‘Witch Hunt’ (★★★✩✩), it gets dark, something remains and other premieres of the week

These are the releases that hit movie screens this October 17:

Ratings

★★★★★ masterpiece
★★★★ very good
★★★ buena
★★ regular
★ mala

Witch hunt (★★★✩✩)
Director: Luca Guadagnino
Interpretes: Julia Roberts, Andrew Garfield, Edebiri.
Production: USA 2025. 139 m. Drama

It gets dark, something remains

By Salvador Llopart

A colleague told me when talking about movies that, when you don’t know what to think, or you know it, but you don’t want to show it, you start to blur the issue. It says one thing and its opposite; he values ​​a reason and turns it around, and thus the matter ends up turning into gibberish. Sometimes even a beautiful gibberish. Witch Hunt leaves you with a similar feeling. With all its virtues, which it has, starting with the achieved atmosphere and magnificent performances, especially that of Julia Roberts, Guadagnino’s film ends up hiding more than showing. And I assure you that the sensation is irritating.

The director of Call me by your name Here he faces a drama of accusations and intrigues full of ambiguities in an environment as exquisite as Yale. A prominent professor (Julia Roberts) at the university is faced with the question of whether or not to believe a student (Ayo Edebiri) when she accuses another professor (Andrew Garfield) of rape. We are facing a thorny issue. Manipulation is just around the corner, justice risks becoming pure trickery. Or in mere revenge. Nothing is obvious. And nothing is conclusive. Guadagnino wants to go beyond the accusation. Above all, he cares about the reaction of those involved.

In fact, the witch hunt, if it was such, takes place very early in the film. (That’s why the original title, “After the Hunt,” is more accurate.) Like a good director, Guadagnino leaves gaps in the events where intrigue sneaks in. Although, in this case, those gaps become reddening patches at times. Especially when a series of disjointed and pointless scenes follow one another, the kind that leaves you scratching your head. Scenes that cancel each other out. Evidence discovered in a sink; the wonderful, cold teacher played by Julia Roberts – did I tell you she’s the best thing about the film? – caught in a stupid robbery, and that husband is so wise that he has as judgmental: “guadagninadas” that end anyone’s patience. In the end you no longer know if the director is laughing about it or has too much respect for it to say anything consistent. If you have followed, in short, the concealment strategy of that colleague I was talking about at the beginning.

A simple accident (★★★★✩)
Director: Jafar Panahi
Interpreters: Vahid Mobasseri, Ebrahim Azizi, Mariam Afshari
Production: Iran-France, 2025 (105 minutes). Drama.

The irreducible Panahi

By Jordi Batlle Caminal

Jafar Panahi began his filmography filming a girl who wanted a gold-colored fish (The white balloon) and another girl who, with her supposedly cast arm, broke the barriers between fiction and documentary (The mirror). Three decades later, it is now impossible to conceive of such light and warm cinema in Panahi, since, as is well known, his life in recent years has been an ordeal of prohibitions, censorship, prison and passport retention, which he has fought bravely without ever ceasing to make films, even from the radical secrecy of house arrest.

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This defiant and irreducible Panahi, the one of This is not a movie, Taxi in Tehran, three faces o Bears don’t existnow has a new title, a simple accidentPalme d’Or at the Cannes festival. It is his most forceful political work, in which he formulates a moral dilemma close to that of Death and the maiden: the chance meeting between victim (in this case five victims) and executioner and the consequent impulse for revenge. The one who was an executioner, or torturer, is obviously the incarnation of the Iranian regime; The victims, who can now act as executioners, represent those who have been retaliated against. The interior of a van and several desert settings are the main spaces in which this tense, harsh, raw, at times suffocating story takes place (the several-minute shot of the kidnapped man tied to a tree and blindfolded). It is particularly brilliant how Panahi sets his story in motion: a night, a dark road, a car in which a father (the torturer) is traveling with his pregnant wife and daughter, a run over by a dog, a breakdown and a workshop in which one of the employees (a victim from the past) believes he recognizes the person who made him suffer years ago just by the way he walks (the sound of a prosthetic leg that is difficult to forget).

But the way it ends is even more brilliant: a final shot as simple as it is shocking, memorable.

Chuck’s life (★★★★✩)
Director: Mike Flanagan
Intérpretes: Tom Hiddleston, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Karen Gillan
Production: USA 2024. 110 m. Fancy

everyday apocalypse

By S.

Neither fire apocalypse nor frozen apocalypse. Chuck’s life It starts like a mediocre, everyday apocalypse, in which everything falls apart into pieces, as the days sometimes seem to fall apart. He talks about finding one’s own music when silence prevails, as if there were no hope, and then starting to dance. Imaginative and optimistic recapitulation, that of Chuck himself (Tom Hiddleston) about his existence, in this successful adaptation of a story by the usually twisted and, in this case, emotional, Stephen King.

Dinner (★★★★✩)
Directed by: Manuel Gómez Pereira
Performers: Mario Casas, Alberto San Juan, Asier Etxeandia, Eva Ugarte, Antonio Resines.
Production: Spain, 2025 (106 min)
Comedy

Cooking for Franco

By Philip Engel

In times of infantilization of Spanish comedy at the service of the large conservative family, welcome is this friendly and self-conscious vaudeville, as didactic as it is necessary, as light as it is serious, which manages to put a smile on the face of the suffering respectable thanks to the brilliant Mario Casas and Alberto San Juan, supported by a solvent cast, an applied staging and a good sense of rhythm. Too bad it’s not a Tarantino one in which Franco dies of poisoning at the end.

A loose end (★★★✩✩)
Director: Daniel Hendler
Performers: Sergio Prina, Pilar Gamboa, Alberto Wolf
Production: Uruguay, 2024. 95 m. Comedy

The escape

By S.

The implication and the game are present from the same title. Santiago (Sergio Prina), an Argentine police corporal, crosses the border into Uruguay, fleeing from wayward colleagues. We don’t need more to know that Santiago is more than a loose end: it is a free verse. His chance escape, calm and imaginative, leaves behind the trace of a perennial smile that refers directly to Aki Kaurismäki. Also to his melancholy. The film has holes like cheese, another of the protagonists of Hendler’s film.

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Good Boy (★★★✩✩)
Director: Ben Leonberg
Intérpretes: Indy, Shane Jensen, Arielle Friedman.
Production: United States, 2025 (72 min)
Terror

A dog against the evil one

By P. Engel

As Presenceby Soderbergh, a stimulating narrative experiment that adopted the point of view of a ghost, but with a dog and on the other side of the camera, which is only subjective at specific moments. Tiny film in its approach as well as in its succinct footage that, beyond how cute the brave dog may be, is seen more thinking about how it is made than by what it tells us, which is somewhere between little and nothing. With a cat as the protagonist it would have been much better, although it would have to save its owner.

Debt (★★★✩✩)
Director: Daniel Guzmán
Performers: Daniel Guzmán, Itziar Ituño, Susana Abaitua, Rosario García, Luis Tosar.
Production: Spain, 2025 (115 min)
Thriller

In the streets of Madrid

By P. Engel

Curious and hard-working social thriller about the Madrid of the hopeless elderly that combines elements of noir (the great Mona Martinez, Luis Tosar in beer advertisement mode), traces of sentimentalism (the endearing and now deceased Rosario García) and an unlikely redemption plot, which makes one think of a “cross stories” where only a couple cross paths. The presence of Susana Abaitua, a rising talent, raises points for this well-intentioned film that will not end up paving the way to hell. It’s more like purgatory.