These are the movie premieres that hit the screens starting this February 3:
By Jordi Batlle Caminal
Inisherin’s Banshee shows that you can make a fun film, as well as intelligent and visually creative, with the theme of boredom as its central theme. The anecdote is minimal: one hundred years ago, on a beautiful Irish island, two close friends, whose long relationship basically consists of drinking liters of stout or whiskey in the local tavern, come into conflict when one of them confesses to the other that he wants break the friendship because she considers him a boring guy; come on, he gets bored every day listening to his banal phrases. This is how the film begins, which over the course of two hours will develop this apparently trivial issue but, in reality, loaded with transcendence and even, via existentialism, philosophy. It is a work of sad air and in many moments melancholic, although it is treated in the key of costumbrist comedy, flirting with nonsense and punctually and unexpectedly with gore.
And it’s full of echoes. Let’s see a few: 1) the buddy movie with friends of opposite characters, in the tradition of Lemmon
By J. Batlle
As in the luminous scene of the parking lot in Multiple, Shyamalan only needs five initial minutes (a forest, a cabin, a girl, a stranger, some shots of trees that threaten danger…) to drive a powerful restlessness into your body and mind. mind that will accompany you for several weeks. Already carrying the weight of restlessness, the knock on the door announced by the title becomes immediately audible.
What happens next will be good if we keep quiet about it for the benefit of the future viewer, because the less they know about the plot, the more they will enjoy it. Or not: They Knock at the Door is perhaps Shyamalan’s most radical approach and development film, the most insane or senseless and the one that will provide more arguments to his detractors to oust the filmmaker. However, his unconditional public will find a complete “chez” Shyamalan tasting menu, with the main thematic and stylistic motifs that make up his entire filmography.
And it is still paradoxical that this one hundred percent Shyamalian film has, this time, its seed in borrowed material: a novel by Paul Tremblay. Biblical echoes (in the orbit of Abraham’s sacrifice) reverberate in the plot as in Signs and put on the table a discourse, more nihilistic than religious, that will drive more than one person crazy. And, as in The Protected, in The Incident and also in Señales, Shyamalan masterfully records the catastrophe or the apocalypse, channeling them through the images of the news. And it is that, as always, the horror appears indirectly, cornered, never frontally, as here the most brutal gore effects, systematically displaced a few centimeters out of the frame. A very high-tension film, ultra-concentrated in a small space (the flashbacks seem debatable, unnecessary, mere filler), Knock at the Door is, in its formal aspect, another brilliant exercise in great cinema.
By Salvador Llopart
I think that this story on the limit of fertility will interest me little, because it is cerebral and cold. And yet, very soon I find myself swept away by a complex and mature look around a woman (without children). I am taken away by the tension between freedom and responsibility of its protagonist -sensational Virginie Efira-, and I bow respectfully to the depth, elegant and deep, of this non-theoretical story, full of life, about the choices that delimit an existence marked by elusive motherhood, and the imponderables that surround her. With her missed opportunities and, also, her last chances.
By S. Llopart
Electricity runs through, more than dreams, the reality of Eva, a confused fifteen-year-old (in the magical city of San José, Costa Rica). We are before a film of a rare intensity. It commands the observation and, therefore, the tone is apparently leisurely. But one has the disturbing sensation of walking the tightrope of a nascent life, avoiding dangers. A life in tension. Eva’s mother, separated from her father, is the grounding of this adolescent attracted by the abyss that represents her parent.
By S. Llopart
The protagonists -just them- of this bittersweet comedy of concentrated neuroticism, made between friends, experience a succession of relationships that come and go. Leaving, in its wake, a feeling of happy entanglement. They never go for drama. Zaida Carmona, the director and protagonist of it, autofictions, or so it seems, her own existence and insists a lot on the Rohmer model. I do not know. Although it lasts for more than three minutes, the result seems more like a pop song, full of colors and fireworks.
By S. Llopart
Story based on real facts; fiction of monotonous superficiality. The story of the Turkish-German Rabiye Kurdas, mother of Murat, against the president of the United States and the infamy of Guantanamo. Tired fiction, too, that does not even save the oronda humanity of its protagonist, Meltem Kaptan, between tenacious innocent. The best of this function without a pulse, which advances as the days should advance for the prisoners in Guantánamo: equal to themselves. I think of this film and I think of torture, you see.
