cinema

“Cinema is vital and essential, and continues to transform”

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Matt Damon left the filming of ‘The Odyssey‘ with the feeling of having done something that will no longer be repeated. Christopher Nolan, its director, believes that this pessimism is unfounded. And in fact, the easiest way to refute it is with the box office data of the last few weeks. Significantly, the most classic and traditional of today’s directors are not afraid of AI. What Matt Damon said. While promoting the film, Damon said that I had a feeling of nostalgia while filming itbecause it looked like the movies from when he started working, and he admitted that he knew that that type of cinema is ending. He went so far as to say that this was his last chance to make a film like this, and that he does not believe that the industry will have the resources to film this way for much longer. Nolan’s response. Nolan does not share that diagnosis, and he began to comment on the controversial topic of artificial intelligence. In an interviewthe director noted that he has never seen “a technology so successfully adopted by Wall Street, investors and technology companies, and at the same time so rejected by the public.” He aimed squarely at the younger generation: it was they, he said, who coined the term “AI slop” to describe the content generated by AI that has flooded the networks, and those who “show more disdain” towards everything related to this technology. No, but. Nolan doesn’t reject AI entirely. He believes it can provide useful tools for working with images, but states that “the idea that AI will completely replace humans and their creativity is, in my opinion, nonsense.” Your opinionbasically, is that the creativity of cinema is stronger: “Cinema is vital and essential, and it continues to transform.” We are with the people. To justify his words, Nolan defends the attitude of younger viewers and cites, for example, two hits of the season as proof that the twenty-year-old public has not lost interest in films made with real cameras and locations: ‘Backrooms’ and ‘Obsession’. That is to say, they are indisputable box office hits that, in his opinion, dismantle another idea that has bothered him for a long time, that of young audiences no longer having the attention span for a three-hour epic film. Nolan defended that the films that succeed among that generation are mysterious and reflective, and even compared some parts of ‘Backrooms’ with the most enigmatic cinema of David Lynch. The ‘Oppenheimer’ precedent. This isn’t the first time Nolan has brought AI into the public conversation. Already in 2023with the premiere of ‘Oppenheimer’, said that he saw very strong parallels between the physicist’s calls for nuclear containment and the warnings of AI experts who asked to slow the development of the technology, citing among them Geoffrey Hinton, the researcher who left Google to speak more freely about the existential risk posed by advanced AI. Already then he insisted that AI can end up being a powerful tool, but that the responsibility cannot fall solely on technology. Header | HellaCinema In Xataka | Nolan has a reputation for being one of the directors who takes the most care of his films. But the IMAX format of ‘The Odyssey’ raises doubts

vampire cinema will never be the same

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Ryan Coogler writes, directs and produces’Sinners‘, a story set in the Mississippi Delta during the era of Jim Crow laws and which raised nearly $370 million worldwide on a budget between $90 and $100 million. In June 2025, when the film had been in theaters for nine weeks, critics were already at its feet: it was the first film without a sequel or franchise behind it to exceed $200 million in the United States since ‘Coco’. Now you can see it in Netflix. Michael B. Jordan plays two twins who return to their native Mississippi in 1932 from Chicago, with money of dubious origin to set up a blues club and dance hall in an old barn. The first half of the film moves like a classic Southern drama, with familial and racial tensions. The second half changes register and turns the place into a scene of supernatural terror, with a threat that Coogler himself has recognized as inspired by ‘From Dusk Till Dawn’ by Robert Rodríguez. The film also draws on blaxploitation from the seventies and the twilight western, in a Macedonia of references and styles with their own personality, as demonstrated by lto musicwhich occupies a central place in the proposal. The soundtrack, composed by Ludwig Göransson, takes up the Delta blues tradition and its associated mythology, including the legend of the pact at the crossroads, attributed to musician Robert Johnson. And all with a very balanced cast and fantastic secondary characters like Delroy Lindo, Hailee Steinfeld and newcomer Miles Caton. ‘Sinners’ achieved sixteen nominations at the 98th edition of the Oscars, the highest number in the history of the ceremony, surpassing the previous record of fourteen nominations shared by ‘Naked Eve’, ‘Titanic’ and ‘La La Land’. Finally, it took four: Best Actor for Jordan, Best Original Screenplay for Coogler, Best Score for Göransson and Best Cinematography for Autumn Durald Arkapaw. A true triumph for cinema outside of franchises that opened a path to the release of the most emasculating blockbusters. In Xataka | On HBO Max you have the most brutal action comedy just a few weeks after hitting theaters, and it is already number one in 50 countries

the story of how Ridley Scott blew our minds in the most terrifying scene in cinema

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One of the most disturbing inspirations of Alien He was not born in a Hollywood studio, but in a doctor’s office. For years, screenwriter Dan O’Bannon suffered from Crohn’s disease and he described some episodes as the sensation of having something alive trying to break through from inside him. That experience would end up becoming in the seed of one of the most disturbing images in the history of cinema. The scene that changed terror. In 1979, Ridley Scott took a unusual decision even by horror film standards: hiding from their own actors a good part of what was going to happen during one of the key sequences from Alien. The director was convinced that performed fear could never equal real fear. The script barely indicated that “something emerges”but the exact appearance of the creature, the amount of blood, the violence of the scene and the way everything was going to unfold remained deliberately hidden for most of the cast. That commitment to surprise would end up giving rise to one of the most shocking, imitated and studied scenes in the entire history of cinema. The origin of the nightmare. The famous chestburster sequence It was not born solely from the imagination of its creators. Dan O’Bannonscreenwriter of Alien, wore years fascinated by parasites and by some of the most brutal reproductive mechanisms in the insect world. Wasps that lay eggs inside other animals, larvae that grow by feeding on a living host, and organisms capable of controlling the behavior of their victims served as inspiration for the creature. To this added an experience much more personal: the severe intestinal pain derived from Crohn’s disease that O’Bannon himself suffered from. The feeling of having something growing and fighting By coming out of his interior he ended up becoming the central idea of ​​the monster that would end up terrifying the public. The battle for the perfect alien. Once the idea was conceived, O’Bannon knew exactly who should give it visual form. During his experience in the failed project of Dune by Alejandro Jodorowsky had discovered the work of the Swiss artist HR Gigerwhose biomechanical illustrations mixed sexuality, death, bones and machinery in a way never seen before. The problem was that the producers and the studio considered those images too disturbing and they resisted hiring him for months. Everything changed when Ridley Scott joined the project, saw Giger’s designs and was completely fascinated. Their support was decisive in incorporating the artist, a decision that would end up defining the visual identity of Alien and much of subsequent science fiction. A monster inspired by nature. The creature was also not conceived as a simple aggressive alien. O’Bannon wanted his life cycle to be as disturbing as it was plausible. The facehuggerin charge of implanting the embryo in the victim’s body, was born from the combination between the screenwriter’s ideas, Giger’s designs and the work of various artists and technicians. The goal was to create an organism that would use humans as involuntary guestsreproducing in a horror key some behaviors observed in real insects. The true horror of Alien came not only from the physical violence, but from the loss of control over one’s body and the feeling of becoming a vessel for something unknown. Preparing for the big shock. Ridley Scott was aware that the alien birth sequence would decide the success or failure of the film. If the public took it as a joke, the whole threat would disappear. That’s why he spent weeks perfecting the creature’s design and carefully planning the shoot. HE built an artificial torso for John Hurt, the actor who played Kane, and a complex hydraulic system was installed under the table. The fake breast was stuffed with real organs obtained in butcher shops and slaughterhouses, in addition to seafood and organ meats that provided a texture that was impossible to reproduce with the effects of the time. To give us an idea, the smell was so intense that the cast themselves I would remember decades later the mixture of formaldehyde, blood and decaying flesh that permeated the set. Giger airbrushing an alien hieroglyph showing the violent and parasitic life cycle of the Alien The best kept secret. The actors knew that something was going to come out from Kane’s chest, but they were practically unaware everything else. While technicians worked for hours preparing the special effect, the cast remained away from the set. When they were finally called to film, they found a stage covered with plasticscameras protected by transparent tarps, buckets scattered everywhere and team members wearing raincoats. Nobody explained to them the reason. That strange atmosphere generated a growing tension that Scott deliberately sought. I wanted the cameras to capture real uncertainty, not just interpretations. Giger’s first failed attempt to create a chest-busting alien, inspired by Francis Bacon Reality surpassed acting. The filming was not as simple as it is usually remembered. The first attempts failed because the creature could not properly pass through Kane’s shirt and some blood systems were blocked. However, these errors had an unexpected effect: They further increased the anxiety of the actors, who saw how something seemed to try to make its way from inside their partner’s body without understanding exactly what was happening. When the tiny bug finally managed to emerge and jets of blood began to shoot in all directions, the reactions were authentic. Veronica Cartwright received a direct hit in the face that she did not expect and ended up emotionally overwhelmed. Sigourney Weaver confessed that at that moment she was not even thinking about the film, but about John Hurt. Yaphet Kotto was so affected that, according to several testimoniesisolated himself for hours after filming. The scene that no one forgot. There is no doubt, Scott got exactly what he was looking for. The expressions of astonishment, horror and revulsion that appear on the screen belong largely to people that they were living something unexpected before your eyes. The director summarized years later … Read more

the last film directed by one of the greatest masters in the history of cinema

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Clint Eastwood turned 96 on May 31. And a bit of coincidence, with a statement from his son, jazz musician Kyle Eastwood (saying that “he’s retired now, but I’ve been very lucky to be able to work with him on quite a few films”), we’ve learned that Eastwood is no longer going to make any more films. There have been no official statements, but the retirement of the person responsible for ‘Unforgiven’ or ‘The Pale Rider’ leaves us with a filmography full of great films, of all genres and intensities. Let’s celebrate by remembering the last of them, ‘Jury Nº 2‘, released in 2024 and which you can see in Movistar Plus and HBO Max. ‘Jury No. 2’ is a judicial thriller with a moral dilemma on board, as Eastwood likes them: Justin Kemp (Nicholas Hoult) is called to serve on a jury in a high-profile murder case, and discovers that he himself could be more involved in the crime than he thought. The cast is completed with a veritable array of heavyweights such as Toni Collette, JK Simmons and Kiefer Sutherland. The film is Eastwood’s fortieth as a director. ‘Jury No. 2’ was conceived originally as a direct streaming premiere. The change to a limited theatrical release It arrived after some internal passes that yielded very favorable opinionsbut he barely received advertising coverage from the studio, which was said to have resented the author for the poor box office results of ‘Cry Macho’. It was finally released, as was later learned, not only out of respect for the director’s advanced age, but in recognition of his 50-year relationship with Warner Bros. This stimulating thriller closes an absolutely exemplary career, always halfway between popular genres and auteur cinema, since the time of his international fame aboard some of Sergio Leone’s most significant titles. Between those first successes and his recognition by critics starting with ‘Unforgiven’ in 1992, there was the creation of milestones such as Dirty Harry and a series of absolutely superb westerns and thrillers, often directed by himself. He has spent this entire century praised by critics and the public thanks to films like ‘Million Dollar Baby’ or ‘Mystic River’. In Xataka | Rafa Nadal won 22 Grand Slams and lost 18 more due to injury: the documentary that explores those last ones arrives on Netflix today

They learned cinema on YouTube, they have raised 300 million with their films and they have achieved something: defeating Star Wars

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Three horror movies. Budgets ranging from a ridiculous million dollars for one to ten million for another. Directors of 26, 34 and 20 years old trained on YouTube, not in schools for children of. So far in 2026, those three films have grossed more than $300 million in the North American market. Franchise cinema is not dead, of course, and we are going to prove it this year with the premiere of ‘Doomsday‘ (although, for once, surprises are no longer ruled out). But there are issues that seem to be changing in another sense. The ‘Backrooms’ explosion. Last weekend,’Backrooms‘ (directed by 20-year-old Kane Parsons) collection 81.4 million dollars in North America and 118 million worldwide in its first weekend (and it does not arrive in countries like Spain until the end of June), with a budget of only ten million. It is the biggest premiere in the history of A24surpassing the previous record held by ‘Civil War‘by Alex Garland. Parsons also becomes the youngest director to top the US domestic box office, taking that record from Josh Trank, who was 27 years old when ‘Chronicle’ topped the charts in 2012. Unstoppable obsession. At the same time, ‘Obsession’ (by Curry Barker, 26 years old) added 26.4 million in its third weekend, 54% more than the previous week, starting from a budget of one million dollars. Its domestic total already exceeds 104 million. Meanwhile, ‘The Mandalorian and Grogu‘, with a budget of 165 million, fell 69% compared to its opening week and was third on the list of box office receipts that week. We will see ‘Obsession’ this weekend in Spain. The precedent. January had already given the first sign. ‘Iron Lung’ (written, directed, starring and self-distributed by Mark Fischbach, Markiplier on YouTube, 34 years old), debuted with 17.8 million domestic dollars and reached 52 million at the global box office from a budget of three. Fischbach didn’t even go through a study: he self-financed and distributed the film himselfpocketing half of the world gross. Young audience. It is obvious where these collections come from: 86% of the opening audience for ‘Backrooms’ was under 35 years old, and 44% under 21. ‘The Mandalorian and Grogu’, not to get away from Disney’s setback with a financially similar debut the previous week, had a share of those under 25 years of age of 27%, although on paper, it should have attracted more viewers of that age (which corroborates that at this point ‘Star Wars’ is entirely a franchise for kids over forty.) These directors who came from YouTube did not summon a new audience, but rather the one they already brought from the internet. Warner Bros. Motion Pictures co-head Michael De Luca summed it up in a conference in which said that these directors “They are in dialogue with their audience from the first moment.” By the time movies like these hit theaters, he added, “they’ve already had a billion screenings.” Three directors, a common pattern. In 2022, Kane Parsons uploaded a nine-minute short film to YouTube titled ‘The Backrooms (Found Footage)’shot from his bedroom with the help of the 3D graphics software Blender. Over the next few years, episodes of the series They accumulated more than 197 million views. Curry Barker, on the other hand, came from the sketch comedy channel ‘That’s a Bad Idea’ which currently has over 700 million cumulative views across platforms. In 2024 he filmed ‘Milk & Serial’, a found footage horror with $800 budget, almost all of it spent on the camera. He spent a year trying to get mainstream distribution without success. He uploaded it for free to YouTube and accumulated 1.6 million views. Mark Fischbach, for his part, has been on YouTube since 2012. He had experimented with the film format in two of his own productions for YouTube (‘A Heist with Markiplier’ and ‘In Space with Markiplier’) before adapting ‘Iron Lung’, David Szymanski’s indie horror video game published in 2022. Why the terror. American terror has exceeded 800 million dollars worldwide so far this year, and these three films directed by YouTube creators account for a third of that figure. But… why this devotion to the genre, which goes hand in hand with the good state of health that enjoy in recent years? Horror operates well with low budgets, and the young audience that grew up with creepypasta and found footages on YouTube has a particular relationship with that aesthetic space. Testing ground. The video clips of the nineties were the laboratory where authors such as David Fincher or Michel Gondry developed their visual grammar before jumping into cinema. Now, YouTube serves as a testing ground for the new generation of filmmakers. That’s why studios and agents now scour YouTube for new names. Now what. Barker has already filmed his next film, a horror comedy titled ‘Anything but Ghosts’, and A24 has hired him for a remake of ‘The Texas Chainsaw Massacre’. Parsons wants to expand the ‘Backrooms’ universe, possibly in television format. Fischbach, for his part, has already made it clear that he would like to collaborate with a large studio on future projects, without giving up creative control. It is possibly the one with the most traditional discovery profile in the underground and jump to the big leagues. For now, ‘Backrooms’ could end its box office career between $140 and $160 million in the United States alone, which would make the film one of the biggest hits of the year. Not bad for an idea that started as just another meme on 4chan. In Xataka | Cinema can only survive by competing in the “experience” market. That’s why Madrid already has its 70 mm projector

this week, a remake of an explosive thriller, a disturbing documentary and very recent Spanish cinema

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The week of April 27 to May 3 comes packed with new releases on Netflix. The most anticipated title for action thriller fans is ‘The Fire of Vengeance’. In the documentaries section true crime highlights ‘Should I Marry a Murderer?’, a three-episode docuseries about a woman who discovers her fiancé’s dark past. And the gem of the week is the Spanish ‘Mi Querida Señorita’, produced by Los Javis. series Should I marry a murderer? The documentaries true crime are one of Netflix’s safest bets, and ‘Should I Marry a Murderer?’ He wants to continue the streak. The British-produced docuseries begins with a more or less conventional love story: a young forensic examiner meets a man through Tinder and the relationship progresses quickly until a commitment is made. One day the man confesses that he has committed a murder and the victim is still missing. However, the woman decides to keep the commitment while gathering evidence against him. The series is built from real testimonies, archival material and reconstructions of the case. The fire of revenge One of the platform’s most ambitious action bets for this spring goes beyond the simple remake of the blockbuster directed by Tony Scott and starring Denzel Washington in 2004. The series is based on the original novels by AJ Quinnell and proposes a renewed vision of John Creasy’s character, taking advantage of the episodic format: a former special forces soldier suffers from untreated post-traumatic stress disorder that keeps him on the brink of collapse. A former colleague offers him a job as a bodyguard in Brazil, where he develops an unexpected bond with the person he must protect. Other series you will go to hell – April 27 Rescue Me: Rescue Team – April 27 envious (Season 4) – April 29 Parenthood – May 1 30 Rock – May 1 Glory – May 1 Booba (Season 6) – May 1 Miraculous: The Adventures of Ladybug – May 1 Movies Gladiator II One of the great film releases of 2024 arrives this week in the Netflix catalog, returning us to ancient Rome to explore what happened after the death of Maximus, placing the action fifteen years after the duel in the Colosseum. The protagonist is the grandson of Marcus Aurelius and son of Maximus, and is played by Paul Mescal: captured and enslaved after the invasion of his home in Numidia, he is forced to fight in the arena while seeking revenge. A top-notch cast with Pedro Pascal, Denzel Washington and Joseph Quinn stands out in this return by Ridley Scott to the universe that gave him one of his greatest commercial successes. My dear lady Free adaptation of the 1972 film of the same name by Jaime de Armiñán, which completely changed the image of José Luis López Vázquez, and which here delves into much more contemporary terrain thanks to the script by Alana S. Portero and the production by Los Javis. The story follows Adela, the only child of a conservative family, marked by silence about her intersexuality, a condition she is unaware of but that shapes her life. An unexpected friendship with a priest and other decisive events in her life take her from Pamplona to Madrid. The protagonist is Elisabeth Martínez, also an intersex actress who makes her debut here as the protagonist. Premiere: May 1 Other movies My name Agneta – April 29 Janur Ireng – April 30 Miraculous World: Paris, The Adventures of Shadybug and Claw Noir – April 30 Boys and girls – May 1 Exchanged – May 1 The son-in-law – May 1 In Xataka | Today the animated spin-off of the platform’s only powerful franchise premieres on Netflix: ‘Stranger Things’

Cinema has been accusing Netflix and Amazon of suffocating it for years. Now it has new saviors: Netflix and Amazon

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In Las Vegas, before thousands of theater owners, the head of Amazon MGM Studios promised that at least 15 of its films a year would reach theaters. He did so days after Netflix, which has been avoiding cinemas for years, announced that it will respect traditional exhibition windows for Warner Bros. films, thus building new bridges of understanding with its former enemies, traditional cinemas. Coincidence or highly studied public relations move? 15 a year doesn’t hurt. Mike Hopkins, director of Prime Video and Amazon MGM Studios, He was very direct with the exhibitors: “While some competitors have entered and exited the theatrical waters, for us this is neither a test nor an experiment. Our commitment to release at least 15 films each year in your theaters is underway.” The theater owners responded with a standing ovation. Amazon backs this promise with figures: they have been announcing for some time an investment of $1 billion annually in movies for theaters. The ‘Hail Mary’ gift. Immediately afterwards, Ryan Gosling spoke. The actor and producer of ‘Salvation Project’the science fiction film that has been dominating the global box office for weeks, thanked the exhibitors for their decisive role in the film’s success. He later said that the production, which has accumulated more than $525 million at the global box office, was going to extend its exhibition window, delaying its arrival on digital platforms. A true gift of good will for a sector that appreciates any oxygen cylinder. In the other corner. On the other hand we have Netflix. In April 2025, his co-CEO Ted Sarandos described going to the movies as “an outdated concept”. Obviously, given the platform’s trend-setting power, the statement did not sit particularly well with exhibitors. Months later, when Netflix announced its intention to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery for around 80,000 million dollars, the alarm became something more concrete: the main studio committed to the exhibition passed into the hands of the platform most hostile to traditional cinema. Collect cable. Sarandos partially retreated in January 2026 in an interview: “When this deal closes, we will have a phenomenal theatrical distribution engine that generates billions of dollars of theatrical revenue that we do not want to put at risk. We will manage that business as it is today, with 45-day windows.” He clarified his comment about “outdated” cinema: he was referring to locations without access to theaters, not to the experience itself. Internally, suspicions did not subside: according to the CEO of the Cinemark chainNetflix intended to approach a window of only 17 days. Cinemas are improving. The point is that a slight improvement is detected in the situation of cinemas. According to Comscorethe US box office accumulated from the beginning of this year until April 12 reached $2.26 billion, 23% above the same period of the previous year and the best figure since 2019. Ticket sales grew by 16%, reaching 154 million viewers. This improvement has been echoed among production companies: Universal, which during the pandemic reduced its windows to 17 days, has already announced that will extend its guaranteed minimum to 45 days since January 2027. In this context, MGM’s congratulations and Netflix’s change in philosophy make sense. Reasons for suspicion. The rooms, however, have reasons to be reticent. David Zaslav, CEO of Warner, promised three years ago 20 films a year from Warner Bros. for rooms. He never kept his promise. But we may be seeing the winds of change blowing. The box office in slight but clear improvement, the expansion of windows and the regulatory pressure They are creating a panorama in which it is more profitable for platforms to be allies of cinemas than enemies. Although the rooms know that they have to make sure before burying the hatchet. In Xataka | Spotify killed the record and the industry pivoted to concerts. Netflix killed cinema and the industry was left with a “space crisis”

Kubrick was obsessed with this masterpiece of war cinema

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Stanley Kubrick one of the most demanding directors in the history of cinemawas unable throughout his life to stop talking about a film, to the point that he “spoke enthusiastically about it until shortly before his death.” It was not his, but from an Italian filmmaker practically unknown to the general public. It was filmed in 1966 with non-professional actors and on the streets of Algeria: ‘The Battle of Algiers’. Says who knows. Anthony Frewin worked as Kubrick’s personal assistant between 1965 and 1999, except for short interruptions at times in the 1970s. No one knew the director’s cinematographic tastes better than him, as demonstrated in an interview where he states that Kubrick “was generally very disappointed with Hollywood cinema.” What interested him was something else: international directors who questioned the conventions of the medium and sought new forms of expression. Your favorite. Among all those films, one occupied a separate place. According to Frewin, Kubrick was “excited” by it for decades ‘The Battle of Algiers’by Gillo Pontecorvo. The first time this assistant started working for him, Kubrick already told him that it was impossible to understand what cinema could really do without having seen that film. And he continued saying it until shortly before he died, in 1999. What is ‘The Battle of Algiers’. Winner of the Golden Lion in 1966 at the Venice Festivalreceived three Oscar nominations. Gillo Pontecorvo filmed it in black and white, on the real streets of the Casbah of Algiers, with thousands of local extras and a handful of non-professional actors. The result was so convincing that the film’s advertisements warned that the images did not come from documentary archives. The film reconstructs the most intense years of the Algerian conflict against French colonization, between 1954 and 1957. Pontecorvo based it on the memories of FLN commander Saadi Yacef, who also acted in the film itself, playing a character inspired by himself. The director spent an entire month testing before shooting a single scene, using multiple cameras to make the crowds appear larger, and even repeating some takes more than twenty times to exhaust the actors. The music, signed by Ennio Morricone, flirts with traditional North African percussion and traditional military marches. And finally, the film stands out for its refusal to offer a clear moral perspective: both FLN guerrillas and French paratroopers commit atrocities, and no one plays the role of unequivocal hero. What did Kubrick see in him? In an interview included in the aforementioned article, Kubrick commented that “all films are, in a sense, mockumentaries. You try to get as close to reality as you can, but it is not reality. There are people who do very intelligent things that have fascinated and completely deceived me. For example, ‘The Battle of Algiers’. It is very impressive.” Frewin added a detail: the director went so far as to say that ‘The Battle of Algiers’ and Andrzej Wajda’s ‘Danton’ were the only two films he would have liked to have directed. Parallels with his cinema. Above all from a thematic point of view, the influence of ‘The Battle of Algiers’ on Kubrick’s cinema is indisputable: ‘Paths of Glory’ examines the mechanics of military hierarchy and the corruption it generates, and ‘Full Metal Jacket’ divides its story into two almost incompatible points of view to show that war does not have only one face. In none of these films is there a protagonist who triumphs morally, and in that sense, Pontecorvo and Kubrick shared that war films should not generate catharsis but rather discomfort. At the Pentagon. The influence of ‘The Battle of Algiers’ exceeds the cinematographic sphere. In August 2003the Pentagon’s Directorate of Special Operations organized a screening of the film for senior military and civilian officials. The invitation brochure said: “How to win a battle against terrorism and lose the war of ideas. (…) The French have a plan. It works tactically, but it fails strategically.” The background was the occupation of Iraq: the US army was looking for clues to understand why military victories did not translate into political stability. They weren’t the only thing: the Black Panthers used the film as training material in the 1960s. The IRA also studied it. Argentine intelligence used it in the seventies, for radically different purposes. And today, is screened regularly at West Point, at the Naval War College and at the Academy’s Combating Terrorism Center. In the world of cinemaNolan cited him as an influence when he released ‘Dunkirk’ and (2017) and ‘The Dark Knight Rises’. In Xataka | ‘2001: Flashes in the Dark’: An HBO Max immersion in Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece that surprises with its visual inventiveness

Backrooms come to the cinema

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A pixelated image, yellow carpet and fluorescent lighting. That was enough for the internet to build, in just five years, the most terrifying collective horror mythology in recent years. Now A24 wants to bring it to the big screen and, although the trailer looks great, the question is whether Hollywood can contain something that, by definition, has no form. Origins of backrooms. On May 12, 2019, an anonymous user posted a thread on /x/, the paranormal-themed board on 4chanwith a simple request: share images that “felt strange.” Among the responses appeared a photograph without context or signaturea room with immense yellowish carpet, walls of the same color, and everything illuminated with a ghostly fluorescent light. No people, no windows, hellishly mundane. And yet it was ridiculously disturbing. The next day, another user added a description under the photo. He said that if you “clip out of reality in the wrong areas” you will end up trapped in the Backrooms, a non-space that spans nearly a billion square miles of empty rooms. The original post received four responses, but this repost combined with the image triggered the phenomenon. Pay attention to detail: the term “noclip” describes, in video games, the glitch in which a character passes through a solid wall and falls into the geometric void behind the map. Real architecture becomes a membrane. The monster is space itself. The myth grows. In a few days there were already stories exploring the myth. In just one month, it had been created a wiki explaining the lore that didn’t stop growing. It wasn’t even clear where the photograph came from, it had no metadata, but ended up being tracked even a blog archived on the Wayback Machine. It was a photograph of a HobbyTown USA store (specializing in radio-controlled cars) in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, taken around 2002 to announce the renovation of its facilities. Pure abysses of extreme mundanity. That dissonance between the banality of the origin and the symbolic load is what turned the myth into a giant. He lore. Infinite and unfathomable, but broadly speaking, as the Backrooms wiki explains: they are divided into levelsdifferentiated environments with their own rules. Level 0 is the original room from the first post. Level 1 scales to a larger industrial architecture. Level 2 introduces darkened maintenance tunnels where there is the feeling of being watched. Entities soon appeared: the Smilers, who live in darkness; the Facelings, humanoids that populate most levels with a complete absence of facial features; the Hounds, with four limbs, disproportionate jaws and no intelligence… Origin in creepypasta. Backrooms have their roots in the creepypasta genre that has its possible origin in the blog of Ted the Caverpublished in 2001, where a man documented his exploration of a cave with increasingly disturbing results. Until the entries simply stopped appearing. Documentary realism, narrative ambiguity and lack of a defined ending were the keys that gave rise to creations such as Slender Man, created by Eric Knudson in a manipulated image contest on the Something Awful forum. Slender Man he was a tall, faceless figure stalking children in the margins of seemingly normal photographs. On the same 4Chan /x/ board, internal norms and rules appeared that gave a bit of order to its history, but the creepypastaas a genre, had become a monster with infinite heads: stories without ending, without rules, almost without development, that only sought sordid, vaguely familiar terror, with dreamlike overtones and without moral justification. ‘American Journalism’ would describe the phenomenon in 2002 of the “largest collaborative writing project in history.” Unexplainable fear. The backrooms are a sophisticated version without the need for characters or monsters (although the community would end up creating them, as we have seen) of many stories. creepypasta. Its secret is that it is based on recognizable spaces (offices, shopping centers, meeting rooms, hallways) devoid of their usual context. Researchers Alexander Diel and Michael Lewis described it as “the uncanny valley of physical spaces”. Jump to audiovisual. The turning point starred Kane Parsons, known on YouTube as Kane Pixels. Parsons was 16 years old when he published his short film ‘The Backrooms (Found Footage)’ in 2022: nine minutes shot in first person with a VHS filter, in which a cameraman accidentally crosses the threshold of Level 0 and is followed by an entity that does not look good. From there it would come a series which exceeds 197 million views. Parsons created a universe of his own (the fictional Async research institute, experiments with dimensional portals in the 1980s, government involvement) that sometimes contradicted the mythology of 4chan. The community ended up adopting part of its history. Video game connection. In August 2022, three years after the founding post on 4chan and several months after Kane Parsons’ video, ‘Escape the Backrooms’ landed on Steam proposing a cooperative adventure for four players, and which was embraced by the players: It has 91% positive reviews and a peak of 48,879 simultaneous players. And there’s more: ‘The Backrooms 1998’ takes the concept to the first-person perspective with a VHS filter, with the story of a teenager who films his friends skating and accidentally falls to Level 0. The backrooms are in tune with one of the most stimulating horror video game fevers of recent years: the lo-fi horror or PS1 aesthetic. There are very active communities like Haunted PS1which functions as an incubator for the subgenre through development competitions, annual builds, and a network of developers who exchange techniques to reproduce the visual texture of the 1990s in modern engines such as Unity or Godot. In this context, Backrooms fit naturally and intuitively. And now, to the movies. one year later of Kane Parsons’ first video, indie production company A24 won the bid for the film adaptation rights to the series. With an estimated budget of 10 million dollars and a premiere scheduled for May 29, 2026, it has already shown its first trailer, as disturbing as can be expected. It will tell us the story of a … Read more

The director of Sirat criticizes commercial cinema. But meanwhile, four out of ten directors film once a decade

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Oliver Laxe’s statements comparing commercial cinema to “bimbo bread”, especially pointing out the contradiction of making films for Netflix. have generated an unexpected controversy in the Spanish audiovisual sector, relativizing the extraordinary career of ‘Sirat’. The film not only got five statuettes at the European Film Awardsbut it has also received eleven Goya nominations and two Oscar nominations. The debate arises at a significant moment: a study by the European Audiovisual Observatory reveals that four out of every ten European directors and screenwriters who released a feature film in 2015 did not sign another one during the following ten years. A complicated metaphor. Oliver Laxe conceded an interview with The World in which offered his diagnosis on the crisis of youth attendance at the theaters: “It is our fault and our responsibility that young people do not go to the cinemas. They have been given fodder, bimbo bread and their palates are accustomed to sugar and processed foods.” The food metaphor did not stop there. Laxe went on to argue that when these viewers are offered “a rye bread or a pure cereal,” the palate is not prepared, although he insisted that “the sensitivity is there.” The filmmaker, whose film has exceeded three million euros at the Spanish box office and has attracted precisely a young audience, closed his reasoning with a resounding statement: “Having very political proclamations, but then making a movie with Netflix seems like a pure contradiction to me that nullifies your speech.” The accounts don’t work out. The answer did not take long to materialize. Jota Linares, a filmmaker from Cádiz who has often filmed for Netflix, replied in the SER questioning Laxe’s analysis. Linares challenged the simplification of the problem: “I will tell you what allows me to continue maintaining political ideas and express them freely despite having directed series and films for Netflix: my social class.” And he added: “I assure you that, due to my social class, I would be incapable of supporting myself by making only auteur films spaced over time for about two or three years. It doesn’t work out for me, although I see that it does for you.” Finally, he concluded that “you don’t hack the system from within with a six million euro movie with thirty publicists working at your feet. No, dear Oliver. That’s being at the top of the mainstream.” ‘Sirat’s’ money. The contrast between both positions reveals broader tensions in the sector. Laxe speaks from a relatively privileged position, since his film had the financial backing of Movistar Plus+ and is now enjoying an international campaign that has taken him to the Oscars. Linares, for his part, represents a silent majority of filmmakers who fight to get each new opportunity. Precariousness as a backdrop. The debate takes on a more urgent dimension when confronted with the data that published El País based on the study of the European Audiovisual Observatory. The research, which analyzes the careers of 38,762 professionals, covering some 30,000 projects, provides revealing figures: 40% of those who released a feature film in theaters during 2015 did not sign another film again in the entire subsequent decade. At the same time, more than half of the films released each year are debut films. The report’s conclusions leave no room for doubt: there is “an impressive turnover and great precariousness.” Cinema versus television. The document also shows a growing separation between film and television. Only 11% of directors and scriptwriters worked in both formats between 2015 and 2024, dismantling the idea of ​​fluid transfer between screens. On television and platforms, 85% of screenwriters and 91% of directors active in 2015 continued working later, compared to the 60% that disappear from theatrical cinema. “The majority survive poorly. Those who endure have family financial support behind them,” explained director Cristina Andreu in 2021. Little seems to have changed since then. Structural contradiction. Can the industry demand “rye bread”, as Laxe says he does, when the system expels 40% of its creators after a film? Is it fair to hold the public responsible for having a palate “accustomed to processed” in an ecosystem where professional continuity is more the exception than the norm? Laxe himself acknowledges that ‘Sirat’ was considered “a suicide” during the search for financing. If even an ultimately successful project faced that initial diagnosis, what happens to proposals from filmmakers without a safety net? The tension between the discourse of cinematic quality and the precarious reality of European production raises uncomfortable questions about who can afford to cultivate discerning palates. When, furthermore, the system itself does not guarantee anything. In Xataka | Many agree that ‘Stranger Things 5’ lowers the quality of the series. But that doesn’t change Netflix’s ambitious plans.

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