Trap, God Can Defend Himself, Little Panda in Africa: What's New in Cinema This Week

What to see in theaters

THE EVENT
TRAP ★☆☆☆☆

By M Night Shyamalan

The essential

A concert, 20,000 people in the hall and in the middle a serial killer hunted by the police. A brilliant concept that unfortunately doesn't live up to its promises.

Here is a B movie with an absolutely unstoppable concept: Cooper (Josh Hartnett), a seemingly decent family man, is in fact a serial killer known as “The Butcher.” While accompanying his daughter to a famous pop star's concert, he realizes that the police have set a trap for him and that officers posted at each exit will search anyone matching his description… An eminently sexy idea that Shyamalan unfortunately struggles to transform into a cinematic object. While we have known the Philadelphian to be more inspired in terms of directing, the problems here arise mainly from a poorly put together script, which pushes the suspension of disbelief to its limits. And the improbable third act, which buries the promise of a closed-door setting, only holds up – more or less – thanks to the impeccable performance of Josh Hartnett, finally allowed to let his character's contained madness burst forth.

Francois Léger

Read the full review

FIRST LIKED

GOD CAN DEFEND HIMSELF ★★★☆☆

By Isabelle Cotenceau

This documentary that rhymes two long periods, those of justice and cinema, by returning to the trial of the January 2015 attacks that took place in 2020. An event that Isabelle Cottenceau seizes upon with as its backbone: the reading of her plea by Richard Malka, Charlie's historic lawyer. The beauty and depth of this text rub shoulders with welcome refreshers of memory that recall that years before LFI Danielle Obono claimed that she had not mourned Charlie, Jacques Chirac, then President in 2006, or Jean-Marc Ayrault, Prime Minister in 2012, had each in their own way denounced the unnecessarily provocative nature in their eyes of the newspaper. God can defend himself turns out to be a poignant and essential manifesto for freedom and secularism.

Thierry Cheze

Read the full review

LITTLE PANDA IN AFRICA ★★★☆☆

By Richard Claus and Karsten Kiilerich

It's terrible, prejudices: by engaging in an animated film called Little Panda in Africawe expected an animated avatar of the soft power Chinese story where the legendary animals of the Middle Kingdom would go and save the world, starting with Africa. Wrong choice! It is in fact a very funny reinterpretation of the Lion Kingwhere a band of animals of all kinds (panda but also monkey), go to save a little feline prince from the misdeeds of his scarred uncle. It's pretty, funny, well animated, it highlights the collective before the demagogy of the individual (yes), it's full of little writing finds that maintain interest permanently… In short, this almost Hanseatic film (the production companies go from Estonia to Denmark via Germany) signed by the directors of Little Vampire 3D (2017) is to be classified among the nice discoveries of the year. And so much the better for the soft power.

Sylvestre Picard

TIGRESS ★★★☆☆

By Andrei Tanase

How do you get over the death of a baby? Vera, a veterinarian, tries to do so by taking under her wing a female tiger who has arrived at her zoo. Until the evening when, drunk with rage after discovering her husband in the middle of adultery, she forgets to close the cage of the beast who runs away in the middle of the night. Tigress will then stage the couple's expedition to find the feline before it causes fatal damage. A quest that will also become that of the final attempt to repair the bonds of a couple gradually falling apart. Remarkably written – notably a female character rich in nuances and contradictions -, this first feature film avoids all the traps inherent in the story it develops, from emotional blackmail to heavy symbolism. Because Andrei Tanasa knows how to breathe a permanent tension doubled with a real sense of the absurd that means that the film never goes where we expect it to and that his way of telling, in the background, his country marked by corruption, a central theme of Romanian cinema, manages to make a little original music heard. A name to remember, undeniably.

Thierry Cheze

ALMAMULA ★★★☆☆

By Juan Sebastian Torales

In the genre film palettes, that ofAlmamula is of a great darkness, not that of the Argentine forest with its quasi-sacred lighting where its action takes place, but that of the sexual rectitude imposed by the country's Catholic Church or the carnal sins of a 12-year-old boy. In this deeply homophobic rural region of Argentina, the local teenagers do not just humiliate Nino because he is probably homosexual, but because they fear the “Almamula”, a monstrous female figure who punishes those who, like him, dare to commit sexual acts deemed impure. Torales makes her the projection of a religious community and the unhealthy divinity of a boy driven by a desire for rebellion but eaten up by guilt. If he advances too cautiously in his exploration of Argentine folklore, Almamula is most effective when it tells, without fear of immorality, the story of the puberty of a teenager overwhelmed by his faith.

Lou Hupel

Find these films near you thanks to Première Go

And also

Borderlands, by Eli Roth

Wandering without return, by Mélanie Carrier and Olivier Higgins

My friend the little penguin, by David Schürmann

Super dad, by Léa Lando

Reprises

Paddington 2, by Paul King

Shoot the pianist, by François Truffaut