Well no, Sirado It is not one of the films chosen by the ARA critics (María Adell Carmona, Gerard Casau, Eulalia Iglesias, Joan Pons, Paula Arantzazu Ruiz, Manu Yáñez Murillo and myself) to summarize the cinema of 2025. But if a second of cinema only fits 24 frames, this invitation to discover a magnificent harvest that could also have included films by Hong Sang-soo, Jafar Panahi, Ryan Coogler, Gerard Oms, Jia Zhang-Ke or Radu Jude.

To mark the centenary of Antoni Tàpies last year, the Museu Tàpies commissioned director Albert Serra to create a piece that would generate new narratives and reflections on the painter's work. The result is Faith without works is dead52 minutes of magnetic and deconstructed images, eight segments ranging from the study of a body or a scene framed in a sensual, almost violent way, to total visual abstraction, sometimes projecting a work by Tàpies and giving great prominence to the sound mosaic of loops The film features synthesizers by Marc Verdaguer, Serra's regular musician. It was screened this Thursday at the Museu Tàpies as part of the Loop Festival, a closing of the circle that culminated in a subsequent discussion between the filmmaker and journalist Joan Burdeus.

The film has arrived at the establishments of the branchAlbert Serra Afternoons of solitude, with the special participation of Andrés Roca Rey, a quality bullfighter. The fact that we can now see it three times, preferably on alternate days rather than consecutively, will perhaps give everyone a more seasoned idea of what the art of bullfighting entails.

Cinema is an art form created by a team, and although directors often get most of the spotlight, a good film requires a team of highly trained professionals all pulling in the same direction. Films by Albert Serra. Self-taught and with a profoundly artistic vision, Tort amazed audiences and critics with his spectacular work in the cinema. Pacification (2022) and, following this milestone, which earned him a César Award in France, have recently contacted artists of the stature of singer Björk and filmmaker Lav Diaz. With the former, he recorded the concert Cornucopia, which was shown in theaters last May and, with the second, he directed the photography and edited the film. Magellan, starring actor Gael García Bernal, premiered at Cannes this year.

"The evolution of contemporary art goes one way and that of my mind goes another, and I believe that the interest of this proposal lies in that collision," he said on Thursday. Albert Serra before presenting at the Filmoteca Faith without works is dead, a piece commissioned by the Museu Tàpies to commemorate the painter's centenary celebrated last year. tribute perhaps it would be excessive: for 53 minutes divided into eight parts with titles like Friend, Oracle either First fall, Serra films scenes without narrative or hardly any action, sometimes over the projection of a work by Tàpies and always accompanied by a sound envelope of layers of synthesizer and feedback by his regular musician, Marc Verdaguer. Occasionally, subtitles appear that have no relation to what is shown on the screen: it could be an evocative "Who dreams of whom?", a disconcerting "Amor Visca" or a cryptic "honey, oriole, sparrow, warbler". Among the actors who appear in the film – it cannot be said that they act – is Lluís Serrat, Serra's faithful squire since the times ofHonor of chivalry. The images have a magnetic and violent aftertaste, especially when the camera moves abruptly as if someone had hit it.

"No questions about age, please." The warning is repeated before interviews with Isabelle Huppert (Paris, 1953), but it is unnecessary: at 72 years old, the great diva of French cinema maintains an admirable vitality and restlessness that are evident in The traveler, his new collaboration with Korean director and cinephile hero Hong Sang-soo, with whom he had already worked on In another country (2012) and Claire's Camera (2017)In the film, which premieres this Wednesday, Huppert tours South Korea offering French classes with a learning method as disconcerting as her attempts at flirting with her students. "I had a great time in these scenes; they're very funny," the actress admits.

The day before he married his wife, the director Miguel Gomes (Lisbon, 1972) read him a passage from Somerset Maugham's travel book The gentleman in the parlour (1930), in which the author describes the encounter in Burma with an Englishman who is making a famous route through Southeast Asia (the so-called Grand Tour) to escape his promise and the prosperous marriage it represents. That this story about a groom on the run has ended up becoming the new film by the director of Taboo and Arabian Nights It says a lot about his sense of humour and his absolutely free and fabulating conception of cinema. "Fiction exists precisely to create parallel lives that are less boring than mine," says Gomes, who in the film Grand tour –Cannes Best Director Award– first follows the melancholic Edward's journey through Southeast Asia and then switches point of view to narrate how Molly searches for him in Rangoon, Bangkok, Saigon, the Philippines...

Film director Albert Serra (Banyoles, 1975) premieres this weekend Afternoons of solitude, the documentary about bullfighting that won the last Golden Shell at the San Sebastian Festival. People who know that I have already seen the film ask: "but is it for or against bullfighting?" Serra's artistic choice is to portray them as we have never seen them before. With the cameras and microphones so close that the beauty and brutality are magnified. The bull and the bullfighter, two beasts, facing each other in an ancient and deadly ritual, banned in Catalonia since 2011.

The interest in men who hover around death runs through much of Albert Serra's filmography. Afternoons of solitude, his first feature-length documentary, clearly shows the desire to capture, through a ceremonial and spectacular practice, this link with the death of a man willing to kill or, to a much lesser extent, to die in the attempt. Although it is part of a long artistic and intellectual tradition of attraction to bullfighting, the Banyolí filmmaker wanted to make a bullfighting film like no other had been seen. An achievement that involves a series of decisions regarding formal refinement and discursive enrichment. Afternoons of solitude There is no voice-over or interviews, so the proposal departs from the usual report, eliminating intermediaries between the film and the audience.

In a strange protocol, Albert Serra is practically cornered in the photograph of authorities and winners prior to the presentation ceremony of the 2024 Bullfighting Award, which the PP has recovered through the Senate and the autonomous communities where they govern, after the Ministry of Culture led by Ernest Urtasun will eliminate it. It is clear that the conservatives want to oppose the Spanish government through this tradition, which is as controversial and divisive as politics in the State itself. And they have found in Serra their main ally, to whom they give great praise for the film, despite downplaying the role. Afternoons of solitude, which genuinely reflects how the bullfighter Andrés Roca Rey faces his bullfights. A film that was The big prize at the 2024 San Sebastian Film Festival and will be released in theaters on March 7.

The Truffaut Cinema in Girona is experiencing a sweet moment. With its two screening rooms, on the top floor of the old El Modern building, during the year 2024, nearly 44,000 spectators have passed through. This is the highest figure in its history and represents 13% more than the previous year, which had also been a record. At a time when large movie theaters are struggling, the Truffaut is still in top form: it is the only one left in the city center and, with a programming of auteur films, always in their original version, it has managed to attract an increasingly large, diverse and loyal film-going public. Opened in 1992, the Truffaut is a public facility, like the Municipal Theater and the Auditorium, but in this case it is managed, altruistically, by a group of critics who are responsible for making the selection of the program with great care and good judgment.