Palabras cruzadas
2015 · 11m · España
Directed by Xavier Miralles
Marta is sitting on a bench spending a quiet time doing a crossword; the tranquility breaks when a solution gets stuck and the pen stops working, and in the middle of her particular chaos appears Jose, a boy willing to help her.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
A meet-cute disguised as a crossword puzzle—it's almost too earnest, too tender for its own good, which is exactly why it shouldn't work but somehow does; the film knows it's playing with the most shopworn premise in romance and leans into it anyway.
Miralles locates this piece within a lineage of European romantic comedy that prizes restraint and formal clarity—the bench as stage, the puzzle as syntax—and executes with the kind of measured pacing that respects both the form and the audience's intelligence.
The entire film hinges on that one moment where José hands Marta the pen and she looks up: a single glance that reframes the whole thing from isolation to possibility, and Miralles trusts the actor and the camera stillness enough to let it breathe and *mean* something.