La Bola Negra(2026)

This review may contain spoilers.

Beautiful, heartbreaking, and erotic, this is truly a queer epic that we rarely get to see on screen. 

First of all, I must emphasize how hot this movie was especially in the first half. You really get to see bodies and dicks of all shapes and sizes and all in extremely homoerotic light. The eroticism eventually gave way to platonic longing and the general weight of history, but it left a mark on me for sure and it’s going to be how I remember this movie primarily. 

I’m trying to ask myself why seeing harrowing love stories somehow soothes me. I was in a discussion recently about whether romance is a solvable problem. Why is it that in the bay area, with every avenue available to us, it’s still hard for queer men to find love? Sometimes it’s easy to get bogged down in guilt, rejection, and loneliness and attribute it to the death of romance. Then I realized that perhaps it’s not about that at all, but because life outside the world of romance is already hard enough that you wish love was easy. Seeing Sebastian and Rafael find their way to each other in the most hopeless of places helped me remember that a lot of that stuff doesn’t truly matter. When we feel connected to each other, few things do, as long as we have each other. That’s why it’s soothing. 

So with all that said, criminal that those two didn’t get to have sex in such a horny movie. It could have been easily justified like “they may make me kill you later so let me at least suck your dick beforehand” kind of situation. Not even a kiss was unnecessary cruelty that I don’t endorse.