‘Matador Bolero’ Review: An Auteurist Vision That Oozes Style But Lacks… Everything Else
Lucky American Films
In a contemporary economic landscape where movies with eight digit productions budgets are often considered “independent cinema,” Matador Bolero stands out, thanks to its creator, Jonathan Rosado, who wrote, directed, shot, and edited the film himself in an act of ultimate creative freedom. While such ambitious endeavors should be celebrated, it is tough to find any pleasure in Rosado’s latest beyond its in-your-face stylistic choices.
Matador Bolero stars Jack Irv, Kansas Bowling, and boundary-pushing musician Yves Tumor in his debut acting role, and centers around a premise much more appealing on paper than in practice: An exclusive New York City nightclub, The Matador, is thrown into chaos when a world-famous actress is murdered one night within its walls, setting off a maelstrom of chaos. Disparate figures are drawn into the crime, including a relentless detective, a news reporter, and members of a niche cult that worships an ultramodern supercomputer called Bolero, whose teachings of purity aim to “reset the world.”
Sound strange? Well, it most certainly is, and Rosado lazes in the opportunity to pay homage to the style and genre references the film is heavily indebted to. These aesthetic explorations initially feel compelling, but as Matador Bolero moves through its ninety-minute-plus runtime at a painfully glacial pace that offers no satisfying sense of tension-building or character development, this critic fast became frustrated even by the ambitious swings the movie makes with its atmosphere and tone. While it may seem gauche to keep harping on directorial decisions about film length in contemporary cinema, Matador Bolero often feels more like a music video that drags on and on with no real intention to evolve in riveting ways.
Lucky American Films
The movie’s grainy Super 8-shot visual language often feels like a wild cross-pollination of Taxi Driver and The Holy Mountain, saturated in deep crimsons and greens that support its increasingly hallucinogenic atmosphere. Scored by The Suede Hello, Rosado’s band, Matador Bolero makes another 1970s reference through its music choices, which channel the experimentation of early electronic, in this case with tracks that sound interestingly comparable to Goblin’s iconic Suspiria soundtrack, especially through its apparent use of a celesta.
Matador Bolero could be likened to an obscure art movie you would watch in a college dorm room after smoking too much weed with your roommates, oscillating between fever dream and background noise. While the movie could find a devoted audience on underground circuits in bigger cities, its paper-thin narrative and hollow dialogue felt far too insurmountable for my tastes, particularly given its punishing runtime.
2/5
2026 | U.S. | 97 minutes | Color
‘Matador Bolero’ opens in New York on May 22 and Los Angeles on June 12, with a national expansion to follow, courtesy of Lucky American Films & Uncensored New York.