2024 was a year full of milestones for Spanish cinema. It began with the Oscars where the presence of our cinema multiplied thanks to the success of The snow society and the beautiful surprise of Robot Dreams. They couldn’t win, but they showed that Spanish cinema is in an excellent moment.
Something that was confirmed with the award to Jonás Trueba at the Directors’ Fortnight in Cannes; with the award for Best Female Performance for Karla Sofía Gascón for Emilia Perez and, above all, the historic Golden Lion for The next roomby Pedro Almodóvar, the first for a 100% Spanish film and the first big prize at a class A festival for the director.
A level that can be seen by watching this selection of the best films released between January 1 and December 31, 2024 (which leaves out all those seen in international competitions but pending release in Spain). In no specific order, just alphabetical and with a clue as to where you can see those that are already available somewhere.
A musical, directed by a Frenchman, set in Mexico and about a drug trafficker. As if that weren’t enough madness, with a Spanish woman leading the cast, that earthquake called Karla Sofía Gascón ready to make history and be the first trans actress to be nominated for an Oscar. He deserves it for being the center and heart of this story that always navigates the edge of ridicule and is not even afraid of falling into it, always getting up and landing on its feet. A musical about a drug trafficker who transitions into a woman in the midst of femicides in Mexico. A surreal plot that only in Audiard’s hands could become one of the films of the year. Only its first musical number leaves you with your mouth so open that you grant it everything afterwards; including that Selena Gómez doesn’t speak a single word of Spanish.
Who was going to tell us that the master of melodrama was capable of refining his style to create a drama as delicate and fragile as the pink snow that falls in one of the most beautiful moments of The next room. Pedro Almodóvar’s first film in English is a prodigy of delicacy that, with the help of two wonderful actresses, creates a story of female friendship that has something of a ghost film and a tribute to Dubliners as a leitmotif. A film that is much more political than it may seem at first glance, that turns the way in which cinema looks at death on its head – that shot of Tilda Swinton getting pretty to say goodbye and putting on lipstick looking at the camera – , and which hides in its simplicity a masterful work of staging, reflections, composition and meticulous planning.
Alice Rohrwacher has one of the most personal views in current cinema. One that draws on magical realism to create contemporary fables that talk about the world. A cinema that seems to have come from another time. After the magnificent Lazaro Happy reconfirms it with The chimeraa film about the looting of Etruscan art in Italy thanks to the unknown figure of the Tombaroli, charming thieves who enter tombs to sell what they find to art dealers and survive. With an almost naïve tone, where the fable and the mixture of formats and resources follow one another, Rohrwacher ends up speaking about property, about whose land it is, about how to break the capitalist wheel and many other constants of his cinema.
The Holocaust had never looked like this. Without a death. Without a drop of blood. And yet, becoming the painful and almost physical portrait of the most absolute terror. Jonathan Glazer makes a very free adaptation of Martin Amis’ novel to portray what was defined as the banality of evil. Glazer goes further. Not only were they the monsters, that’s very easy. By showing the boring and absurdity of the daily life of that Nazi family, it identifies us with them. And it makes us see that we are all perpetrators. It does so with an ethical and aesthetic proposal, which never shows horror explicitly, but which resorts to a master device to manage to cause us a bad body that ends in vomit, like that of that Nazi soldier capable of seeing the future in a final scene to remember. A masterpiece.
In a world where directors measure their egos in the form of sequence shots, overwhelming visual stakes and complex artifacts, Alexander Payne arrives to prove that sometimes the simplest is the best. A clean staging, a transparent montage and the strength of a script that advocates kindness and empathy in a cynical world. Those who stay It is a portrait of losers that you like so much, this time with class inequality and the Vietnam War in the background thanks to the union of three characters that you just want to hug and tell them that everything is going to be fine.
Two documentaries that triumphed in Berlin and deserve all the awards this year. The first is the mud portrait of the Israeli occupation in a West Bank town. It is guerrilla, activist and political cinema, but not only that. It is telling from the inside a problem that is only told from the big headlines and that here is seen from the wounds of a family like everyone’s. It is also the story of two friends, Bassel Adra, a Palestinian, and Yusev Abraham, an Israeli, who together face the task of showing the world a genocide that many do not want to see. Heartbreaking.
For his part, Mati Diop attends Dahomey to the fantastic one from which he already drank his Atlanticbut now he does it with a documentary that borders the realms of fiction and non-fiction to tell the story of the 26 treasures that the French Government returned to Benin. Diop addresses a topic at the center of the cultural debate, the decolonization of museums, and does so by giving voice to one of them to tell the story of one of those looted countries. But also to young people who argue about whether it is enough, an unnecessary gesture or an important symbol that these works return to their country of origin.
A musical about euthanasia with Ángela Molina and Alfredo Castro. With original music by María Arnal and choreographies by La Veronal. Well, that alone is enough for Dust will be It is one of the most interesting projects in cinema this year, but on top of that the incredible sensitivity and good taste of Carlos Marqués-Marcet and the script he writes with Coral Cruz and Clara Roquet address the topic of dignified death from places that are not at all comfortable. nor visited. Fleeing from Manichaeism, with an intelligence and a risk that could have made them lose their step. They never do. A gem that should place Marqués-Marcet once and for all as one of the great directors of Spanish cinema at the moment.
We really missed Mar Coll, one of those pioneers not always recognized in Spanish cinema. His return has been surprising because the themes that have always interested him have been joined by a commitment to realistic terror that has made Hail Mary in one of the most different portraits of motherhood. It focuses on those women who regret being mothers but never dare to say it. She does it by flirting with him body horror and discovering a powerful, hypnotic and different actress, a Laura Weissmahr who should be in all the awards of the year.
‘Second Prize’ (available on Movistar Plus+) / ‘The Blue Star’ (available on Filmin and Movistar Plus+)
It had to be Isaki Lacuesta who showed us that musical biopics are boring and academic because no one puts soul into them. Their talent has turned the story of Los Planetas into a beautiful film about friendship and love, because deep down what Jota and Floren have is a lifelong relationship. A film that transcends the stuffy norms of the genre as does another of the Spanish phenomena of the year, the beautiful The blue star, which has placed Javier Macipe in the spotlight, who reveals to us in a fiction and documentary game the history of Más Birras with another excellent discovery, that of Pepe Lorente, and a tear-in-the-eye ending.
Jonás Trueba has been maturing as a director, and what in other filmmakers usually comes together with an engorgement in his voice and a gravity in his forms, here it has been almost the opposite. Trueba has shed ties, industry pressure and certain dramatic mannerisms to become one of the freest filmmakers in Spain. One that is capable of stringing together a documentary of more than three hours about today’s youth where fiction and non-fiction went hand in hand (Who prevents it) with a film of just 70 minutes (You have to come see it). In that crescendo he delivers his best work, one that in its apparent lightness delivers an emotional love letter to routine, to growing up, to friends and to his own father. All with a playful spirit that gradually excites you until you fall exhausted.
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