If we were to make a bet on whether Pedro Almodóvar likes Espejos nº 3, the recommendation from film betting houses would be to put a few euros on yes. Perhaps it's a film without pop inertia and without melodramatic or comic moments that disrupt it, like in the cinema of the Mancha native. But the German Christian Petzold sets himself a challenge that runs parallel to those of Almodóvar's latest films: trying to make an implausible, even ridiculous, plot believable on screen.

A leading German filmmaker of recent decades, Christian Petzold (Hilden, 1960) has visited Barcelona for the retrospective dedicated to him by the D'A Festival, a program that includes his latest film, which will be released in cinemas on April 10. In Espejos n. 3, a depressed piano student and the sole survivor of a fatal car accident recovers at the home of a woman she has just met. Tenderness and unexpected connections in a film that functions as a compendium of virtues and obsessions of one of the most in-form European directors of the moment.

It's hard to know how Wes Anderson manages to continue to function as a happy anomaly in today's Hollywood. His films remain, film after film, tremendously true to themselves and oblivious to fads and trends, building a filmography of exceptional coherence in American cinema of recent decades. An independent republic within Hollywood that is only possible thanks to Anderson's supernatural ability to summon in each film a good handful of international stars who lower their cachet to become part of the director's very personal universe. It happens again in the film that premiered this Sunday at the Cannes Film Festival,The Phoenician Plot, which stars Benicio del Toro, Tom Hanks, Bryan Cranston, Scarlett Johansson, Benedict Cumberbatch, Riz Ahmed, Michael Cera and, of course, Bill Murray, who has already collaborated with the director for eleven years.