La Bola Negra Comes to Netflix on December 2, and It Might Be the Film That Beats Nolan

Photo: Benjamin Smith, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

La Bola Negra has had the kind of year most films never get. It premiered at Cannes in May, where Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi, the pair everybody calls Los Javis, shared the Best Director prize. It won the People's Choice Award at Toronto in September. Spain picked it as the country's Oscar submission. Netflix bought it after Cannes and is putting it on the service on December 2 after a short cinema run, with Canadian screens getting it first from late October.

It is a three-part epic about Spain's twentieth century, with Penelope Cruz anchoring the middle section, and the structure is the thing critics argue about. Metacritic has it at 82, the Guardian gave it four stars, and the Globe and Mail said the scale outruns the substance, which is a fair description of a film that is trying to do everything at once. I have not seen it yet and I am trying to avoid reading too much, because the one thing every review agrees on is that the final hour is the point.

Photo: Pedro J Pacheco, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

The awards chatter is where it gets interesting. Slate ran a piece asking whether it is really The Odyssey's rival for Best Picture and then talked itself out of the idea, but the prediction sites keep it in the top three. A Spanish-language Netflix film winning Best Picture would be a first, and it is not impossible.

Photo: John Sears, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Mostly I am glad it is getting a cinema window at all. If it opens near you, see it on a screen. If not, December 2 is close enough. Are you planning to watch, and do you buy it as a serious Oscar contender?