Wasp Network
This is very suspenseful, it’s only about half way through, in that silly flashback, that the politics of the thing reveal themselves. You can watch the first half and see only the hardcore Floridian Cuban POV, even inside Cuba.
An apparently sympathetic portrayal of Cubans in a mainstream film with an actual budget, that’s just weird. Like Anora, with significantly less balls, the Cuban embargo is in place for sixty years, nearly everyone involved is dead for decades, it’s not an hot war with HIMARS being shipped right now.
The only Cuban actors are the bad guys, not sure this is intended. Certainly the main terrorist leader that is always at arms length, the Bin Laden of Miami. Unlike the other one, he died of old age and slept in comfortable beds.
Ana de Armas is not a bad guy, just an extremely Americanised member of the Cuban community. If my partner would treat me like that scene before the wedding, I would walk immediately, fuck everything. But that would mean she remained poor, or had to get another violent husband like before. Now that I really think about it, her story is the most tragic, but the film drops her as soon the guy self-deports to Cuba.
The protagonist is the other guy and his family left in Cuba. To keep up appearances, the family even joins him on a spy mission abroad, that’s just crazy. After Penelope Cruz gets summoned to the ministry of state security and knows his husband did not defect, but is a spy, she still goes to Miami, but grills him for keeping her in the dark anyway.
Ironically, the leader of the spy network also left a girlfriend in Cuba, but this doesn’t deserve more than a passing mention.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.