These are the movie premieres that hit the screens starting on July 6:
By Salvador Llopart
The new Santiago Segura. In other words, the same movie from the last few years. Let’s start by talking about the less positive aspects and, thus, from the outset, we take a load off our shoulders. This is a silly summer comedy that shamelessly seeks its audience. And who is your audience? The fathers and mothers with children who do not know what to do with them these summer months, and who, with the new/old Segura, as in recent years, solve the ballot for one afternoon, at least, in the cool room cinema.
Summer Holidays is as cheesy as the adaptation of the old Formula V song on which the title is based. A comedy with a lot of children inside: a comic child. He wants to be endearing and at times it must be said that he succeeds. It has the morality of a Bruguera comic and hopes to revive the cinematographic spirit of Paco Martínez Soria, that is, of a certain Spanish cinema of ordinary people and undeniable popular charm. Segura knows how to surround himself with good interpreters, perfectly adjusted to what he asks of them. At times tender, I say. Although it has other downright hateful moments, in its lack of sincerity. The shrewd intelligence of Segura and his most prominent sidekick: the screenwriter Marta González de Vega hover over the film, and we enter into the praise.
Los Torrente de Segura were, at the time, a cynical product, where one found as much social criticism as complicity and wink. A complex product that found its audience, even among those who hated it. Between one Torrente and another, years passed, and Santiago Segura survived then, we know, with the will to do another, devoted to television or whatever was thrown at him. So respect.
But then came the
Por Philipp Engel
The ecosystem of what appears to have once been Earth has collapsed. There are no animals in sight, and the plants have mutated into friction science mode, with an r, like the memorable exhibition at the CCCB. Some are dangerous for the biped, others mesmerize by their beauty. The seeds are the currency of exchange among the survivors, but they only give for one harvest. These are the interesting ideas that make up the DNA of a post-apocalyptic dystopia whose floral display, carried out without green screens, that is, by hand, is more captivating than that of Annihilation, by Alex Garland, a film that comes to mind, or even the Avatar saga. Shot in Lithuania, the film is also distinguished by its contemplative rhythm and an atmosphere close to a fable, somewhere between a fairy tale and Spirited Away.
The heroine (Raffiella Chapman) is a teenager who lives with her father, focused on the study of seeds and far from the remains of a dehumanized society. Politically, the film may seem like yesterday’s newspaper: the privileged have entrenched themselves in invisible citadels and dress in neo-Renaissance fashion, like something out of Flash Gordon, while the common people have been left in a sleazier medieval world, under the rule of of a small tyrant incarnated by a disturbing Eddie Marsan.
The parent-child relationship may be reminiscent of The Road, if only to mention Cormac McCarthy here, as Vesper’s father lies bedridden and mentally travels around the world through a ball-shaped drone to which he rides. He has painted an ironic smile, like Amazon’s. The immersion in the universe proposed by the couple of Belgian filmmakers is a unique, seductive and enveloping experience, although above all on an aesthetic and intellectual level, as it lacks drama: the characters are not very expressive, and their adventures end up being observed with some detachment
By Jordi Batlle Caminal
The first minutes of this film are disturbing, until you discover where the shots are going; until you discover, in short, that this is not a movie, but something like a suicide prevention campaign. Or about the benefits of life. Manichaean, tricky, progressively (and tediously) sentimental, with the soul of a self-help manual written with notorious elementality. The cast is solid, yes, but it was not necessary for such a company either.
By Salvador Llopart
Slow cooking film, very Haneke in the conception of humanity. There is the origin, yes, and also a good part of the ingredients of evil. The poison is inoculated with betrayals, hypocrisy and deceit. An uncomfortable, playful film, where there is no one to sympathize with; perhaps with a phone that rings in the night and brings us back to reality. At the exit I observe some complicit smiles among the audience. Are they nervous smiles of release? Or complacency? I could not tell
Por Philipp Engel
Drunk on rakia, the men are philosophers and say that corruption in Bulgaria is caused by good people doing nothing. Although the panorama is bleak, after a burial, young Victor stays in the village, far from his life in Madrid, through the eyes of a gypsy. But this is not Call me by your name, but the opposite: violence, racism, and worse things. Although Sergio de la Puente’s exquisite photography does not renounce the beauty of summer, and captures the sensuality of plying country roads on a motorcycle without a helmet.
By Salvador Llopart
The term haunted house has a bad translation to designate the stories in which the tragic past of the place where the drama takes place is of paramount importance. Cursed house would be a meaning. Haunted house, another. The demonic manifestation here feeds on a pregnant woman who cannot move from the bed; It goes without saying that the pregnant woman does not stop still, persecuted by the curse. Bland and slow twist to the genre, which here is neither cursed nor enchanted. Rather, silly and goofy.
By Salvador Llopart
The issue it deals with is not new: the struggle, at the end of the seventies, to convince Spanish society that all forms of sexuality are valid. The beauty of the film, its value, I would say that its miracle, is in the journey of Reme (great Ana Wagener), who must fight within herself her own beliefs about homosexuality. And then there is the careful work with the secondaries. And it is already known that the god of movies resides in the details.
