which closes with a monologue by David Cronenberg. But a figure as voracious as the author of Brat cannot be satisfied with winks, and in recent months has dedicated a considerable part of his hyperactivity to the screen: not only has he composed the songs for Wuthering Heights [Wuthering Heights], but has participated as an actress in various films and has even become the driving force behind two projects: the mockumentary The moment and Eruption, a pocket-sized drama he coprodces, cowrites, and stars in. Here, the British anti-star embodies Bethany, a woman who returns to her amulet-like city, Warsaw, to reconnect with her friend Nel, next to whom everything seems more exciting and open to possibilities that turn everything upside down, like a volcanic eruption. Pete Ohs' film presents itself proudly disheveled and with a cinephile militancy that is evident in scenes like the one where Bethany discreetly pursues Nel, a direct reference to The crazy journeys of Céline and Julie (Jacques Rivette, 1974), which Charli XCX herself points to as one of her staple films. But, however much she may want to take as a model the liberated and collaborative spirit of the cinematic tradition represented by Rivette's work, it is impossible not to perceive Erupjca as an unwitting star vehicle, an indie toy tethered to the polyhedron of one of the most fascinating pop figures of our era.

Beyond the talent for orchestrating action scenes – in the film As bestas and the series Antidisturbios–, the filmmaker from Madrid Rodrigo Sorogoyen usually builds his sharp existential odysseys around intimate sequences loaded with dramatic density and attention to detail. Following this pattern, El ser querido opens with a lengthy and vibrant encounter between a father (Javier Bardem), a successful film director, and his daughter (Victoria Luengo), whom he hasn't seen in thirteen years and who offers her the leading role in his new film. In itself, this scene, filmed in close-ups from a distance, offers everything an demanding viewer could ask for: writing of the highest precision, eloquent silences, echoes of John Cassavetes and Ingmar Bergman, and a duo of actors in a state of grace.

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.