Review: ‘La Bola Negra’ is a lot of movie

La Bola Negra is a lot of movie. Written and directed by creative duo Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi (a former romantic couple dubbed “Los Javis”), La Bola Negra weaves together multiple timelines, including explosive wartime melodrama, big choreographed dance sequences, and magical realism. It’s a partial adaptation of an unfinished work by Federico García Lorca, a probing of Spain’s historical fascism, and a crushing examination of decades of queer pain and hidden desire. There’s even a Chumbawamba needle-drop to top it all off. 

Meticulously directed, La Bola Negra maximalizes the sensory experience. The opening sequence alone is breathtaking, as cinematographer Gris Jordana creates immaculately composed images of the quirky people who live in a rural Spanish village in 1937, before the Spanish Civil War blows it all to bits. This is when we meet Sebastián (singer/songwriter Guitarricadelafuente), a trumpeter who, after losing his home, has the choice of joining up with the Nazi-aligned fascist forces led by General Francisco Franco or getting killed on the side of the road. 

A few years earlier, in 1932, right before the war broke out, Carlos (Milo Quifes) is denied entry into an exclusive private men’s club due to rumors of his homosexuality and the “undesirable” friendships he maintains with left-wing artists and radicals. The frame that holds this all together and eventually connects everything is in 2017, when we first meet Alberto (Carlos González) to the ding of a Grindr notification. Complicating La Bola Negra further, Alberto is a loose version of La Bola Negra’s other screenwriter, Alberto Conejero, and partially adapts his play La piedra oscura into the 1937 portion of the movie. I told you there was a lot going on here. 

Alberto is a failed playwright turned academic doing research in Athens when he learns his estranged grandfather, whom he’s never met and his mother (Almodóvar regular Lola Dueñas) won’t talk about, has left him an inheritance that he must go to Cantabria in Northern Spain to collect. While his mother forbids him from going, Alberto’s curiosity and general malaise with his current life lead him on the road to discover not just his family’s secrets, but to reckon with Spain’s past, both as a citizen and as a gay man. 

As an experience, La Bola Negra is both riveting and exhausting (especially at three hours long). The way each piece is threaded shows the incredible talent of the directors, and there are a number of sequences that are among the most exciting of the year, such as a scene where Carlos shrugs off his sexual confusion and stress in an amazingly shot flamenco dance scene. Likewise, a scene-stealing Penélope Cruz as a cabaret singer the fascist troops visit during a night off is electrifying. But then you pay for it with Glenn Close as a García Lorca scholar and some of the worst-spoken Spanish I’ve ever heard in a movie, or another scene of Alberto and his mom pointlessly bickering. 

Admittedly, it’s been hard for me to form a firm opinion on La Bola Negra when there’s so much to it, and somehow the film can feel vital as a whole while many of its individual pieces don’t stand up to close scrutiny. Likewise, there’s power in creating a big tragic wartime romance between two gay men that feels like a powerhouse Oscar-bait movie from 25 years ago that never would have been made then, but also feels overly manipulative in 2026 (though it’s not Crash bad by any means, thankfully). 

La Bola Negra is certainly one of the year’s most ambitious and unique projects, even if it rings a bit hollow. This will be many people’s favorite movie of 2026, and I wouldn’t blame them. Los Javis are proving to be masterful directors in the making, capable of commanding the screen in a maximalist way few others are in the modern streaming-focused era. While I’m still trying to unpack my thoughts and feelings about this one, I’ll be lined up for whatever they do next.