Eusebio Poncela Movies

A hyperstylized tribute to spaghetti westerns courtesy of fearless Spanish director Alex de la Iglesia, 800 Bullets finds young Carlos (Luis Castro) striking out on his own in search of his long-lost father. Swiping his shrewish businesswoman mother's (Carmen Maura) credit card and setting his sights on Almeria, Carlos begins his quest to learn the truth about his father after his curiosity is sparked while thumbing through old photographs. Carlos comes into contact with his alcoholic grandfather Julian (Sancho Gracia) shortly after arriving in Almeria, where the one-time Clint Eastwood stunt double is still chasing his dreams of stardom. Rumored to have caused Carlos' father's death years earlier when a dangerous stunt went horribly awry, Julian now spends his days staging elaborate Western shows for tourists on the abandoned film sets. As the young boy quickly wins the affections of the rough and tumble stunt crew, the arrival of his mother begins to threaten his newfound happiness when she reveals plans of turning the location into an amusement park. As the hapless crew faces the prospect of being displaced by the greed of modern society, they are forced to defend thier territory by replacing their blanks with 800 real bullets. ~ Jason Buchanan, Rovi

Someone in a black minstrel suit is killing all of the flunky students at a university in Salamanca, Spain, and it's up to a new student, Alex (Silke), to piece the puzzle together before the next post-exam death. ~ Jeremy Wheeler, Rovi

An angry man erupts into lethal violence and must face the consequences of his actions in this horror story from Spain, which has won a cult following. Marcos (Vicente Parra) is a slaughterhouse worker whose tenuous emotional stability is pushed over the edge one day. With little provocation, he goes on a week-long bender of violence and murder, killing an annoying cab driver, his nosey fiancée, his inquisitive brother, his would-be father-in-law, and an unfortunate prostitute. The corpses begin to pile up in Marcos' apartment, and he has to find a way to dispose of them. Marcos happens to have a meat grinder, and he begins to wonder if eating his victims might be a good way to cover his tracks. Cannibal Man, also known as La Semana del Asesino and The Apartment on the 13th Floor, was one of a number of horror films banned in England in the 1980s as a "video nasty." ~ Mark Deming, Rovi

In this confusing crime story, a police inspector has two days to solve some ugly murders, and he travels all over Madrid to uncover the sinister deeds of a Latin American government prone to torture and political assassinations. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, Rovi

Aguirre (Omero Antonutti) leads 300 Spanish soldiers and 300 natives in his search for the legendary land of El Dorado in Peru during the year 1560. The expedition is attacked by hostile jungle tribes before mutiny breaks out among the soldiers. The unit is forced to kill and eat their horses to survive, but the leaders of the expedition are also targeted for assassination. ~ Dan Pavlides, Rovi

Omero Antonutti is divorced, and has a grown son who a young, upwardly-mobile professional person (yuppie) and an ex-wife who regularly sharpens her tongue on him. These developments have only served to sharpen the cynicism he naturally has as a private investigator, constantly exposed as he is to the shabbiest human behavior. However, when a beautiful and obviously wealthy woman asks him to track down her second boyfriend on behalf of herself and her first boyfriend, his interest is aroused. The absent boyfriend is a professional model from Greece who is also a painter. The woman believes he may have disappeared somewhere in Barcelona. His investigation exposes the P.I. to a world of sexual and other eccentricities which even he had never imagined existed anywhere, much less in his hometown. ~ Clarke Fountain, Rovi

In 1976, having completed two praiseworthy projects for Spanish filmmaker Carlos Saura, Geraldine Chaplin journeyed to Spain to appear in Enrique Braso's In Memoriam. Her contribution to the film is secondary to that of Jose Luis Gomez, who play Julio Montero, a man tormented by his past. In pre-war Madrid, Julio, a painfully shy writer, is competing for the love of Paulina (Chaplin), but cannot bring himself to speak. Instead, another witer, a flamboyant hothead, asks for and wins her love. Julio then leaves Madrid for Cambridge. It is not until he returns many year later that he learns to his horror that Paulina's lover murdered her in a fit of jealous rage, after she had come from seeing him off on his journey to Cambridge. The same year that he appeared in In Memoriam, Jose Luis Gomez won the Cannes Festival "best actor" award for his work in Pascal Duarte. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

In this Spanish film, Daniel (Tony Isbert) is a member of The Organization. It is never quite clear whether The Organization is part of the government, a secret society, or something else. Whatever it is, it is powerful, and does not take disobedience lightly. He is sent on an assignment to Bilbao to determine what has become of a lad his age, a former member. He takes over the boy's room in an odd rooming house. When he is given the photo of the boy's girlfriend (Geraldine Chaplin), he is so taken with it that he puts off his quest. The Organization requires him to continue, however, so he tracks her down to a remote fishing village. The two fall in love and attempt to escape. ~ Clarke Fountain, Rovi

In this blend of a family drama and a noir-styled crime thriller, Esteban (Eusebio Poncela) is a politician who shares a home with his cousin Daniel (Jorge de Juna); also living with the two men are Dona Esther (Isabel de Castro), Esteban's mother, and Patricia (Laia Marull), Daniel's wife. Dona Esther is the owner of the family business, a steel mill that becomes the source of drama when a shipment of drugs is stashed in the of the mill's delivery trucks. A gang of low-level crooks captures the truck as the dope is being delivered to Abdul (Juan Erasmo Mochi), a large-scale dealer. Abdul's son is killed in the crossfire, and Abdul swears revenge. Meanwhile, the mill is having money problems, and Santana (Alberto San Juan) is brought in to help put the business back on its feet. But Daniel has developed a drinking problem, and in his alcoholic haze he becomes convinced that Santana is having an affair with Patricia, who has a past as a drug dealer that she's trying to keep secret. ~ Mark Deming, Rovi

Once-great Spanish matador Nacho Martinez has been reduced to starring in gruesome "snuff" films. Martinez is idolized by Antonio Banderas, who has no notion of his idol's current illegal profession. Terrified at the thought of drawing blood in the bullring, Banderas nevertheless seeks out Martinez' assistance in preparing for a bullfighting career. To prove his "machismo", Banderas rapes Martinez' lady-friend Eva Cobo. No one will believe Banderas' confession of the rape, so he decides to attach more importance to his crime by confessing to a recent rash of serial killings (actually perpetrated by Martinez and his cohorts). Bandera's case is taken by feminist attorney Assumpta Serna, who unwittingly--but not unwillingly--sets herself up as Martinez' next "conquest." ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

Four years after cresting the pinnacle of cinematic acclaim with his comic festival hit Smoking Room (2002), Spanish writer-director Roger Gual returns with a sophomore outing, Remake (2006). Though this film will inevitably earn critical comparisons to such prior efforts as The Big Chill and Peter's Friends for its ensemble-in-a-house setup, Gual - unlike the directors of those prior efforts- aims straight for dark, multilayered, probing drama on themes of intergenerational disillusionment. The story concerns a tightly-knit group of four 1960s leftist radicals (two men and two women) who formed a hippie commune circa 1968-9, in a Catalunya farmhouse, and proudly upheld a "nontraditional" parental approach that shunned discipline. Over the forty years that followed, these onetime "revolutionaries" paired off, got married, raised their kids and settled into affluent, upper-crust bourgeois lifestyles. They now gather for a reunion in the same farmhouse, accompanied by their grown children, and by the fifth member of their old clique, Max (Mario Paolucci). As the sole remaining resident of the farmhouse, the wholly countercultural Max now plans to sell the property. As the weekend unfurls, the parents begin to project old super-8 movies of themselves from forty years prior, and must simultaneously confront the loss of their 1960s idealism and the ill-adjusted natures of their children, who blame their parents' non-conformist ways for their innate unhappiness and inability to succeed in the everyday world. ~ Nathan Southern, Rovi

Two sisters separated for the duration of the Argentine dictatorship spanning from 1976 to 1983 reconnect to confront the tragedy of their past in director Julia Solomonoff's reflective drama. It was 1975 when Natalia Levin's (Ingrid Rubio) militant boyfriend Martin (Nicolás Pauls) disappeared from Buenos Aires without a trace. Natalia was also separated from her sister Elena (Valeria Bertuccelli) that same year, but the two are once again drawn together when -- after the dictatorship crumbles -- Natalia travels to Austin, TX, to visit her sister and inquire about an unpublished novel written by her late father. Discovering that the novel is a fact-based account of their family's struggle during the dictatorship, Natalia and her sister are forced to confront the painful memories of the past before they can begin the healing process that will free them of the lingering guilt that accompanies their survival. ~ Jason Buchanan, Rovi

The story of Spain's most infamous family is brought to the screen with surprising subtlety in this historical drama. Near the end of the 15th century, the Borgias are one of the most wealthy families in Europe, with their numbers divided between Spain and Italy, and when Rodrigo Borgia (Lluis Homar) is elected as Pope, his three sons -- Cesar (Sergio Peris-Mencheta), Juan (Sergio Muniz), and Jofre (Eloy Azorin) -- find themselves raised to positions of power as their father arranges politically advantageous marriages for them. Rodrigo's daughter Lucrecia (Maria Valverde) is also used as a bargaining chip when he persuades her to wed Giovanni Sforza, the favored son of a family often in opposition to the Borgias. While Rodrigo benefits from these alliances, his children do not -- Cesar's dreams of serving in the military are dashed when he is made to join his father in the church, Juan's time in the Army is full of unhappy consequences, Jofre's marriage to Sancha of Aragon (Linda Batista) is not fated to be a happy one, and murder stains the lives of most of the family. Originally shot as a mini-series for television, The Borgias (aka Los Borgia) was reedited for theatrical release in Spain, where it became a success at the box office. ~ Mark Deming, Rovi