Mr Aznavour, Transfomers: the beginning, The Killer: what's new at the cinema this week

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What to see in theaters

THE EVENT
MR AZNAVOUR ★☆☆☆☆

By Mehdi Idir and Grand Corps Malade

The essentials

Grand Corps Malade and Mehdi Idir sign an unblemished film to the glory of the singer of Bohemia and wallow in all the clichés of an exercise worn to the bone.

The “Monsieur” placed in front of the famous surname indicates deference to the singer of Bohemia. We enter this biopic with the never-denied certainty of an illustrated panegyric, a chromo validated by a descendant keen to perpetrate the aura of Aznavour among younger generations. There is no doubt that rights holders and record labels are rubbing their hands and are already preparing the compilations. When it comes to cinema, however, it's a completely different story. Grand Corps Malade and Mehdi Idir's camera moves through the gold of a setting where no trinket protrudes without asking questions about the character in the middle of the frame. Tahar Rahim, good prince, plays the game and emerges miraculously unscathed from this circus. But this Aznavour without an ounce of psychological asperity appears very dull.

Thomas Baura

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FIRST TO LIKE

TRANSFORMERS: THE BEGINNING ★★★☆☆

By Josh Cooley

Like any frankness wishing to prolong the auscultation of one's navel, Transformers returns to the origins with a film which attempts to restore some order to a complicated mythology, where alien robots are transformed into vehicles from our own country. And to achieve this, Josh Cooley goes through… the exploration of the daily life of blue-collar workers assigned to the mines. The XXL fights are still there, perhaps even more gigantic thanks to the absence of human scale, but a good part of the story focuses on the class struggle and the tyrants who very consciously block the social elevator. And the film's strong point is that it manages to juggle between the seriousness imposed by its plot and the cartoonish comedy that only animation can allow.

François Léger

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ANGELO IN THE MYSTERIOUS FOREST ★★★☆☆

By Vincent Paronnaud and Alexis Ducord

In a duo with Alexis Ducord, Vincent Paronnnaud brings the comic strip to the screen In the dark and mysterious forest which he had signed under the pseudonym Winshluss. The adventures of a little 10-year-old eyewit who dreams of being a muscular Rambo-style explorer who, forgotten by his parents on a remote highway rest area, sets out to join his grandmother by passing through a forest that he experiences as a kingdom magical, slightly zany, populated by endearing creatures: a flying squirrel, an army of ants, an ogre real estate agent, a TV presenter frog, whooping mushrooms… A funny initiatory journey, whose creativity will charm young and old alike.

Lucie Chiquer

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CARLA AND ME ★★★☆☆

By Nathan Silver

Ben, a synagogue singer, lost his faith and…. his voice after the death of his wife, incapable of loving again or of singing again in the heart of an environment that we will quickly discover very far from the traditional and strict Jewish family. And in this irresistible chaos of melancholic fun that his life has become, an element emerges which will add a very tangy zest of eccentricity: his music teacher from his college years whom he meets again by chance and who asks him to help him to have his bat mitzvah. The depressive comedy shot on 16 mm film and doped with Jewish humor handled with mastery then takes on, over the course of the unexpected rapprochement between these two solitudes, the air ofHarold and Maud. And Wes Anderson's faithful accomplice, Jason Schwartzman and the iconic heroine of Terror on the lineCarole Kane, find two of the most beautiful roles of their careers.

Thierry Cheze

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CHINESE CHRONICLES ★★★☆☆

By Lou Ye

Experienced filmmaker, appreciated among other things for Suzhou River Or Nights of spring drunkennessLou Ye signs a particularly captivating new opus. It all begins with the preparation of a film shoot which resumes a project interrupted ten years earlier by a filmmaker. But the story takes a turn when the Covid-19 pandemic arises and the team finds itself confined at the beginning of 2020 in a hotel near Wuhan and undergoes violent health measures which disrupt the filming. By transforming an artistic adventure into an anxiety thriller, Lou Ye recreates a situation that he really experienced and offers an immersive staging where video calls and digital interfaces take possession of the image. By blurring the boundaries between reality and fiction, the filmmaker angrily asserts that cinema will always know how to create free and inventive material in response to prohibitions and censorship.

Damien Leblanc

FARIO ★★★☆☆

By Lucie Prost

A young man who has lost the desire to make love and to live must leave Berlin to return to his native village of Doubs and sell the last lands of his farmer father, who committed suicide years earlier. There, nothing is the same as before. His group of friends has changed, his family has given up selling their land and their polluting activity is denounced by the local farmers. Undecided, he lets himself live. Until the day he sees farios — a breed of mutant trout, swimming in the river. Pollution, no doubt. With this tale of fresh water, Lucie Prost composes a delicate reflection on the destructive relationship that men have with nature and the living things around them. So many burning current questions that the young director brings to life with a lot of mystery and a little magic.

Emma Poesy

THE DEPOSITION ★★★☆☆

By Claudia Marshal

Thirty years after having suffered sexual abuse committed by the priest of his village, Emmanuel went to the gendarmerie and made a statement. It duplicates the act of a documentary, like a means found to confront the world with what happened in their childhood: their own memories with the inaccuracies they may contain, their family, the criminal proceedings… Each of the exchanges between Emmanuel and his father, at first glance convinced of the innocence of the man of the Church, reveals itself as particularly poignant in this respect. If the form of the film does not always convince, the essential thing here lies elsewhere: in the need for this man to brandish the camera like a weapon capable of recording irrefutable evidence. And in its best moments, the film turns into a sort of investigation into his own life, the way in which he managed to continue living despite the unimaginable.

Nicholas Moreno

REMEMBER THE FUTURE ★★★☆☆

By Romain Goupil

The exhibition Hand to hand, compared the collection of photographs of Marin Karmitz and that of the Center Pompidou. Here Romain Goupil films the founder of the MK2 company in the alleys of Beaubourg or at his home. Karmitz shares his love for the works accumulated over twenty years and which outline his own story. A story, haunted by the Shoah and therefore the disappearance. Whether it is the faces in Vishniac's Eastern European Shtetls or Boltanski's collages, the same story crosses space and time. Moving.

Thomas Baura

SITABAOMBA- AMONG THE FRANCOPHONE ZEBUS ★★★☆☆

By Nantenaina Lova

Ly, a farmer from Antananarivo, lives in a rural enclave of the capital of Madagascar. His hamlet is the last bastion of the Malagasy peasantry, where rice cultivation is the livelihood of the land workers. There, too, where poverty is the breeding ground for corruption and hectares are negotiated. In 2016, when Madagascar hosted the Francophonie Summit, the red carpet was rolled out just a stone's throw from the plots of land, now coveted and controlled by a president, generals and foreign investors. In her documentary, Lova Nantenaina has the skill of introducing these speculators through a puppet theater, which the inhabitants in turn manipulate to teach us History, their story, told in the manner of an oratorical tale, teasing and offbeat in Claudia Tagbo's voice. The Malagasy director films spades as weapons and brings justice to a suffering, dispossessed land.

Lou Hupel

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FIRST TO MODERATELY LIKED

3 KILOMETERS TO THE END OF THE WORLD ★★☆☆☆

By Emanuel Parvu

In Tulcea on the banks of the Danube delta, the population is harnessed to the weight of traditions. Everyone places their morality where they want it. Therefore, what can a young 17-year-old boy with a future in the navy do if he is, to use a police euphemism, “ in the other camp » (understand, homosexual)? In Romania, homosexuality was decriminalized twenty years ago and more is needed for the law to conform to morals. As a result, the teenager's face will very quickly look like that of a boxer. Emanuel Parvu spares his little effect with a staging of studied precision, then unfolds his vitriolic portrait of a retrograde Romania. Meanwhile, Adi says nothing, muzzled by severely narrow-minded parents. We believe for a time that the film will descend into farce. Parvu prefers to create suspense over the possible emancipation of his young hero. One last look at his swollen face, a reflection of the shame of an entire country, and the hero can step out of the frame. Yeah.

Thomas Baura

CHALLENGE ★★☆☆☆

By Varante Soudjian

Arriving in France around 1960 and dying in 2022, the Malian Bouba Touré signs, for what will remain his final feature film (in a duo with Raphaël Grisey), an ambitious documentary around the struggle of African workers who came to France. The damage of colonialism, the development of agriculture in Senegal and ecological issues are on the program of this kaleidoscope mixing places and times, which is a little complicated to follow and which would have benefited, given the quantity of subjects and the years covered, from being treated in series. Varante Soudjian brings together the duo Audrey Pirault and Alban Ivanov again after The Crossing. This time, Ivanov puts on the boxing gloves as Luka, a failed sportsman managed by an old friend, who finds himself, through an incredible combination of circumstances, having to face the reigning European champion. Even if Challenger is more of a boxing film tinged with gags rather than a parody, it enjoys caricaturing the world of star fighters on social networks. By bringing together an astonishing cast bringing together Pef and Soso Maness, among others, it connects the sometimes sluggish situations and exhibits the expected tricks of a competition story. Result: a comedy passionate about Rocky (winking at him very emphatically) effective but which, despite a few good moments, does not surprise.

Bastien Assie

FIRST DID NOT LIKE

THE KILLER ★☆☆☆☆

By John Woo

John Woo himself remakes his most beautiful film, 35 years later and in Paris. You might as well tear off the plaster all at once, the result is disastrous: The Killer 2024 feels like a Europa Corp film from the 2000s (fun fact #1: Omar Sy plays a cop named Sey), where Woo's style only appears in fleeting, frustrating appearances. The worst being the absence of any emotion, where the Killer from 1989 was a heartbreaking melodrama, a tragedy written on 9mm ending in darkness and death. It's Not About Territory: Woo's last indisputable great film, Windtalkerstook the side of the Navajos in the Pacific War. It is therefore, quite simply, a question of the times: that of the great genius of Woo has completely passed, for those who doubted it (and we defended Silent Night right here). Fun fact n°2: no less than three “First Assistant Directors” are credited in the credits…

Sylvestre Picard

And also

Coconut head generation, by Alain Kassanda