Click here to copy URL

Official Competition

Competencia oficial

2021

Gastón Duprat, Mariano Cohn

Antonio Banderas, Penélope Cruz, Oscar Martínez, Irene Escolar ...

6.3

4,877

Comedy In search of significance and social prestige, a billionaire businessman decides to make a film to leave his mark. To do so, he hires the best: a stellar team formed by famous filmmaker Lola Cuevas and two renowned actors, both enormously talented, but with even bigger egos: the Hollywood actor Félix Rivero and radical theater thespian Iván Torres. Both legends, but not exactly the best of friends. Through a series of increasingly ... [+]

	Author	Review
United Kingdom	Jonathan Romney Screendaily	"Essentially a frothy bagatelle (...) nevertheless this lively, sleekly executed farce from the Argentinian makers of black comedy The Distinguished Citizen offers comic and visual pleasures alike"	POS
United States	Lovia Gyarkye The Hollywood Reporter	"Competencia Oficial won’t tickle everyone but for viewers willing to go with the flow, the film serves up roughly two hours of sharp reflections deliciously wrapped in entertaining antics."	POS
United States	Guy Lodge Variety	"[A] cheeky, funny, slightly overstretched showbiz comedy (...) The film will certainly mine dark laughs of recognition from industry folk"	POS
United States	Sophie Monks Kaufman The Playlist	"Controlled pacing, visual punchlines, and an insider knowledge of the varied pretensions within filmmaking make this a consistently amusing – if never downright hilarious – vehicle"	POS
United States	Nicholas Barber IndieWire	“Official Competition” is essentially a series of light sketches (...) Most of these sketches are amusing, some are ingenious, but they’re nearly all too gentle and predictable to have much of a satirical impact"	NEU
United States	Anna Smith Deadline	"It’s credit to the actors that these characters are still very engaging, for all their flaws (...) Cruz is tremendous"	POS
United States	Phil de Semlyen Time Out	"Penélope Cruz and Antonio Banderas are a blast (...) If awards season gets up your nose, this playful and wildly entertaining satire on the filmmaking process is the perfect antidote (…) Rating: ★★★★ (out of 5)"	POS
Canada	Shelagh Rowan-Legg Screen Anarchy	"'Competencia oficial' is quite a satire, one that finds its heart of darkness hidden in the absurd reality of high-art cinema"	POS
Canada	Mae Abdulbaki Screen Rant	"The film is able to peel back the layers of each character as they work in an intimate setting (...) A story that works on so many levels, unafraid to get personal and ridiculous, funny and dark (…) Rating: ★★★★ (out of 5)"	POS
United States	Anthony Lane The New Yorker	"[The] comedy eschews easy laughs for something more intricate (...) What sets the film apart is its specificity: instead of attending to the action on and around a movie set, [they] focus on the enjoyable madness of rehearsals"	POS
United States	Ben Croll The Wrap	"Running just under two hours, the incredibly slight film overstays its welcome"	NEU
United States	Hoai-Tran Bui SlashFilm	"With Cruz, Banderas, and Martinez's performances at the center, 'Competencia oficial' forms an absurd, darkly funny portrait of ego in the age of buzzword-centric arthouse filmmaking"	POS
United States	William Repass Slant	"Disarmingly funny, [it] offers its audience a reminder, entrancing and disconcerting, that sometimes our eagerness to be convinced of a story grows in inverse proportion to its verisimilitude (…) Rating: ★★★ (out of 4)"	POS
United States	Mark Keizer AV Club	"Consistently amusing, it's a tightly controlled, low-boil send-up of the acting process"	POS
Australia	Nadine Whitney The Curb	"What makes 'Official Competition' work so well is its core cast. Cruz appears to actively relish her role as the idiosyncratic Cuevas (...) it’s hard to imagine anyone more perfect for the role of a Spanish actor than Banderas"	POS
United Kingdom	Cath Clarke The Guardian	"A very funny film, sending-up human absurdities without being too mean. Cruz is a talented comedian, but she smartly plays it straight-ish here (...) Rating: ★★★★ (out of 5)"	POS
	Marta Bałaga Cineuropa	"[A] satire that’s as on point as it is hilarious (...) Martínez and Banderas are both mocking their own public personas – or their accents – and it’s a delight to watch"	POS

Return to movie

We encourage you to check the reviews' original sources. Intellectual property rights of these reviews belong to their authors and/or the correspondent media from which they have been extracted. If you'd like to help us to add more reviews to your favorite movies, just send us a message.