Afternoons of Solitude.Ernest Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon (1932), his book of reportage on bullfighting, was received skeptically by some critics upon its publication. When reviewing it in The New York Times, R. L. Duffs contended that the work’s long-winded spiritualism was at odds with the writer’s habitually lapidary prose. Catalan director Albert Serra is also a self-described admirer of the sport; it repels some even while it mesmerizes others with its peculiar mixture of artful pageantry and shocking gore. His new nonfiction film Afternoons of Solitude (2024) eschews the Hemingway-esque temptation to dress up in philosophical garb a spectacle that, at its core, stems as much from crude, irrational impulses as it does from the desire to touch the sublime through a proximity to violence. In Afternoons, whose title professes its affinity for Hemingway’s rendering of tauromaquia, Serra follows the Peruvian bullfighter Andrés Roca Rey, observing...