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.

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