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.

The end of Oak Street begins with a sunny day of celebration, games, and quintessentially American neighborhood barbecues. An idyllic scene that all viewers will be wary of, either because they know David Robert Mitchell's previous filmography – in particular, the essential text for contemporary horror that is It follows– and they know that the filmmaker has a tendency to touch a raw nerve regarding suburban unease. Or, simply, because they have seen some of the film's posters, where a family flees from the sharp jaws of what appears to be a dinosaur. Whatever expectations one enters to see it with, the film satisfies, and modulates the horizontal pulse with which Robert Mitchell usually tightens the scope in order to bring it closer to the codes of a Hollywood entertainment that the director hesitates whether to challenge or revere.

For her opera prima, Muriel d'Ansembourg has chosen a pair of debut actors: Caolán O'Gorman and Safiya Benaddi are Alec and Nina, two teenagers who meet at high school and who, based on a joint research project on pornography addiction, begin to develop the typical tension of first loves. The conflict arises when the young man, who helps his father shoot adult films on a makeshift set at his home, adopts intolerable behavior, a result of his precocious relationship with sex.Andrew Howard, a Welsh actor who has worked on The Odyssey or Tenet, alongside English porn star Alessa Savage, offer the adult perspective of the story, which explores the contradictions of making the porn industry too much of a domestic affair. The focus, however, is on the young man, an introverted boy who, in some way, lives a double life: although he finds it incredibly easy to dissociate when framing a close-up of his father's penis, when it comes to confronting his own sexuality, he is lost. It will be when he meets Nina that Alec will realize – as the film's title anticipates – who he really is; or, perhaps, who his personal circumstances have made him.The film seeks to make the viewer uncomfortable, not only by showing the pornographic exploitation of the female body – often violated and mistreated in this type of cinema – but also by placing a rather unconventional father-son relationship at the center. Alec lost his mother when he was little and found himself alone with Dylan, who tries to get by with what he knows how to do (apparently) best. Although the moral debate about the characters' decisions is particularly stimulating, the power of the proposal gradually dilutes as it progresses. The good ideas, however, do not disappear, and make Truly naked a seductive debut.

When M. Night Shyamalan, president of the jury for the 2022 edition of the Berlinale, awarded the Golden Bear to Alcarràs by Carla Simón, said that the reasons for this award were the "extraordinary performances, from children to actors over eighty years old", and also their "skilled at sensitively portraying a family and their connection and dependence on the land". Well, then these two arguments could perfectly apply, without changing a single comma, to Living the land, the Silver Bear for Best Director for Huo Meng in 2025, also at the Berlinale.

In 17th-century Japan, kabuki theatre banished women from the stage, leading to the emergence of the onnagata, actors responsible for embodying female characters. Their white makeup and painted lips, and their graceful gestural precision have been influential beyond their borders (David Bowie acknowledged them as a reference for his stellar aura), and even today they are one of the discipline's most prized elements. This is how Kokuho is presented, a melodrama that firmly expands from the sixties to 2014, and which is guided by the tumultuous relationship between two onnagata who are raised as brothers. One, Kikuo, son of a yakuza murdered by his rivals; the other, Shunsuke, the firstborn son of Hanjiro, a celebrated kabuki actor. When the latter decides to name Kikuo as his successor to the detriment of his own son, scandal and jealousy irremediably erode the bond between the protagonists.

Director Renny Harlin (The jungle 2), a relevant name from late last century's Hollywood, signs a new film that is nowhere and raised with international financing that includes the Barcelona-based production company Nostromo. The project has something of a digital update of a seventies disaster co-production due to its transnational nature and also a certain unspecific tone, a commerciality that tries to be for all audiences. On the open sea does not assume the apparent seriousness of somewhat more ambitious films such as the recent Labyrinth in flames, nor does it abuse the black humor of the most festively cruel B-movies.

Any image – whether static or moving – captured for posterity of some more or less prosaic family activity has thermal memory. As if they were the embers of a past that never quite goes out, photos of loved ones in a physical album or in the mobile's image and video gallery retain an intangible but undeniable charm and warmth. Looking at them is like finding some of those little things Serrat sang about in his song: they make us cry when no one sees us.

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.