Piety, The Substitute, The Den, Emily, and Holy Spider are this week’s reviewed films.

An insidiously inventive tale of tyranny and liberation

Pieles was Eduardo Casanova’s first feature film, and it proved that we were in the presence of a true rarity in Spanish cinema. A director who isn’t afraid to transgress, bother, or experiment, as evidenced by his or her creation of a non-transferable personal cosmos somewhere between the grotesque and the naive.

His second feature picture proves that there is more to discover in Eduardo Casanova’s darkly inventive and subversive mind than what was revealed in his first.

In contrast to Skins, which was more choral and fragmentary in nature, Mercy focuses on an one narrative, that of a mother and son whose toxic relationship eventually becomes pathological. To the point where she makes his life a prison, in a suffocating and sinister space where disease and madness throb, she (a totemic and impressive ngela Molina) is called Libertad, and that is exactly what she denies to her son Mateo (the excellent young Manel Llunell, who metamorphoses into almost a transcript of the filmmaker himself).

The director’s cinema is deeply free and daring, and only through these two virtues are true cinematic epiphanies achieved. At that moment, Casanova traced a deadly double pirouette, dangerously close to that of the early Julio Medem cinema, by drawing parallels between the matriarchal dictatorship and North Korean totalitarianism to speak of repression and subjugated sentiment.

The visuals, colors, and textures of La Piedad’s aesthetic composition, along with the film’s gigantic score, work together like a symphony that tugs, displaces, attracts, and disturbs the viewer all at once. Ms. Beatriz Martinez

applause for education

At first glance, Diego Lerman’s sixth feature picture seems like just another version of the classic tale of a dedicated educator who is assigned to a dreary high school and a classroom full of catty youngsters, only to completely transform their outlook on life overnight. It avoids the artificiality, arrogance, and simplicity that plagued Unforgettable Lessons (1988) and Dangerous Minds (2006), as well as the cliché that this idea symbolizes in and of itself (1995).

Lerman highlights the social tensions to which many students and teachers in underprivileged neighborhoods are exposed, defends the importance of not giving up troubled students, and ruminates, with much less conviction, on the purpose of literature as he observes his protagonist, a hermetic and somewhat lost man who manages to find a new meaning to his existence as soon as he opens his comfort zone to open to a social and political environment that is not his own.

El suplente, on the other hand, may overcomplicate life at the plot level and its incursions into the mafia thriller territory are somewhat false, but all this is compensated by the attention to detail that it exhibits in its portrayal of the Buenos Aires marginality and by the dramatic containment and the general credibility that it displays while combining ingredients typical of social cinema, elements of intrigue, and philosophical notes around a penetrating psycholo.

A violent and masculine form of entertainment.

From his early work on Doug Soldiers through his cult classic The Descent, Neil Marshall has demonstrated an unwavering dedication to series B and a distinct understanding of the horror genre, making it possible to recognize his films at a glance. All of them are quite murky in color, smell faintly like macarra and verbena, and roll on like a train. To put it simply, they are 100% rock & roll.

After the critical and commercial failure of his Hellboy remake (which nearly everyone insisted on destroying despite the film’s merits), he reverts to his previous style of filmmaking, which involves low budgets and plots on the point of madness starring super-powered female protagonists.

We’ll start now. Let’s pretend the Russian invasion of Afghanistan was motivated solely by the fact that an alien ship crashed in the area and the Russians spent years conducting experiments on humans and Martians, creating a destructive race that they then imprisoned in a bunker because they couldn’t figure out how to control it. Now that the action has moved to Afghanistan, the animals will awaken as the British forces fight the mujahides. Who is the true foe at this point?

The rest of the film is exactly as outlandish as the premise suggests, and it’s amusing to watch if you like bad, silly fantasy and action movies. The only option left now that everything is completely insane is to throw caution to the wind and immerse oneself in the warlike realm where the military, monsters, and Islamic fanatics all mingle with a healthy helping of action, gore, and hilarity.

Brave heroine in the eye of the hurricane

Emily Bront was a writer who was discouraged by both the patriarchy and her own sister Charlotte, who was also a writer, and who was unable to break out of her oppressive surroundings until she was 30 years old and had already written one of the most important novels in Anglo-Saxon literature. This film makes it apparent that it is not an attempt to recreate the life of its protagonist, but rather keeps a loose connection with her in order to present a version of the young woman who emits the same passion and intensity.

Frances O’Connor, a fellow actor, makes her directorial debut with a film that explores the complicated nature of sister relationships, one that is founded in love but stained by jealousy and rivalry. It paints a picture of a woman who does more than just make it through life in the small world she loves dearly and for which she feels disturbed at the same time; she also uses it to nourish his imagination, and in order to bring it to life, she strategically places herself in the middle ground between the traditional storytelling subject and the modern aesthetic.

An Iranian “thriller” that condemns violence towards women

Danish director of Iranian descent Ali Abbasi has not attempted to replicate the success of his last film Border (2018), a criminal and love thriller starring trolls. Without ignoring any of his previous criminal escapades, he shifts gears in Holy Spider (Sacred Spider) to follow a young Tehran-based journalist as he covers the investigation and eventual apprehension of a serial killer who targets prostitutes in the city’s shantytowns. The Iranian holy city of Mashhad.

Holy Spider is a powerful analysis of the fanatical and moral violence in Iranian society beyond the strict intrigue, devoid of surprise in classical terms, since we know the identity of the criminal after 20 minutes. This is because the serial killer, imbued with a divine reason, does not stop doing the dirty work for the police and well-thinking minds, eliminating what they consider social scum, and his arrest becomes a sacrilege for certain layers of society.

The film’s last act is a forceful tirade about a particular societal morality (independent of country) and the demagogy on which it is built, revealing the film’s meticulousness in shooting the first murder and presenting the daily life of the murderer. The final scene is terrifying not because it is violent or unpleasant but because it reveals how a criminal conscience legalized by the system itself is conceived. Ingmar Bergman titled his film about the seed of Nazism the serpent’s egg for this reason.