Rafa, the four-part Netflix series directed by Zach Heinzerling, chronicles Rafael Nadal’s difficult decision to retire from tennis at the end of the 2024 season, after an astounding 22 Grand Slam wins — and also several injuries and a painful foot condition that plagued him throughout his career.

The doc weaves together archival footage of Nadal’s intense training sessions with his coach, Uncle Toni; interviews with rivals Roger Federer, Novak Djokovic and more; and glimpses of his home life to show what has motivated the former No. 1 pro to compete for more than two decades, as well as the mental and physical toll it has taken.

“I enjoyed doing what I was doing,” Nadal tells THR. “Of course, I paid the price of suffering. But I always put everything on the balance, and that’s why I was always able to keep going. I said, ‘OK, I’m having pain every day, but on the other hand, I have been enjoying all these amazing and unforgettable moments of my life.”

“I was doing it for the people next to me, team, family, fans. It’s not [just] a way to talk. That’s true. That’s the way that I approached that,” he added. 

Nadal was not a producer on the doc, which was made by Skydance Sports, and also meant the tennis star had to give over some degree of control. Before this, Nadal had long been resistant to doing a documentary, because he was worried about showing a more personal side of his life and having cameras around his family and team. Skydance head David Ellison convinced him to do this project with the idea that this was, at the very least, the last stage of Nadal’s career. 

Going into the 2024 season, Heinzerling was not entirely sure of the narrative for the doc, as Nadal was returning to tennis after a hip surgery. “I was in that phase of trying to come back, but without the security that the [comeback] is going to go well,” Nadal says. Within days of filming, he reinjured his hip, but continued to press on, giving Heinzerling a new narrative.

“Rafa usually wins by outlasting his opponents. That’s what makes him so great. So, if he is so determined and the person who never quits, what’s actually going to make him quit? That became the new story, as opposed to the last comeback or Rafa’s last dance,” Heinzerling says.

Heinzerling adopted a fly-on-the-wall position throughout the tennis eason, largely staying silent as he captured Nadal’s practices and his daily routines. He returned for look-back interviews with Nadal and others after the tennis pro made the difficult decision to announce his retirement, a moment that Heinzerling also captures. 

While filming, Heinzerling also bore witness to many sensitive moments, including a car ride in which Nadal learns he has reinjured his hip and softly says, “I’m destroyed. I’m destroyed.”  

The process required a delicate “dance” between filmmaker and subject, in which Heinzerling tried to capture what was needed without being intrusive. 

“It’s moments like those that actually build a relationship, and you feel even more of an obligation to protect that vulnerability because you feel more connected to that person and you want to shepherd their image and legacy in as delicate a way as you can,” Heinzerling says.

To help build that picture, Heinzerling and team got on court with Nadal, with camera operators dodging tennis balls and sliding and capturing moments of Nadal with his young son and wife at home. On the other side of it, the doc also shows a particularly shocking image of the prominent bump on Nadal’s foot as a result of years playing with a degenerative bone disease and delves into the anxiety that he faced throughout his career. Most of the interviews are done in Spanish, to allow Nadal, team and family to better express themselves. 

Even now, it’s tough for Nadal to watch a film about himself.

“It’s very difficult to look at yourself and sit on the sofa and just enjoy the documentary,” he says. “You know, you are analyzing things all the time.” But he said that he’s relied on positive reviews from friends and family to get a sense of how others view it. 

It wasn’t easy to have Heinzerling document his tough journey through the season, and Nadal noted there were some moments he asked not to film so as not to skew the overall picture: “I missed plenty of Grand Slams because of injuries, but on the other hand, I was able to have very successful and long career. So I don’t want to only look like ‘OK, I am injured, injured, injured.’”

But ultimately, he says he trusted him to tell his story. 

“I always felt lucky, even though I went through a lot of injuries. I always felt I am a privileged guy for living the life that I was living,” says Nadal. “I was living from a work that I love a lot. So I never took it like work. Tennis for me was never a job.”

This story first appeared in an August stand-alone issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.

Letterboxd, the social media platform for movie fans, crashed Sunday morning, logging users out of their accounts.

As of 10:50 p.m. PT on Sunday, the issue had not been resolved. Letterboxd shared on its X account, “We’re still working to resolve the outage affecting our service. Thanks for bearing with us while we work to get things back up and running.”

The message, along with a photo of the 1980 movie Raging Bull, was also displayed on the website: “We’re taking a short break between rounds. Letterboxd is offline due to a server outage. We’ll be back soon!”

The platform, which launched in 2011 and has garnered more than 30 million users worldwide, is a personal watch diary for cinephiles, allowing them to rate and review films as well as connect with other movie lovers.

When users tried to access the platform early Sunday, they noticed they were logged out of their accounts. When trying to sign back in, users were met with the message, “The server returned an error. Please try again later.”

Many were quick to express their frustrations over the outage on social media. “Letterboxd is down just when i was about to write my review,” one X user wrote, while another person added, “rip to anyone who has been logged on letterboxd for years and doesn’t remember their username or password.”

Letterboxd first acknowledged the site issue just before 6:30 a.m. PT, writing on X, “Hang in there. Our team is aware of an outage affecting service and is working to restore access as soon as possible. Thanks for your patience and support.”

Alex (Ani Mesa-Perez, also the film’s co-writer), a young woman from New Jersey, tries to escape a claustrophobic home life by running away with a rowdy band of hard-partying in-line skaters in Erin Vassilopoulos’ freeform but engaging drama, Destroy All Girls. The film’s provocative title comes from a message a niche Californian skatewear company once wove into their clothing line’s care labels as a joke, a sample of which is seen here. But it hints at how a low-key misogyny can sometimes be palpable under the surface in the skater dudes’ bro-centric culture, even if at first the guys seem pretty chill.

Even so, the film’s gaze is more anthropological than polemical, especially given the faux-doc vibe created by its abundant handheld camerawork, seemingly filmed sometimes by the actors themselves. Premiering in Locarno’s Cinema of the Present strand should give this a good launch on the rolling concrete ups and downs of the festival skatepark circuit.

First met in happier times rolling around the streets of a Jersey town just across the river from Manhattan, working-class Alex is especially close to her big brother Gabriel (Gil Perez-Abraham, who also collaborated with Mesa-Perez on the script, as did Flo Baumann and Vassilopoulos). Gabriel was a talented skater with access to the latest in skate designs, but an abrupt flashforward finds him paralyzed after a car accident, the particulars of which are explained later.

Alex, pointedly called Alexa by her mother (Florencia Lozano), who hates Alex’s tomboyish style, works in a bodega and looks after her brother a lot. Constantly bickering with her mother and burdened by her brother’s care at home, Alex finds joy mostly when she’s out skating herself, or filming others at the local skatepark with her minicam.

One day down at the park she meets Cameron (Dominic Bruce), a lanky white guy with an odd accent (he’s Scottish but with all the glottal stops and gutterals sanded down) who is a real showboat on the jumps and ramps. Cameron is the de facto leader of a little non-violent gang-ette that call themselves Prospers. Together, they travel from skate park to skate park, getting high often on weed and beer, and hoping that they’ll get taken up by a sponsor so they can compete out in California professionally. It’s not exactly clear how they support themselves, let alone afford the gas to run the refurbished short bus they live in, but maybe they sell the footage shot by Cole (Malcolm Heard) or deal a bit of drugs on the side. Who knows, maybe they have trust funds.  

Alex certainly doesn’t ask too many questions and is just happy to keep hanging out with them in New York and points beyond, living in the bus. She starts shooting the B-roll for Cole’s ongoing doc, and learns a few tricks from Cameron with whom she soon starts a romantic liaison, although he’s upfront about having a child with another woman.

While the script may have four names attached to it, the dialogue often feels spontaneous and semi-improvised and Vassilopoulos does a good job at relaxing the young cast so that they sound like regular zoomers as they banter and bicker. The road movie atmosphere may conjure features set in a similar milieu, like Andrea Arnold’s American Honey perhaps, or early Harmony Korine or Larry Clark movies, but with less tension or violence.

Indeed, not much really happens apart from skating and partying, the latter reaching its high pitch when Alex and Cameron take mushrooms and check into a motel room for a night of hallucinations and sex. But the voice messages from her family that Alex occasionally listens to start to pull her back to her old life. Will she go home or stay with sweet but self-absorbed Cameron? Alex’s androgynous dress sense suggests that she might not be that into him, and possibly may be more taken with lithe skater punk Silvia (Silvia Kambouridis, luminous in just a few scenes).

The resolution when it comes is satisfying if slight. The way Vassilopoulos and her team have chosen not to define things like Alex’s gender identity feels very of the open-ended, label-resistant ways of the younger generations. Identity here is very much in motion, much like the young athletes themselves.