Female Film Critics 24/375
F. Javier Gutiérrez takes the audience through what at first appears to be a dusty neo-western, then a revenge film, and finally an occult horror. The Wait is a muscular and particularly masculine film where the often-silent protagonist goes through a Dantean journey redolent with grief, guilt, and incipient madness. Dust, blood, and ingrained dirt saturate the film.
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Spanish actress Itsaso Arana’s directorial debut, The Girls Are Alright (Las chicas están bien), is an amusing, thought-provoking and heart-warming gem of a film. It is the story of a group of girls who meet at a country house for a week in summer to rehearse a play. During their time together, they exchange their knowledge of friendship, acting, love, orphanhood and death; with the secret hope that sharing will make them better people. The Girls Are Alright is a summer tale with princesses, horses, toads, a fire, a fiesta, a river, myriad letters, and even a scatterbrained prince.
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You’re Not Me succeeds when it is acting as a story about uneasy family dynamics but when it moves into the overtly foreshadowed occultist horror it somewhat loses its power. Aitana with her wife Gabi and newly adopted baby son Joao arrive at her parents’ house as a Christmas surprise and receive a distinctly chilly reception. Instead of the welcoming voice of her mother which has been on the end of telephone calls over the past three years, she is greeted with seeming disdain and agitation from Dori and Justo who have effectively replaced Aitana as a daughter with a refugee called Nadia they encountered begging for shelter in exchange for menial tasks nine months ago.
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This is a deceptively simple movie. It’s filmed with non-professional actors in a documentarian’s naturalistic, day-in-the-life style. It captures the realities of rural farm life in northwestern Spain (Alcarràs is a town in Catalonia) in a way that is rare for an international audience to see, providing accurate cultural details about the different generations of a single family. But more than its anthropological value, the film is also a beautifully shot and structured timepiece with a stealthily absorbing story.
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Shot during the Covid19 quarantine, 100 Days with Tata is Spanish director/actor Miguel Angel Muñoza’s heartwarming documentary love letter to Luisa Cantero, his 95-year-old great-aunt who never married, worked as a cleaning lady, and took care of him, her sister’s great-grandchild, as if he were her own son.
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100 Days with Tata, the documentary that Spanish actor/director Miguel Angel Muñoz crafted out a year spent in Covid19 quarantine with his great aunt, Luisa Cantero, the titular Tata, is a testament to the power of love, the difficulty of aging, the reality of death and the importance of family.
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Official Competition goes behind-the-scenes with actors and a director. As Official Competition begins, on the occasion of his eightieth birthday, multimillionaire Don Humberto Suarez asserts that he lacks prestige. Therefore, he must contribute to something lasting, a bridge with his name by a famous architect or a movie. For that latter option, he purchases the rights to the Nobel prize novel Rivalry, which he doesn’t read.
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As long as there have been movies, there have been movies about making movies. Some are serious, some are silly; some are dark, some are light. One thing most have in common is that they always seem to bring those involved that particularly satisfying form of glee that comes from casting a critical light on something you have a complex relationship with. All of that is in play in Mariano Cohn and Gastón Duprat’s sharp showbiz satire Official Competition.
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Turning a Nobel Prize-winning novel into a movie on the whim of a millionaire, “it” director Lola Cuevas pairs two different kinds of actors to breathe life into her version of the story. What could go wrong casting a serious leading actor with a box office action star? Only everything, of course. If you’ve ever been through the rehearsal process with a director that is secure in their vision, Official Competition is for you. The film is a masterclass in writing and acting. It encompasses all the temperamental moments in the history of cinematic genius.
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In film after film, Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar has built a reputation as a man who understands women. With Parallel Mothers, he also proves that women belong not just in the home but also in the world. He layers stories to underscore an understanding of the force that is woman.
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