Argentine cinema is one of the most resilient in the entire world. A thousand times, circumstances have been adverse to it –the most recent, when Milei and his chainsaw came to power–, and a thousand times it has demonstrated its capacity to generate remarkable and free works. The latest example we have in The River Train, a film that emanates from two desires, intimately related, of its directors, Lorenzo Ferro and Lucas A. Vignale: on one hand, to wander through the sensations that childhood leaves behind; on the other, to work with a child who could embody the loneliness, the bewilderment, and the wonder of that vital phase. It is, in fact, the eyes of its protagonist, Milo Barría, both immense and impenetrable, that are in charge of guiding us through an adventure that detaches itself from realism as the child moves away from the family home and approaches Buenos Aires, a city that signifies the opening to mystery, risk, and the possibility of discovering oneself as someone different.

In recent weeks, the release of the film La bola negra in the United States and Canada has not stopped bringing good news to Spanish cinema. The success has been unstoppable and has spread among film critics, and some media outlets have even come to consider the film a strong candidate for the Oscars in various categories. And the success is also reflected in the audience's reception. As reported by the specialized media outlet The Hollywood Reporter, this weekend the film will be shown in 465 movie theaters, after premiering in only four theaters on October 16th.

In 1988, George Michael was 25 years old, had broken up Wham!, and was immersed in the tour for his debut solo album, Faith, with which he had fulfilled the dream of every musician who leaves the band that brought them fame: not only to match the success of the mothership, but also to consolidate himself in the pop constellation. When the tour stopped at the Palais de Paris-Bercy and filled it for two nights, the event was used to record a promotional video for the single Monkey. Far from settling for just that track, the cameras filmed the entirety of both concerts in 35mm; a fact that tells us as much about the lavish philosophy of the music industry at the time as it does about the precocious status of royalty that Michael had conquered.

Hollywood is trying once again to export the creations of the writer and illustrator Dr. Seuss (The Grinch). The Cat in the Hat, a children's story about the clash between the desire to have fun and the rules of conduct, returns in an animated and quite transformed version. A move to a new house is the trigger for the action: a mother and her two children have moved into a small apartment in another city, a fact that causes the girl's complaints. A cat that speaks and generates chaos around it will intervene to encourage the youngsters with games that have unpredictable consequences.

The dark Spanish and Catalan tradition of real-life serial killers (the Werewolf of Allariz, Jarabo, Arropiero, Enriqueta Martí, the Olot caretaker...) has not had a very successful audiovisual exploitation; perhaps because there is no such fascination halfway between morbidity and the cautionary tale –which does exist in the film and series industry of the United States– surrounding these figures that are too horrifying for a conventional true crime. That is why we only find sporadic works, such as the series La huella del crimen, the film Romasanta and the documentary La vampira del Raval.

Following the success of the series Yo, adicto (2024), Javier Giner once again teams up with Oriol Pla for his feature film debut. In This Loneliness, the director follows two characters in their thirties burdened by something more than loneliness: Leo (a Pla who even speaks in Basque) and Lorea (Marina Salas), who have just broken up as a couple and cannot find their respective paths in life. From their wandering parallel trajectories, Giner constructs an intense, raw portrait of a disoriented generation marked by a helplessness that has never been explicitly stated as such.

Shaun the Sheep and his ovine companions return to the big screen in the year that other cinematic sheep (the protagonists of the hilarious The Sheep Detective) threatened to overshadow them. Luckily, there is room for everyone on the farm. The third feature from the popular stop-motion franchise created by Aardman studio, to whom we owe classics like Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit and Chicken Run, once again presents a story stuffed with brilliant visual gags and a careful, artisanal aesthetic proposal that reaches its maximum expression in the tower-laboratory scenes where Shaun, turned into a woolly version of Dr. Frankenstein, creates a potion that will transform the hairless Farmer into a terrifying hairy monster.

Before the Lumière brothers' cinematograph filmed the workers of their factory leaving into the street after a day of work, there was the horse that Eadweard Muybridge immortalized in a series of photographs animated by the rotation of the zoopraxiscope. For some, this is the true first film in history, reclaimed by some of the most interesting works of contemporary cinema: from Holy Motors by Leos Carax to Nope! by Jordan Peele. The latest to give a nod to these seminal images is the Korean director Na Hong-jin, who delights in the gallop of the animal being chased by an extraterrestrial creature during one of the explosive action sequences that occupy the bulk of the footage of Hope. In the same way that Muybridge's primitive artifact could not fully capture equine movement, Na shows the race of the alien creature as a vertigo impossible to grasp with the eyes (or with cameras), and synthesizes at a stroke a chronology of the movement of bodies (animal, human, and digital) that contains within itself the history of cinema.

The success of a literary adaptation depends on the fragile balance between fidelity to the original text and its necessary betrayal. As was the case with the revered Sense and Sensibility of 1995 directed by Ang Lee and written by one of its actresses, Emma Thompson, the new adaptation directed by Georgia Oakley positions itself far enough from the original work to boast a personality of its own. The bet made by the director of Blue Jean (a striking lesbian drama set in Thatcher's England) is to bring Austen's modern and immortal work to contemporary audiences through a naturalistic, pictorial aesthetic (the film is shot on 35mm) and an intimate style that recalls the cinema of Jane Campion or Sofia Coppola and shows the Dashwood sisters as never before: talking lazily in bed or running through desolate natural landscapes with messy hair or mud-stained dresses.

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.