The Sex Of The Angels (El Sexo De Los Angeles) (2012)

The Sex Of the Angels (aka Angels of Sex) (or, my alternative title, How Difficult It Is To Set Up And Maintain A Threesome) is a very dry look at how Bruno, happily committed to his girlfriend Carla, encounters and starts having sex with Rai, a dancer, but despite the actors' obvious commitment to the film's positive polyamorous message and the attempt to keep things titillating with butt shots and sex scenes, this thruple never feels even slightly like it would go the distance, and the film is ultimately only as exciting as a well-intentioned public service announcement. 

★★☆☆☆

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A Fantastic Woman (Una Mujer Fantastica) (2017)

This is a marvellous character study, not just of the fantastic woman at the movie's heart, who resiliently navigates first the death of her partner, then the suspicion she encounters from the man's family, friends and the police, but also of the world around her, which struggles with challenges to its polarised gender constructs, with every scene in this smart, snappy movie crammed with unmistakable signs - uncertain air kisses, awkward handshakes, stammered titles - that betray the fact that the world is organised, now perhaps more than ever before, to exclude, not include.

★★★★☆

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Parallel Mothers (Madres Paralelas) (2021)

Orchestral swells and tremulous strings help turn kitchen-table drama into grand operatic melodrama in Pedro Almodóvar's story of two new mothers sharing their experiences of childbirth, but the link between this melodrama and the broader politics Almodóvar bookends the movie with feels pretty tenuous - living without knowing, living with a secret, and correcting past wrongs seem to be the vague thematic bridge.

★★★☆☆

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El Angel (2018)

"Serial killer" seems the wrong word for the murderous criminal portrayed here - is it possible to distinguish between serial killers and murderous criminals? - but extra confusingly, this murderous criminal is Rob Puch, a real-life babyfaced killer from Argentina who in the 60s, working as a brazen career thief, killed eleven people, but look him up later - because this striking and well-acted movie will garner your interest in this peculiar character - and discover someone quite different to this eccentric, possibly sociopathic babyface here - staring out from newsppaper photos and Wikipedia pages is a sneering rapist and abuser (did the movie neglect to metnion that?) and it becomes hard to reconcile fact with this, what, fiction?

★★★★☆

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Broken Embraces (Los Abrazos Rotos) (2009)

I think it was the laugh-out-loud melodrama I enjoyed most watching Pedro Almodóvar's Broken Embraces, an overwrought carry-on about a blind film writer's affair with an actress, but everything else left me a little cold, including the rush to tie all the nonsense up sensibly in the end.

★★★☆☆

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End Of The Century (Fin de siglo) (2019)

In this beautiful slip of a film — a romance tinged with sadness — Ocho, an Argentine poet, encounters Javi, a producer of children's television, while knocking about Barcelona one day and after immediately hitting it off is startled to learn they first met twenty years earlier at a time when Ocho, perhaps due to the times, wasn't yet himself.

★★★★★

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The People Upstairs (Spanish: "Sentimental")

With the exception of Javier Cámara's character, so sarcastic and annoying he almost bursts the whole, this comedy drama is a light and frothy bubble, a surprise given the subject matter could so easily have been treated as salacious, about a get-together between neighbouring couples with the couple from upstairs proving so disarmingly open, the downstairs couple are forced to face some truths.

★★★☆☆

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Klaus (2019)

It hijacks the Christmas tradition and completely fabricates a Christmas origin story, but Klaus is worth watching for the beautiful hand-drawn animation alone, and for Jason Schwartzman's hilarious voice performance of the main character Jesper - a lazy son cast out by his father to a remote snowy outpost - who finds reward in hard work and in getting good out of people, albeit duplicitously.

★★★★☆

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The Tip of the Iceberg (La Punta Del Iceberg) (2016)

 

This thriller about a woman, Sofia Cuevas who in her capacity as a company director is sent to investigate a series of suicides at a branch of her employer's megacorporation, has a tricky job trying to hit the right note because although you expect some moments of solemnity in a thriller about suicide, things become outright maudlin -  scarves flutter in slow motion in the wind and workers who have suicided reappear and look pained or at peace depending on the current status of Cuevas' investigation - making this a slick corporate thriller with jarring, emotionally overwrought moments, but it is always interesting, calling into question the line between work and life and control and subservience, and features a terrific performance from lead Maribel Verdú.

★★★☆☆

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The Beach Of The Drowned (La Playa De Los Ahogados) (2015)

This murder mystery is about as complex and cinematic as an episode of Murder, She Wrote but Cabot Cove is the spectacular coastline of Galicia, Spain - the real star of the show - where anchored Spanish fishing boats jostle on the wind-swept Atlantic, where more and more vinos españoles is sloshed into wineglasses on sun-bleached cafe terraces, and where the fish markets reverberate with the calls of auctioneers, all adding to a richly-detailed backdrop of what is unfortunately a very pedestrian mystery - Inspector Leo Caldes (of the Domingo Villar books) investigates when the body of a fisherman washes up on shore.  

★★☆☆☆

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It Happened In Broad Daylight (Es geschah am hellichten Tag) (1958)

The book, adapted by Sean Penn in The Pledge (2001) with Jack Nicholson as the detective who promises a grieving mother he'll catch her child's killer, came later, but this 1958 Swiss-Italian-Spanish co-production is based Friedrich Dürrenmatt's even earlier screenplay - not the book - featuring the chilling child serial killer plot with a more palatable ending - the book's subtitle (The Pledge - Requiem for the Detective Novel) hints at the dark direction Dürrenmatt took with his refashioned plot, while this film, faithful to the earlier screenplay, can be enjoyed as a detective novel proper: a jaunty Swiss mystery with a thrilling police investigation.

★★★★☆

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Marshland (La Isla Minima) (2014)

Spain has emerged a democracy after years of Franco repression and its people are split between those excited by the prospect of freer times and those who wish things back to the way they were, a divide mirrored in the female victims of this movie's serial killer, all of whom, a police investigation reveals, dreamed of escaping a Spanish backwater but met with foul play in the remote marshlands where they felt stuck, and it is up to two cops, one a liberal campaigner and the other complicit in Franco-era secret police crimes, to work together to stop the killer.

★★★☆☆

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Live Flesh (Carne Trémula) (1997)

Director Pedro Almodóvar turns Ruth Rendell's psychosexual thriller into a rambling soapy melodrama and turns Rendell's main character, the 38-year-old serial rapist Victor, into a more palatable naif whose inexperience-in-love and obsession with his 'first' results in an incident in which a policeman is shot and ends up a paraplegic.

★★★☆☆

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The Aura (El Aura) (1993)

In this really good Argentinian thriller, an epileptic taxidermist with an eye for detail (played by the always excellent Ricardo Darin) goes on a hunting trip with his buddy and everything is hunky-dory until a shooting accident leaves one man dead and more men, grim-faced ones, show up wondering why the dead man hasn't kept some kind of an appointment.

★★★★☆

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Verónica (2017)

About a high school girl terrorised by something supernatural after a seance with her friends, this 2017 Spanish supernatural thriller, not to be confused with the other 2017 Spanish thriller titled Verónica, recalls It Follows with its retro synthesizer cool and high school setting, and there's also a strong whiff of The Conjuring series given the suggestion made via this movie's initial documentary stylings that the story is based on actual events, of itself a not very interesting approach for a movie of this type but used here in conjunction with some truly original creepiness to keep viewers on their toes.

★★★★☆

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Verónica (2017)

When a retired psychologist agrees to start seeing a new patient, it turns out she means for her consultations with this mentally ill stranger, who may or may not be responsible for the disappearance of her former therapist, to take place in the psychologist's remote forest hideaway with the two of them magically sharing the knowledge that sleepovers are a part of the bundled service, which is the point it becomes clear this psychological thriller is not going to be very intelligent no matter how many references to Freud and the Platonic forms it bandies around.

★★☆☆☆

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The Bar (2017)

Patrons in a bar in Madrid witness the shooting death of one and then another man outside on the street and too scared to venture outside, they stay sheltered inside but turn on each other, growing suspicious as more deaths occur, which sounds like a ripping movie, but only 50% of viewers will be satisfied in the end depending on whether they are murder mystery or horror fans.

★★★☆☆

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The Secret In Their Eyes (El Secreto De Sus Ojos) (2009)

In this engrossing romantic mystery thriller from Argentina, a criminal investigator in retirement played by the captivating Ricardo Darin looks back upon a murder case for inspiration for a novel and as the movie switches backwards and forwards between the brutal events of the past and his and his colleagues' memories of them, questions are raised about seizing life, living with grief, and seeking justice and revenge.

★★★★☆

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The Invisible Guest (Contratiempo) (2016)

When a successful businessman becomes the only suspect in a locked room murder investigation, it is up to him and a gun courtroom lawyer to sit down and comb meticulously through the details of the mystery to nut out what really happened, starting with an earlier missing persons case so convoluted and reliant on coincidence the movie frequently teeters on the verge of the ridiculous...but keep watching because it surprises by staying rivetting and - perhaps only just - on track.

★★★★☆

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The Orphanage (El Orfanato) (2007)

Belen Rueda, who is so good in thrillers (for instance, Julia's Eyes), loans her weight to this slightly cheesy but perfectly entertaining Guillermo del Toro-endorsed gothic mystery with all the trappings: a creaky mansion by the sea that was once an orphanage, caves, pasty orphans in leg-braces playing nursery games, hidden rooms, ghosts, paranormal investigators, skeletons and treasure hunts.

★★★☆☆ 

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