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While it is technically accurate to say that \u201cThe Black Ball<\/a> (La Bola Negra)\u201d is the first feature film<\/a> from Spain\u2019s beloved creative duo, Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi (collective moniker Los Javis<\/a>), it feels truer to say that they have made four films and magically contained them within the form of one. It is nearly impossible to grasp the structural effort required to fluidly create one perfectly coherent story using three narratives told across three timelines, each with a distinct visual identity.\u00a0 <\/p>\n \u201cThe Black Ball\u201d comprises a neorealist tale of a closeted young man seeking membership<\/a> at a casino in 1932, a tragic wartime romance set in 1937, and\u00a0a lo-fi drama about a historian prompted to investigate all of this in 2017. The fourth element, which serves as the connective tissue for everything, is a timeless poetic expression of love for all the queer storytellers who died before they could truly live<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n An unfinished play, \u201cLa Bola Negra\u201d by the Spanish poet Federico Garc\u00eda Lorca, is the basis of the themes explored across all timelines. Lorca was murdered in 1936 by right-wing militias amid the rising nationalism that led to the Spanish Civil War of 1936-9. In an act of fantastical baton-passing, Los Javis collaborate with Lorca\u2019s spirit to finalize this play, infusing it with details, moods and lyricism from his life and work. Choice lines from his poem \u201cLove Sleeps in the Poet\u2019s Breast\u201d serve as a time-collapsing flash of lightning, reanimating lost souls so that they are briefly, vividly here.\u00a0<\/p>\n In this reimagined \u201cThe Black Ball,\u201d it is 1932 and 20-year-old Carlos (Milo Quifes) is under pressure from his father to be accepted as a member at their local casino. The meaning of La Bola Negra\/The Black Ball is immediately explicated as roomful of stern homophobic elders vote on his admission with a white ball, meaning \u201cyes\u201d or a black ball meaning \u201cno.\u201d Perhaps you can guess how this vote goes.\u00a0<\/p>\n Los Javis, aided by sound editors Alejandro Lopez and Anna Harington, use sound design as part of their seamless editing toolkit. The clack, clack, clack of black balls landing plays over the image of an open-topped medical vehicle carrying bodies in 1937. The basis of this second story is \u201cLa Piedra Obscura\u201d by Alberto Conejero (2023), a play that re-imagines history to give a different ending to Lorca\u2019s lover, Rafael Rodr\u00edguez Rap\u00fan, a former Atletico Madrid player who fought and died as a Republican during the 1937 Battle of Santander \u2014 the capital of Calabria (this will be important). Conejero has a screenwriting credit with Los Javis in this queered version of his play.\u00a0<\/p>\n The 1937 section contains a tortured impossible love story for the ages, while also being the horniest depiction of military life since Claire Denis\u2019 \u201cBeau Travail.\u201d\u00a0In his first film role, the long-lashed Spanish pop star Guitarricadelafuente plays Sebasti\u00e1n, a young trumpeter whose family is wiped out when Italians bomb his village. Offered the choice between death and Nationalism, he accepts the rifle foisted upon him. When a wounded Rafael (Miguel Bernardeau) is taken as an enemy prisoner in the military hospital, Sebasti\u00e1n\u2019s job is to guard him.\u00a0<\/p>\n Courageous, principled, tragic, and mind-blowingly hot, Rafael is the platonic ideal of a romantic hero meaning Sebasti\u00e1n, already out of his depth, now also has to deal with an intoxicating crush. His eyes nearly pop out of his head when a nurse tells him to towel off a naked Rafael. The overlapping imagery of sex and violence is never more felt than when Rafael gets so angry that his wound starts bleeding through his bandage.\u00a0<\/p>\n The real Rafael was described as having a profile like a Greek statue, and Sebasti\u00e1n\u2019s meeting with this flesh-and-blood sculpture is foreshadowed in an extraordinary image from shortly after he loses his family in the bombing. Disoriented and terrified, he runs around until somehow he finds himself crawling up a mound of rubble topped by a fallen statue of Grecian marble. Los Javis express heightened emotions related to love, loss, fear, and regret in compositions that make us pause with the character. Later, in a moment of high anxiety when Rafael is catching a beating, Sebasti\u00e1n will run to the bathroom to play his trumpet (not just a euphemism). Cued by Lorca, Los Javis take poetic license to create magical peaks within a landscape of political realism.\u00a0<\/p>\n Alberto (Carlos Gonz\u00e1lez), the Madrid-based protagonist of the 2017 storyline operates in a more recognizable and grounded sphere. A historian with a particular interest in queer music from 1920s Constantinople, his days are a low-stakes matter of research, casual Grindr user, hanging with his partner Javier (Julio Torres) and handling his explosive mother (Lola Due\u00f1as). The catalyst connecting him to Sebasti\u00e1n, Rafael, Carlos et al. is the news that a grandfather he never met just died and left something especially for him, if only he will travel to Calabria to collect it. Initially impatient with the whole proposition, Alberto \u2014 mirroring the trajectory of Los Javis in making this film \u2014 is drawn into a fascinated communion with the history that brought him here.<\/p>\n Each of these three stories is exquisitely crafted on its own individual terms and the triptych becomes dazzling once the subtly seeded internal rhymes begin to set into a cohering fourth underlayer. The screenplay is either perfect or pretty damn close with a refined structure ensuring that every episode on one timeline enhances its neighbors on the others, on both a narrative and thematic level.\u00a0<\/p>\n Crystalline dialogue sparkles whether it is spoken by a poet, a fascist or Pen\u00e9lope Cruz channeling Drag Queen energy to entertain the Nationalist troops as a Vera Lynn type singer. As the platinum blonde wig-wearing Nene, who comes rolling into a room of roaring soldiers draped sexily on a tank, her sympathies are secretly elsewhere. Sensing something different about Sebasti\u00e1n the moment she sees him amongst her audience, Nene confides in him with lines like, \u201cTransvestism is the fantasy of possibility. War is its opposite.\u201d<\/p>\n Wherever possible, without interrupting the movements of the character and narrative arcs, Los Javis enhance the mood with nods to queer joy and the freedom of expressing the only lifeforce that is truly yours. Music, dance, poetry, and even looking point-blank at the one you desire afford the repressed characters moments of release. The tormented Carlos is briefly himself while dancing flamenco. Sebasti\u00e1n and Rafael transcend their doomed romance through lines of poetry. Who could do otherwise when those lines are, you will never know how much i love you for you sleep within me<\/p>\n Los Javis build out this culturally reverant perspective to honor their partnership with Pedro Almod\u00f3var (whose fellow competition title \u201cBitter Christmas\u201d<\/a> includes a very funny cameo from them) with a fabulous little gag. Meanwhile, Glenn Close shows up in 2017 to play American academic Isabelle Durand, who has dedicated her life to Lorca research and is publishing a volume named \u201cFederica el Poeto Gay.\u201d The gratification of experiencing all the narrative threads coming together is only eclipsed by an awe at the underlying emotional continuity. <\/p>\n All these moving parts are positioned to play like one unbroken piece of music. By the final crescendo, time feels like an illusion and the stories of our dead belong to today.<\/p>\n Grade: A<\/p>\n \u201cThe Black Ball\u201d premiered at the 2026\u00a0Cannes<\/a>\u00a0Film Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.<\/p>\n Want to stay up to date on IndieWire\u2019s film\u00a0reviews<\/a>\u00a0and critical thoughts?\u00a0Subscribe here<\/a>\u00a0to our newsletter In Review by David Ehrlich, in which our Chief Film Critic and Head Reviews Editor rounds up the best new reviews and streaming picks along with some exclusive musings \u2014\u00a0all only available to subscribers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"While it is technically accurate to say that \u201cThe Black Ball (La Bola Negra)\u201d is the first feature…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":596920,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[160823,96,10923,2332,203971,2839,129,203972,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-596919","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-cannes","tag-entertainment","tag-festivals","tag-film","tag-los-javis","tag-movies","tag-reviews","tag-the-black-ball","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/596919","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=596919"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/596919\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/596920"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=596919"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=596919"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=596919"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"La](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/La-Gravida-Courtesy-of-Cannes-Critics-Week.webp\")
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