[Disney+] It has the ability to mix genres (romantic, spies, fantasy, violence...), with a structure into micro-stories that serve to develop the characters (even the most secondary ones have a somewhat tragic background), and create one of the most entertaining and enjoyable series in this year. Good CGI contribute to a solid narrative that actually ends up talking about family in its concept of protection ("I'm willing to become a monster to protect my son"), so that the dividing line between the heroes and the villains is adequately diffused.
[Netflix] One of the best series that have ever been made about the world of drugs, complex in its plots, unexpected in the construction of the characters and unpredictable in the development of the story. If Channel 4 phase was more focused on the construction of the Summerhouse, Netflix phase turns into a splendid thriller with social ramifications. Each character, main or secondary, could have their own series. The last season is a perfect exercise in tension that closes the series as if it were a Shakespearean tragedy.
[Sheffield '23] Romanian director Vlad Petri draws a parallel between the 1980 Islamic revolution in Iran and the popular uprising in Romania in 1989, through a fictitious epistolary relationship between an Iranian woman and a young Romanian girl who studied together in Bucharest. The letters that are exchanged over the years show the hope of the beginning of both revolutions to end in disappointment and hopelessness, in a fictional story that surrounds reality through a montage of archival images that is remarkable and revealing.
[Festival Scope] Throughout the film there seems to be a clear intention to develop not only a narrative that mixes fact and fiction avoiding the usual mockumentary style, but also a prominent experimental manifestation. Although the incorporation of some elements such as dance seem like additions that do not fully fit with the whole, this unique work addresses problems of addictions and mental illnesses in a different way, in which the artistic pulse is mixed with the documentary impetus, achieving a fascinating connection between reality and fiction.
[Filmin] An excellent thriller based on real events but that works better in its fictional elements, through a compelling story about the progressive distancing of two friends faced with an environment of violence and abuse within the police. Framed in the attacks of the Brabant murderers in Belgium between 1982 and 1985, the series opts for a theory never proven, but which offers an interesting reflection on the power and fragmentation of a society in which the limits between what is correct and what is wrong are less and less clear.
[Sheffield '23] Through his relationship with his family, the director builds one of the most intelligent approaches to death based on the need to enjoy life. The diagnosis of a brain tumor that offers him only a margin of four to eight years to live becomes an obsession to build an audiovisual legacy, but also a reflection of how to deal with an incurable disease, tinged with a funny sense of dark humour. In his distant relationship with his mother, and the closest and most affectionate with his father, the film changes focus to show family secrets and an extraordinary celebration of life.
[Annecy '23] Constructs social commentary using a sense of humor and a traditional animation style that is marked by a remarkable sense of composition, perfectly balanced to portray the monotony of social norms. It begins with a funeral, one of those rituals in which social norms are more strongly established and differences and traditions are more clearly reflected, with the protagonist surrounded by men who are all the same. Throughout its 16 minutes, the story develops in a fluid way, introducing surreal elements and a dark but effective sense of humor.
[Annecy '23] An interesting reflection on the millennials and their lack of resources to emancipate themselves, at the same time that it is an exploration of female sexuality through the fantasies of Alice, as if it were an approach to porn but with a social approach. The story begins with Alice's fantasy in which she has a threesome with a couple of police officers who have approached her in a park, after asking where her parents are. This feeling of not being considered an adult until she leaves the family home causes an emotional disorder in Alice that she only releases when she dances.
[Prime Video] One of the most relevant series in recent years, a happy place that shows the development of stand up comedy until the appearance of the first late shows in the 60's. Although it has had ups and downs throughout its five seasons, it manages to close splendidly the stories of all the characters. But above all, it celebrates the history of the first comic women who, like Joan Rivers, Mary Tyler Moore or Carol Burnett, opened the doors of comedy to other perspectives. And it achieves a screwball comedy pacing that is unprecedented on current television. The end of the TV Golden Age.
[HBO Max] In the universe of fiction's most fascinating antiheroes, Barry Berkman accompanies Walter White, Dexter Morgan, Tony Soprano and Don Draper, characters who progressively embrace the darkness until there is no way out but to continue entering it. And that's when the concept of redemption or forgiveness takes on a more tragic tone, that of being someone they don't really want to be. "Barry" has the weirdest motorcycle chase, the most outlandish fight scene, and the most radical change of tone in recent years. A story of tragic characters who finally find the only possible ending.
[ArteKino Classics] It is through its images that the influence that this film has had on subsequent war cinema is transmitted, but at the same time it remains as experimental and modern as it was in its time. A nightmare about the lack of humanity in war that takes place on a realistic terrain, which uses expressions of art to build a story that is heartbreaking and emotional due to its rawness and daring. It's as strong visually as it is psychologically deep, perhaps one of the best representations of the human being transformed into a beast.
[HBO Max] Sometimes it struggles to unify all the myriad ideas it brings up, but it has such a unique, thoughtful, and current concept that it's even worth leaving questions unanswered. In the midst of mixture of genres, this story talks about how devotion to AI works as a representation of faith, as a substitute for divinity in terms of delivery absolute of the users/acolytes. It's a story that could not be created with tools like ChatGPT, because it has a capacity for inventiveness, irony and a playful character that claims creativity as intrinsically human.
[Filmin] A skillfully constructed story, creating a suspenseful tone without ever losing the realistic approach. The approach to the main character is created from revelations of his cloistered childhood, but at the same time Pete Jackson develops a story in which it's the others who are giving in to Danny's vision of the world instead of him who only adapts to a new world. With a profile of secondary characters who face their own traumas, it uses monstrous representations that come from the imagination, but are also allegorical of mental disorders.
[Filmin] As in the work of the photographer, the relationship between the personal gaze and the political comments is more than close, and thus a film is built that turns out to be deeply intimate but also radically political. Laura Poitras offers such a close portrait that she herself appears at the beginning of the film recording Nan Goldin, as if she were an inseparable part of this story. The film contains such a careful narrative that it can be considered the best of the filmography of a director who is building an absolutely fascinating chronicle of our society.
[VdR '23] Infected by the traditions and certain spirituality surrounding grasshopper hunting in Uganda, the director creates a poetic texture when showing close-ups of grasshoppers and establishing a contrast between the world of insects, mysterious and fascinating, and the most vérité style in the world of humans, but in which the traps are also reflected, seen from afar, as if they were spaceships that have just landed on the ground. The electronic sounds of Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe's modular synths add a sci-fi texture that makes for an especially immersive experience.
[VdR '23] Contrast is the main element of this film that develops with a certain air of science-fiction reverie, while it shows the quiet life of Valeriano, a shepherd who lives in a Catalan forest with the facilities of a laboratory in which one of the vaccines against Covid-19 is being developed. There are numerous ideas captured throughout the documentary, which always work in this sense of opposition that serves as the axis of the narrative, and which raise issues such as animal experimentation through a repeated image of goats, sheep or pigs entering the laboratory. The science-fiction tone that the look brings to the laboratory is a skilful visual resource that feeds the narrative.
[CPH:DOX '23] A film endowed with a clarifying and deeply disturbing look that describes the consequences of a system of hazing in the army inherited from the former Soviet Union that persists in countries like Belarus. With a series of narrative layers that give complexity to the story and an outstanding sense of cinematographic visualization, the film creates a disturbing atmosphere that reflects in the last part the transmission of this intrinsic violence to the police in charge of controlling the demonstrations against the president in 2020, with chilling brutality.
[Filmin] Cinema has these grandeurs. Now praised by Sight and Sound magazine, it provokes an incomplete but necessary retrospective on streaming platforms of a director who avoided the "feminist label" that was awarded to her. Her cinema is more than that, it's a humanist cinema that observes what the surface shows to investigate what happens inside. Even different from the rest of her filmography, the representation of daily actions causes memories and identification to emerge. Those "Jeanne moments" that appear in certain daily actions and that bring back scenes that you didn't know had remained so impregnated in your memory.
[FlixOlé] Carlos Sura superimposes times, dreams and lucubrations, forming part of his most "Bergmanian" stage, in which the juxtaposition of stories (sometimes imagined, sometimes real) build a polyhedral story in which the characters murmur their thoughts . Some of the most elaborate dialogues of Saura's career are represented in two masterful performances, made up of two characters who have escape in common (from a meddling society and an unknown husband): "I think, I breathe, I walk, I live... that It's not little”, while the camera pans through empty rooms in a half-ruined house in the middle of an arid country landscape.
[FlixOlé] Carlos Saura leaves the Franco regime in the background (it is still the representation of a bourgeois family born from the trophies of the dictatorship) to address another of his recurring themes: childhood from the perception of memory. It is a very melancholic but extraordinarily beautiful film, which has a certain old-fashioned tone but maintains in its essence the depth of an unconventional look. Like Victor Erice three years earlier, it's a journey through a dark infancy, with death suffocating childhood and the constant fear of uncertainty.
In this film, calibrated through metaphors and symbols, there is masculinity, envy and violence, a portrait not captured by the censorship of a Spain in which the rabbit shelters remained like scars from bloody battles. A gathering of predatory alpha males who talk about women and money, who look at each other suspiciously while they load their weapons, and which today (this is the great merit of the film) maintains the forcefulness of its language and the virulence of its message. RIP Carlos Saura.
[Disney+] It offers everything expected of a "Star Wars" spin-off, after several failed attempts, without the need to use too many elements that make direct reference to the galactic saga. But above all it works as a perfect framework of political background thanks to the participation of Beau Willimon, creator of "House of cards" and screenwriter of "The Ides of March". An odyssey of transformation of a rebellious anti-hero who takes care of the portrait of the characters without making it feel like a too isolated story. An absolute success.
[HBO Max] Ethan Hawke manages to balance the most personal exploration, without avoiding controversial aspects, with the journey through two successful careers. In this double portrait, Joanne Woodward shines especially because her career was partly overshadowed by her role as mother, but at the same time she is vindicated as an extraordinary actress. It is more of an essay than a documentary, in which Ethan Hawke asks questions about the balance between popularity and family life.
[RTVE Play] One of the director's best contributions to the portrait of a late-Francoist Spain, which reflects a fictitious openness to the outside world in order to maintain a dying dictatorship. A kafkian nightmare about a submissive country as effective as "La cabina" (Antonio Mercero, 1972), as a critical and political metaphor. The television is the reflection of the false vision of a social evolution.
[HBO Max] It does a great job of reconstructing the background to the US embassy crisis in Iran, which defined not only what the Arab country is today, but also the 1981 US presidential elections. Cleverly structured, it knows how to balance high politics with the consequences it has on citizens, and offers a story that never feels one-sided, concluding that the crisis didn't have good results for some or for others.
The smartest thing in this adaptation as a feature film is not to fall into the temptation of the sequel and reinvent the character while referring to the most iconic situations of the short films. There is a greater amplitude, necessary, that incorporates characters like Marcel's grandmother, an Isabella Rossellini who reminds us of her surreal series "Green porno" (2008). But the improvised dialogues on which the film's narrative was designed introduce smart reflections such as mourning, the repercussions of success or personal relationships. It is significant that the main objective of Marcel is to reunite his family, while the human characters are marked by separation: that of the couple who lived in the house, and that of the director himself, who rents it out before moving out. It is also the first time that Marcel realizes that his world is part of other worlds, that the house is one of those that make up a city, that it is one of many that are part of the planet. And yet, his diminutive perspective offers an insightful and humorous look on the pleasure of enjoying the far corners of something called home.
It is a complex film, which traps the viewer or causes distance, but ends up being as exciting as it is cryptic. An incursion into the past through sound, memory impregnated in stones, a thousand unanswered questions, like a fantasy that is not comfortable in reality or in the imagination. But it has a power of fascination that keeps your attention, waiting for the sound of that "huge concrete ball falling on metal surrounded by sea water" as an invisible threat.
[Movistar+] There are shows that are part of the history of television, and this is a bridge between the golden age and the birth of streaming. A long journey that has built a universe of deeply human characters and therefore eminently imperfect. A forceful reflection on morality and ethics, but also on repentance. It is not possible to change the past, but at least it is possible to accept the consequences.
A controversial thriller at the time, hijacked by Paramount for more than ten years, which focuses on racism as an inherent condition, like a mental illness of doubtful cure, represented in a dog that has been trained to attack people with fur. dark. An impeccable film that definitively confronted Samuel Fuller with Hollywood, which is not surprising, given the audacity to focus on violence and racism with deep roots in American society, which hides under the guise of a kind grandfather and his granddaughters, as a family transmission of a racism that is learned from generation to generation.
[YouTube] The Argentine adaptation of Nicholas Blake's novel changes the structure of the story to create an excellent film noir, with tormented characters and an unpleasant villain. Now, Ibáñez Menta brings complexity to the father who seeks revenge, more calculating, but more human in his relationship with Phil. Directing is outstanding, providing a continuous subtext that makes the story more disturbing.
