La sombra de la ley

A pretty decent retro period male gangster film from Spain with an excellent Luis Tosar - you don’t know whether he’s a good or bad guy until the very end. In terms of the direction and acting, the film is definitely good, but the pace is a bit too slow for my taste and the action is not much and it doesn't exactly dazzle either. I was looking forward to it, wishing I liked it more, but I can't give it more than three stars. Still, I don't regret watching it. 65%. (2018.11.27)

A brilliantly thought-out crime story set in Barcelona in the 1920s, where half the city is on strike, police investigators are behaving like gangsters and anarchist riots are raging in the streets. Regarding the main protagonist, a police officer from Madrid who comes to the city to help search for the perpetrators of a train robbery, it is unclear almost until the end whether he is a crooked rat or a cunning good guy who wants to outsmart everyone and bring them to justice. These two views of the officer alternate often, as a result of which the film is an emotional roller coaster in which each of the many characters have their own dramatic arc, numerous storylines intersect and react to each other, and the complex story undergoes complicated developments and a series of surprising twists. The investigation goes in unpredictable directions, and a feminist level, criticism of the state regime and police forces, as well as multiple motives for revenge, have also been added. From the point of view of filmmaking, this is clean work (including action shootouts and fights), perhaps with the exception of the film’s sporadic technical limits (a car chase in which both cars are going about 40 km/h), but even those are usually largely superseded by a great, and probably quite expensive retro film set. (2018.10.08)