Four recommendations on Netflix, Prime Video, Filmin and Movistar Plus+

Koreeda has made a series and it is delicious

Makanai: The cook of the maiko, on netflix

how do you get Hirokazu Koreeda make such naïve and well-intentioned cinema and never turn out cute? Director of our little sister either Still Walking directs his first series for Netflix and the result is exactly what you expect.

“Makanai” is used in Japanese to refer to meals that are prepared for restaurant employees. Japanese gastronomy is so rich that they have their own word for this type of menu. And these are precisely what Kiyo cooks, one of the protagonists of Makanai in the center (okiya) of Kyoto where they go to train as maikos.

And what are the maikos? The maikos are the geiko apprentices (also called geishas in other regions), artists who entertain banquets and meetings. koreeda It not only introduces us to this universe so unknown and mysterious in the West, but also to the delicious Japanese cuisine, all seasoned with a sensitive and tender story of female friendship and sisterhood.

Thriller with a female gaze

1976, in filmin

How many thrillers are you able to list that provide a feminine look? They are not many, no. For this reason, the premiere in filming of 1976 it’s great news. 1976, actress’s first feature film Manuela Martelli, is a thriller with distant echoes of spy movies that delves into the years of terror in Pinochet.

The protagonist (performed superbly by Aline Kuppenheim) She is a bourgeois housewife who gives shelter to a fugitive opponent of the dictatorship and, little by little, she is penetrating this clandestine network of resistance.

The interesting thing is how martelli it develops that simple arc from an essentially female point of view, emphasizing aspects that male-directed thrillers don’t usually explore. This subtle, elegant and fascinating visual commitment also deserves our praise.

Why Mia Hansen-Løve is my favorite director

Bergman’s Island, in Movistar Plus +

“Self-inflicted agony.” This is how Chris describes (Vicky Krieps) what it means for her to write. “Well, if it makes you anxious, take a break, do something else,” Tony replies. (Tim Roth). They are a couple of filmmakers on a creative retreat. He is an established director. He has been invited to Farö, the island where ingmar bergman found his home in the 1960s, where he shot like a mirror and fragments of passion, shame either scenes of a marriage and in which he will spend eternity.

Tony is presenting a retrospective of his filmography on the island and Chris accompanies him. They take advantage of their free time to write in a house and a mill, in the middle of an idyllic setting. He pushes through his script, confident and determined. She, on the other hand, is toying with the same old idea and fears that she is too puny for a movie.

Those conversations about the creative process in a couple are the best of Bergman’s Island, a new occasion in which Mia Hansen-Love takes advantage of his own life to tell us a story. The film she is writing materializes at one point as a short film within a film, narrated with the voiceover of Vicky Krieps. Amy (Mia Wasikowska) and Joseph (Anders Danielsen Lie, the wonderful actor The worst person in the world) They are two ex-lovers who meet again at a wedding in Farö.

If the viewer is familiar with the filmography of Mia Hansen-Love, It won’t have taken long to connect this “closing chapter,” as Chris describes it, with A love of jeunesse, the third film by the Frenchwoman, in which she recounted how her teenage heartbreak led her to find her vocation (cinema) and a new love (the filmmaker Olivier Assayas, with whom she had a daughter and a sentimental relationship and who at some point, as the film says, made a ghost movie).

Worthy as is the short film, especially the sequence in which Mia Wasikowska dance to the sound of The Winner Takes It All, of ABBA, the truth is that the film grows as soon as it returns to the main plot. Chris wants to know Tony’s opinion about his film and he does not let go of the connection with reality, plunging us deeply into a maze in which life and cinema seem the same thing. This fluidity reaches its highest level when Hansen-Love he finds that elusive third act of the film in which, ellipsis by means of, he finally invokes Bergman.

Juan Diego Botto’s debut feature

in the margins, on Prime Video

It’s everything you expect from the debut of Juan Diego Botto: that is to say, social cinema made by someone very committed. And it is also a solid and well-directed first film that delves into the dramas of evictions.

Botto tells this urban tragedy based on three stories and three characters: Rafa (Luis Tosar) he is a lawyer so committed to the problems of others that he has forgotten the needs of his own family; lily (Penelope Cruz) is a woman about to be evicted from the house she shares with Manuel (Juan Diego Botto); and Theodora (Bald Oleander) she is a single mother who has lost her home, and worse, her son.

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