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THE EVENT
THE ROOM NEXT SIDE ★★★☆☆
By Pedro Almodovar
The essentials
Both the first American film (with Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton) and a major final work, the new Pedro Almodovar subtly disrupts time.
At the heart of The Room Next Dooran outlaw pact: the one formed between Ingrid (Julianne Moore) and Martha (Tilda Swinton). Suffering from an incurable illness, she wants to end her life, and would like her friend to be in “the room next door” the night she takes the fatal pill. Until then, in the comfort of a home away from the world, the two women will have the opportunity to take stock of their lives. And Almodovar takes stock of his art, he who signed in 2019 with Pain and Glory his great ruminative film, but does not seem to want to slow down the pace. Between purity and claimed artificiality, the Spaniard reveals himself here as much haunted by the idea of the “testament” film as carried by the excitement of a first US feature film with international stars. He wanders through his work, through that of his masters, into his own aesthete's room, and films characters who are already dead, already in mourning, to better speak about this fascinating feeling: that of being a specter inside his own existence.
Frédéric Foubert
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PREMIERE LIKED A LOT
WILD FIRES ★★★★☆
By Jia Zhang-Ke
Jia Zhangke's cinema has the magical ability to constantly regenerate itself and certain sequences of Wild fires come directly from his earlier films (A Touch of Sin, The Eternals…) At the center of the frame China but also Zhao Tao, the muse who surveys space and time with sovereign gentleness. His character is searching for his loved one who disappeared without a word. She doesn't need to open her mouth too much to express her concern (what happened to him?), her presentiment (What if he was a coward?) and her courage (the immensity of the territory? and time does not scare her) Around her, the world is moving, the construction of a dam is about to lead to the displacement of millions of people, the buildings of big cities are growing too quickly… So stay there 'love which, we have it well understood, seems unattainable. So the journey continues. Zhao Tao does not feel sorry for himself. She walks towards other eternities.
Thomas Baura
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FIRST TO LIKE
CRIMINAL SQUAD: PANTERA ★★★☆☆
By Christian Gudegast
At a time when Hollywood is striving to smooth out its action productions, this sequel to Criminal Squad tumbles onto the screens to orchestrate a magnificent, very trashy and quite tight chaos! This sequel transposes the action from Los Angeles to Europe with the idea of transforming Gerard Butler, the gruff former cop with flexible ethics, into a fully committed criminal. The first opus unashamedly looked towards Heat. Pantera offers an explosive cocktail mixing chrome action and piston-style twists and turns Fast and Furious with the heist film in the style ofOcean's Eleven. And Butler, weighted with his neo-beef gangsta charisma, finds here his best role since… the first criminal squad. More massive, snarky and vulgar than ever, but also very charismatic, he thickens his fallen cop consumed by failure and bitterness, who here finds a form of redemption in his descent into hell. Finally, behind the camera, Gudegast orchestrates this circus with a pyrotechnic know-how that is never lacking, where even the wide shots seem to have done a little muscle building.
Peter Lunn
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NO ONE UNDERSTANDS ANYTHING ★★★☆☆
By Yannick Kergoat
This documentary takes on the so-called Libyan financing affair, starting with a sentence from one of the main accused – and presumed innocent to date – Nicolas Sarkozy: “ the French are hard-pressed to summarize what I am accused of. Nobody understands anything “. Chiche therefore answers Yannick Kergoat (The New Watchdogs). Based on the investigation carried out by Mediapart since 2011, Kergoat goes back in time by bringing together archive images, telephone exchanges between Sarkozy and Gaddafi and testimonies from people close to and knowledgeable about the matter. The director succeeds in his challenge of making this tangle completely clear with this slightly ironic tone which will inevitably enrage Nicolas Sarkozy's defenders. We also regret that they did not wish to give their version of the facts. While Fabrice Arfi of Mediapart (co-author of the survey) pushes himself on the contrary, a little too hard. But the astonishment we feel at the ramifications of what could be one of the biggest scandals of the Fifth Republic takes over. It's up to the courts to express themselves and decide, starting on Wednesday.
Thierry Cheze
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THE DAUGHTER OF A GREAT LOVE ★★★☆☆
By Agnès de Sacy
Screenwriter who has been in the heyday of French cinema for 25 years (she has written films by Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi, Zabou Breitman and Pascal Bonitzer), Agnès de Sacy directs here her first feature film, telling the unique story of her own parents , who divorced in the 1970s before remarrying twenty years later after watching a student film of their daughter. Rather than signing a classic “comedy of remarriage”, the filmmaker crafts a bittersweet drama where the two parental figures, played by the formidable Isabelle Carré and François Damiens, appear as beings assailed by anxieties, doubts and secrets. If the dramaturgy sometimes passes very quickly over certain details by chaining back and forth between Paris and the Pyrenees, the sunny look that the director takes on the difficulty of finding inner peace touches the heart.
Damien Leblanc
WINTER IN SOKCHO ★★★☆☆
By Koya Kamura
A film on a thread, in a permanent in-between but without ever stuttering. For his first feature, Koya Kamura succeeds in a delicate adaptation of the novel by Elisa Shua Dusapin. Or how the arrival of French comic book author Yan in a city in South Korea will have a profound impact on the daily routine of a 23-year-old Korean woman, an employee of the hotel where he is staying. Because his presence awakens in her a wound that has never healed: her abandonment by her French father, about whom her mother is stingy with confidences. Winter in Sokcho therefore tells an impossible quest, that of finding in Yan's behavior, silent and mysterious, avenues of answers to his questions, when, in fact, nothing brings them together. Carried by the Bella Kim-Roschdy Zem duo and their range of nuances in the silences, Winter in Sokcho seduced by the contrast between the intimate violence of what is played out there and the enveloping softness of its staging.
Thierry Cheze
BERNIE ★★★☆☆
By Richard Linkater
Bernieby Richard Linklater, arrives in French theaters fourteen years after its US release. A difficulty in exporting which is undoubtedly due to its very Texan nature, the film being irrigated by quite pointed humor on the sub-regional differences within the “Lone Star State”. But it will nevertheless speak to fans of true crimeof which it is a sort of pastiche: Linklater here tells the true story of Bernie Tiede (Jack Black), an embalmer adored by his community, who found himself at the center of a criminal case involving a cantankerous widow (Shirley MacLaine) and a prosecutor in Stetson (Matthew McConaughey). The story is punctuated with on-camera interviews with people who have encountered Tiede, a process typical of Linklater's taste for conceptual devices, but which proves boring over the length. What remains is Jack Black's tightrope-walking and anthological performance, which it would be a real shame to miss – even fourteen years later.
Frédéric Foubert
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