'The Captive' (★★✩✩✩), a Moors and Christians film, and other new releases this week

Now, with The Captive , Amenábar takes the plunge again with a product about the five years that Miguel de Cervantes, after the Battle of Lepanto, remained imprisoned in Algiers, in the company of other historical figures such as the rather Machiavellian friar Juan Blanco de Paz and the cordial writer and theologian Antonio de Sosa. It's a Moors and Christians film adapted to the times with a queer pompadour; that is, the suggestion that certain settings, in those days, were a hive of oiled male bodies always available to other oiled male bodies, and that Cervantes himself participated in these practices before and during his captivity, as his captor's (forced?) lover. This theme occupies one part of the film. Another focuses on escape attempts, with Cervantes as an unexpected ancestor of Steve McQueen. And yet another in the oral tales that the protagonist, as a prediction of his future glory (the Portuguese De Sosa is clear: "You will be a man of letters"), tells to very attentive listeners, captivated captives. The work oscillates between a lavish, luxurious superproduction (the digital images of the city, in the style of Ridley Scott) and a traditional prison melodrama, which looks like a run-of-the-mill television production where everything sounds contrived and artificial. The cast includes some top-notch actors, whom we will always remember from other films.

By Philipp Engel

The lockdown period made us especially vulnerable to all the garbage we consume on the internet, all for the sole purpose of repeatedly reaffirming our supposedly self-important ideas, isolating us into paranoid atoms. This could be the central idea on which Ari Aster has built his fourth feature film, for which, after the more interesting *Beau is Afraid*, he once again cast Joaquin Phoenix, possessed to delirious extremes by the anxiety that gnaws at us all, albeit now wearing the Thompson-esque uniform of the sheriff of the titular town, Eddington, a synecdoche for the state of New Mexico and, incidentally, for a country that, at that time of Covid, was also witnessing Black Lives Matter reacting to the death of George Floyd and the necktie-wearing supremacists established in the White House. All of this is in the film, transformed into an amphetamine-laced smoothie that offers no consolation, as it lacks perspective.

Eddington offers beautiful visuals, competent actors—Pedro Pascal as a corrupt mayor, Emma Stone as a deranged woman, Austin Butler as a guru—an exciting mix of genres crowned by a captivating climax, with its inevitable violent catharsis. It has funny moments, others that are more cringeworthy (jokes about white people defending black people), and some of the terror we might expect from the director of cult films like Hereditary and Midsommar. But it doesn't do much more than reproduce our everyday confusion, the feeling of defeat that overwhelms us every time we connect to the networks, our weariness with the glut of disposable information. It focuses on the obviousness of the diagnosis and seems to revel in a somewhat perverse ambiguity that shocks due to its irresponsibility in equating the contradictions of wokism with the ultra drift. Long, uneven, and self-satisfied, it's not the best aspect of Ari Aster's cinema, and leaves the feeling of a great missed opportunity.

By Salvador Llopart

Two friends and an imposter. One is functionally or mentally divergent, or whatever his disability is properly called. The other is a natural actor; a tormented young man in search of his identity. A pretender. Who is who? Because they are becoming more and more alike. Brilliant acting from everyone, including the disabled, far removed from the paternalistic stereotype surrounding their condition. The Critics' Week at Cannes rightly awarded the film, Federico Luis's feature debut.

By P. Engel

All filmmakers have projects they couldn't complete. But Fernando Ruiz Vergara's is in a different league: he was only able to finish Rocío (1980), a documentary that remains judicially seized for naming a massacre perpetrated by the Nationalists. The story is not only singular and symbolic, but the formal solutions used to bring each of his aborted films back to life are as varied as they are absolutely dazzling. An instant classic in terms of his work with archival material, and undoubtedly one of the films of the year.

By J. Batlle

Between intrigue and terror, and in a closed, oppressive environment (a nursing home), this film is designed to showcase two famous stars and the acting duel they give us. Although they've had better moments, it's still a pleasure to see Lithgow, who is crazy, and Rush face off in this game of psychological torture. The two shared the Best Actor award at the Sitges Film Festival last October: why do some films take a year to be released?

By S. Llopart

African-American Charles Thomas shone for Barça basketball at just 20 years old, back in the late 1970s. He was a star of Catalan basketball until one day he disappeared, and years later, his death was announced. These are the events so well explored in Temps mort , recreating that heroic period of basketball with images from the era. Then comes an unexpected twist that takes the impeccable exercise of evocation toward emotion, and from there on, hugs become abundant and reasons and facts become scarce.

By P. Engel

During the Bilbao festival, Jone—Olaia Aguayo, a discovery—has a summer romance with a girl, but at the same time, at barely 20 years old, she has to take care of her father with Parkinson's disease and her younger sister. At this painful crossroads of discovering life while facing premature tragedies, a film as austere as it is hypnotic unfolds, skillfully interweaving fiction with the uncontrollable context of Semana Grande. Another promising young woman emerging from the Escac (Eastern Community College).