These are the movie premieres that hit the screens starting this April 5:
By Salvador Llopart
Remember Bambi? Well, let’s imagine Bambi with a submachine gun in his hands and wanting to take revenge on the hunters who killed his mother. Now let’s swap the sweet fawn for a sarcastic and angry little raccoon, and look for the source of his rage in the deaths of his genetically modified animal friends like himself. Friends with whom he opened his eyes to the light of intelligence…
The raccoon is Rocket, from the Guardians of the Galaxy, and his story is, to a large extent, the dramatic/ironic axis of this third installment of the Guardians…, the adventures of a group of bizarre heroes from the Marvel universe, written and directed by James Gunn. Along with Rocket, again Star-Lord (Chris Pratt), that kind of innocent and clumsy Han Solo; Drax (Dave Bautista), as strong as he is dim; the green Gamora (Zoe Saldana), and that piece of living firewood, powerful as an entire forest, which is Groot, the friendly Groot with a limited vocabulary and infinite resources. There are more unexpected characters in this Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 with a baroque breath, a la Flash Gordon: that eighties film by Mike Hodges -with music by Queen- with which the entire series has had so much to do aesthetically.
Thanks to his capacity for sarcasm, Gunn puts the protagonists’ ironic self-awareness to work again without sparing them endless, continuous and tireless battles. A worthy continuation of the two previous volumes, this long installment of the Guardians… -two and a half hours- has something of a final adagio, a long dramatic arpeggio that marks the decline of an era. From the outset, it marks Gunn’s goodbye in the Marvel world, as he has gone over to the DC competition.
Although it is a farewell, it does not mean that he sacrifices the virtues of the series that he himself created. And he also adds a non-existent point of importance in the previous ones: awareness for the welfare of animals. Guardians of the Galaxy was born marginal in the world of Marvel superheroes and, precisely because of its strangeness, thanks to its sparkling creativity, it has ended up taking over the center. The third installment is a magnificent farewell.
Por Philipp Engel
On paper, Siege inevitably refers to the very cinematographic series Riot Control, by Rodrigo Sorogoyen and Isabel Peña: a director versed in the genre, like Kidnapped or Your Son; a woman at the keyboard (the journalist Marta Medina, in her debut as a screenwriter); an eviction out of mother as a plot, and a female protagonist, who makes her way through her teeth in a microcosm as machirulo as that of a riot van.
And everything is confirmed for the better: Vivas puffs out his chest with sequence shots that take us into a marginal building in the midst of a riot; Medina surprises with an unprecedented perspective on the migration issue, as if she had taken many notes watching Claire Denis’s movies, to end up finding her own discourse and her own visual solutions (the Spanish flag doesn’t look good) and, above all, Natalia de Molina gives her all when embodying a character that is morally shady, ergo desperate, with a tremendously physical, almost animal performance, reminiscent of Ester Expósito in Venus.
De Molina, who is usually fine, is better than ever, making it clear that he is a brown beast of interpretation. For the rest, while the cops have lost all nuance to become mere crooked villains, they’re unpleasant sidekicks who get the job done; a sensual dance scene reminds us that a 21st-century thriller has to be a rave of runaway rhythms and decibels (OST by Mexican Sergio Acosta); the satin chiaroscuros by Rafael Reparaz, director of photography, give the proposal, filmed in interiors illuminated in very different ways, an interesting semi-dream look; there are no dramatic brownouts and, more than anything, the tight footage stays under 90 minutes.
One does not fall into the mistake, so common today, of believing that a film is great because of how long it lasts, nor is there an urgent need to “transcend the genre†to knock on the door of the authorial club of three-hour films. Size does not matter, it must be said more. Siege knows how to hit the right button.
By Jordi Batlle
The subject may be a deterrent: the discovery, by a modest persevering historian who defied bureaucratic and institutional obstacles, of the remains of King Richard III of England.
But the veteran Stephen Frears serves it up to us in the key of fine comedy, with an effectively artisan line, with a touch of fantasy (the heroine’s relationship with the specter of the Shakespearean monarch) and insightful dialogues. Sally Hawkins, adorable actress, is the perfect lead.
By Jordi Batlle
In this film there is a script and staging, but its authors distance themselves, do not intervene and let the young protagonists speak for themselves.
And they talk a lot, they enjoy a day in the open air, between barbecues, beers, baths… They celebrate a future that they want better (they’ve had a hard time: marginalization, trials, jail…) and the camera captures them with a realistic, urgent report style. or cinéma verité. The portrait is raw, but gives off a very human warmth.
Por Philipp Engel
Although it has triumphed at the French box office, and despite the collaboration of old accomplices such as Isabelle Huppert and Fabrice Luchini, this transposition of the Weinstein case to Paris in the 1930s is far from the great popular comedies of the director of 8 women or Potiche, full of very devoted stars, original musical numbers and deliciously kitsch decorations.
The soundtrack lacks recognizable songs, vintage Paris is too stuffy, and the young heroines can even be irritating. Still, you have to admit that it works.
Por Philipp Engel
Pure confined cinema: shot without money, with friends and on a single stage, the fascinating Casa Alves, built by Ãlvaro Siza in the 1970s, north of Porto. It even sounds I will resist.
The exquisite director of lavish films such as La portuguesa or La venganza de una mujer, adapts, in a meta-cinematic key, the only play by Rohmer, with the always mischievous filmmaker Ado Arrieta furtively observing his two actors, who rehearse a dialogue between former lovers determined to interpret their emotional fluctuations based on their disparate musical tastes.
By Salvador Llopart
Euskadi, in the seventies. So many things were happening! Silvia Munt finds the complexity of the moment in the look and gesture of Bea (Alicia Falcó). In the discomfort of her adolescent for an expired world and her desire for a better one. Close-up film, without fear of camera movement.
Of a faded color, like the same times it portrays. Good companies know that abortion is a drama, but then, in the seventies, it was also a crime. Always.
