‘El Cuervo’ review: unsuccessful but strange

Manager: Rupert Sanders

Artists: Bill Skarsgård, FKA Twigs, Danny Huston, Isabella Wei, Laura Birn, Sami Bouajila, Jordan Bolge

Gender: fantastic

Premiere: 08/30/24

Punctuation: * *

James O’Barr’s new version of the comic book series, filmed by Alex Proyas in the 90s, ‘The Raven’, comes with the sound of a disaster movie. American critics are not generous to it. Is it really a disaster? No. In fact, it is sometimes difficult to understand the enthusiasm behind the sympathy and antipathy towards certain movies. ‘The Crow’ is a film with obvious problems, but it also has some interesting things to say, especially in relation to the space it occupies in contemporary commercial cinema.. Fundamentally, it is free in many ways, whether voluntarily or not. Its aesthetics, its deep pessimism, its stale romanticism, its way of representing violence (unexpectedly ugly, crude and grotesque) and even some sources and visual solutions are completely out of time, not fashionable in films of the dimensions of ‘The Raven’. There is an act of resistance in it against the inertias and patterns of the present.

That’s why it feels bad that its structure is so inconsistent. His narrative is too simple to bear the weight of his achievements.The story of Eric / Crow (Bill Skarsgård) lacks the bare minimum of detail, especially in the way it describes the protagonist, and insists too much on obvious approaches. The story progresses in fits and starts, struggling to sustain the most interesting conceptual and visual ideas of the proposal.