Join WhatsApp Channel
Join Telegram ChannelCinema, streaming, VOD, TV… Find advice from the editorial staff every Friday.
The film in theaters: The Room Next Door by Pedro Almodovar
A woman with incurable cancer (Tilda Swinton) asks a friend (Julianne Moore) to assist her in her suicide and to stay close to her, in “the room next door“, until she takes the fatal pill… For his first feature film shot in English, Pedro Almodovar combines societal considerations (the debate on the end of life, but also climate change and the rise of populism) with a grand gesture of an esthete sure of his art, in search of purity, entrenched in his sophisticated obsessions (Hitchcock, Ophüls, Bergman…), like his hidden heroines in their superb house deep in the woods Both very alive and as if outside of time, he creates a magnificent frozen, distanced melodrama, which paints the snow in pink. Deaths by James Joyce.
What's new at the cinema this week
The series: At the Dawn of America
Director Peter Berg (Friday Night Lights, Hancock, Deepwater…) revisits the Wild West through a brutal and naturalist prism, through the pen of Mark L. Smith, the screenwriter of The Revenantwho finds his primal obsessions here. The 6-episode mini-series immerses us in a West stripped of all romanticism, where survival is played out in the wide frozen spaces of Utah. Between violence, betrayals and wild beauty, a tragic and visceral story.
Watch America's Dawn on Netflix
The film in streaming: The Fabelmans by Steven Spielberg
Spielberg is barely making this self-portrait about his childhood and his first steps as a filmmaker. He is Sammy, a young boy scarred for life by the train derailment. Under the biggest marquee in the world seen with his parents one evening at the cinema. From then on, he never stopped trying to reproduce this astonishment himself on film. But Sammy will soon be the mute and unconscious witness to the inevitable separation of his parents, the traces of which he will try to erase through editing. Life and cinema constantly interpenetrate here. At the end of the road, John Ford (played by David Lynch!) will offer him a lesson in perspective. Great movie.
Watch The Fabelmans streaming on France.TV
The film on VOD: The Trial of the Dog by Laetitia Dosch
Discovered in the Un Certain Regard section at Cannes (with… the Palme Dog for the dog Kodi) and Valois d'Or for the screenplay in Angoulême, the first feature film directed by Laetitia Dosch features a lawyer specializing in lost causes (which she plays herself) who agrees to defend the dog of a visually impaired client, suspected of having bitten a woman and of being guilty of misogyny! And we find in this film inspired by a true story all the fantasy, finesse and depth that characterize the actress that she is. Between fable, wacky comedy and witty reflection on feminism, The Trial of the Dog also seduced by the delightful cast that Laetitia Dosch has brought together in front of her camera, where François Damiens rubs shoulders with Anne Dorval, Jean-Pascal Zadi and Pierre Deladonchamps.
Look The Trial of the Dog on VOD on Première Max
The film on TV: Bad Boys: Ride or Die by Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah
After a sluggish third part (difficult to move on after the craziness of Michael Bay on Bad Boys 217 years later), Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah finally find their cruising speed with Ride or Die : a good action comedy, which rides on its beauty without being too shy, and which remains full of know-how. The proof with this great final shootout scene in an abandoned alligator park. Not a cinema slap, no, but a wrinkled as cushy as it is fun, which will be perfect to occupy your Friday evening far from the madding crowd.
Watch Bad Boys: Ride or Die Friday at 9:10 p.m. on Canal+ (and streaming on MyCanal)
The classic: Bellissima by Luchino Visconti
Anna Magnani's cheekiness pierces the frame from the first minutes. A crowd flocks to Cinecittà to try to fit their child into a giant casting call. Except that the populace Maddalena (Magnani) is doing all she can to mistreat her child, frightened by maternal pressure. The young Visconti, still linked to the virtues of neo-realism, films this drama of human comedy without taking his eyes off his tempestuous actress. Magnani is here an incandescent Madonna. We cry, we laugh, we cry again, all this without looking for a transition because unhappiness and happiness are experienced in the same emotional momentum. Erupting beauty.
Watch Bellissima streaming on Arte.TV
The documentary: Sharon Stone, the survival instinct
This is a portrait of a star which could just as easily have been called “I'm Sharon Stone, Bitch!”, like the star's improbable rap with James Corden, in 2016, as it depicts an actress lacking in determination, neither intelligence nor humor. Far from being a “brainless Barbie” (a character that she would have liked to play, well before Margot Robbie), the star of Basic Instinct and of Casino reveals himself to be a strategist, lucid about his successes and his flops, and ready to do anything to establish himself in a man's world.
Watch Sharon Stone, the survival instinct on Arte.TV