Parents' Guide to Go Team!

A brilliant ensemble guts corporate culture in this dark comedy from Spain. Go Team! is funny enough that you notice too late what you have been laughing at, and director Diego Núñez Irigoyen keeps the darkness and the comedy in the same frame without either one softening. The satire is familiar without feeling obvious, partly because Spanish cinema rarely stages the cruelty of modern corporate life this directly, and partly because an Argentine filmmaker working in Spain brings a slightly different angle to it. Nobody escapes. Even the anti-woke guy gets an interior life, and rather than splitting the difference between positions, the film shows where xenophobia comes from and how ugly it is anyway. This is the kind of mid-budget, full-blooded genre comedy Hollywood has stopped making.

The ensemble is the best thing about it. Characters who look like caricatures at first are given enough nuance to see that nearly every one of them could carry a film of their own. Maribel Verdú is having the time of her life as Pepa, delivering her lines like a corporate dominatrix, remorseless, letting a small grin of pleasure escape whenever she does something deranged. Motherhood gets a sharp treatment, which includes a running joke about a mothers' group Olga has always found frightening and strange, who function like the witches from Macbeth reorganized into a parenting tribe. Spanish audiences will enjoy the special cameos, but international audience members will also enjoy that everyone in the film gets a moment to shine.