These are the movie premieres that hit the screens starting on July 20:
By Jordi Batlle Caminal
In his gripping Film Meditations, Quentin Tarantino argues that Brian De Palma, as a viewer, hates movies that are too talkative. If so, we wish the venerable author of Dressed to Kill not to go near Oppenheimer or drink too much wine, because they are three hours (yes: three hours) monopolized by dialogues; by people, many people talking non-stop, without a second of respite. The million dollar question is whether this crowd (scientists, military, politicians, advisers) has something interesting to tell us. And the truth is that yes, because this chorus of voices and words ends up forming a true portrait of the time and the profile of a complex and controversial historical personality.
Indeed, inspired by the biography written by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, the film evokes the figure of the physicist and father of the atomic bomb J. Robert Oppenheimer, contemplated in a disorderly way, with continuous leaps back and forth, through the various stages of his life (before, during and after the Manhattan Project, the Los Alamos test, and the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs) and obviously affecting his conscience and, if possible call, his human ethics. A more historically accurate film than Roland Joffé's Creators of Shadows, Oppenheimer's plot is thick, difficult to follow due to the abundance of characters, data, information or conspiracies, and formally robust, although with a noticeable tendency towards solemnity and a tone that seems to be whispering at every moment that this is very serious. These are, of course, the hallmarks of Christopher Nolan, once again navigating the oceans of megalomania with an unusual blockbuster without a great spectacle (the Los Alamos episode is brief, the bombs on Japan are not visible) but with a Great Theme, in capital letters, as if the director of Tenet had metamorphosed into Stanley Kramer from The Final Hour or Winners or Losers, where the parade of famous faces was as luminous as here: Cilli an Murphy, Emily Blunt, Matt Damon, Robert Downey Jr., Florence Pugh, Jason Clarke, Rami Malek, Tom Conti (as Einstein), Kenneth Branagh, Josh Hartnett, Gary Oldman (as Truman), Matthew Modine, Casey Affleck, James Remar…
By Salvador Llopart
Warner Brothers founder Jack Warner was once asked about the message of his movies. "Message? For messages we use the postal service," he said. And it is that the almighty Jack conceived the cinema as an artistic medium. But the truth is that cinema can be - and has been, in Hollywood and elsewhere - an ideological instrument, capable of influencing beliefs, values and even perceptions of the moment. A magnificent instrument to transmit new perspectives.
And so we come to Barbie, by Greta Gerwing. The director, aware of the icon in her hands, one of the most famous toys in the world, here proposes a twist to bring the stereotyped image of the doll closer to the times of
Its biggest problem is the accumulation of jokes about the same thing, where Barbie's self-parody about Barbie -about Barbie clichés- is completed with other more significant ones about lost men, like Ken, giddy in a moment of vital questioning. Gosling, with a sense of parody, establishes the most radical journey in the film. But this is a comedy to the greatest glory of Barbie, the embodiment of changing femininity. The film not only tries to nullify anti-Barbie feelings, but also humanizes them, and, what is more difficult, places her in these times of compromised roles. A comedy at times imaginative, with some cartoons. Rather burdensome when he distributes tow against men, those poor deluded. In any case, the company Mattel, manufacturer of Barbie, can be happy: the message has been sent and received.
Por Philipp Engel
Un Amanece que no es poco (1989), minimalist and in black and white, which marks the debut of actress Liz Lobato as a director. We continue in La Mancha, as in the masterpiece by José Luis Cuerda, the humor is surreal, with an eschatological point, and the story is told by a goat: Saturnino García (Justino, an elderly murderer) is an old woman Doña Rogelia style; At worst, there is also a character that reminds us of a Paco Martínez Soria with incontinence, and at best, another that brings to mind Chus Lampreave in a white coat. They are all residents of a corrupt and indebted town, Villacarrizo, about to be conquered by Chinese real estate interests as before by Pepe Botella's French. A proposal as eccentric and refreshing as it is irregular.
Por Philipp Engel
It could form an entertaining double session with Mama María (J.P. Salomé, 2020), that diversion in which Isabelle Huppert gave life to an Arabic translator who ended up trafficking marijuana in the beards of the police. Here is Toni Collette (also the film's producer), a well-to-do but dissatisfied American who ends up at the helm of a mafia clan in an advertising fantasy Italy, with Monica Bellucci as her second-in-command. A beastly empowerment story, which contains some memorable scenes such as a bloody homicide with a heel strike and funny nods to Eat, Pray, Love (Elizabeth Gilbert's best-seller about the search for balance between body and spirit), although it ends up sitting like a shot of limoncello falling on an empty stomach.
Por Philipp Engel
Like The Kings of the World, by Laura Mora, who won the San Sebastián Golden Shell, La jauría is a film about the most marginalized Colombian youth, starring authentic street kids and with touches of the inevitable magical realism. But otherwise they are completely different movies. The first is a road movie, while The Pack is as still as pool water in the middle of the jungle. The heat, the feverish density of the stagnant environment and the atmosphere of sectarian delirium of a juvenile prison crosses the screen. The poetics is also different, closer to the Asian cinema of Tsai-Ming liang or Apichatpong Weeresathekul, without neglecting Conrad from Heart of Darkness or Kafka from In the penal colony. Sensory, disturbing and captivating.
By Salvador Llopart
From the will to scare without harassing, in the first, to this kind of terrifying bond that closes everything in the fifth installment; the third, actually, starring the Lambert family. The other two Insidious were prequels. The usual monsters lurking in the "afterlife" take the form of traumas from the past. That adds to the film, as I said, a psychoanalytic reason that makes it more coherent (although not more entertaining). The scares seem certified to be bland. But what used to be formless now has the form of a parent-child conflict: the meat of a couch rather than a dark room. Psychoanalysis for beginners. Seasoned, in addition, with a bit of family constellations, where the grandfather has a good part in the mess. Better performed than the previous ones: perhaps because it is directed by Patrick Wilson, who is the protagonist.
