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THE EVENT
WICKED ★★★★☆
By Jon M. Chu
The essentials
An exhilarating and invigorating adaptation of one of the most famous Broadway musicals, carried by the brilliant duo Ariana Grande/Cynthia Erivo.
A great 2h40 show (and that's just Act I). A 2003 Broadway musical adapted from a 1995 book, filmed twenty years later as if a Harry Potter film were an episode of the Marvel Cinematic Universe… We are before the events of The Wizard of Oz, when Elphaba, a young woman with green skin arrives at a magical university where the teachers are talking animals. She will befriend her antithesis, a young blonde, pink and popular woman, while from the depths of her citadel of Emerald City, a political conspiracy rears its head. And all articulated with the help of crazy songs, long since part of the classic Broadway repertoire. Wicked takes us into a swirling fantasy world that really wants to give you bang for your buck. Thanks to the duo composed by Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande (who composes her Glinda like a mean girl lap dancer, magical cousin of Anora Mikheeva), absolutely impeccable musical alchemy, and the frisky energy which carries it all. See you in November 2025 for Act II.
Sylvestre Picard
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FIRST TO LIKE
ONCE UPON A TIME UPON MICHEL LEGRAND ★★★☆☆
By David Hertzog-Dessites
How to tell in 1h50 Michel Legrand, his 70-year career as a film music composer, his work as an arranger (for Michael Jackson, Aznavour, Nougaro…), his passion for jazz which made him one of the first Europeans to work with Miles Davis or even his only directing experience with Five days in June ? With this documentary, David Hertzog Dessites at no time claims to be exhaustive. He tells Legrand like a patchwork, a fragmented fresco, assuming his biases (favoring the Demy chapter, particularly careful with his American career) and interweaving testimonies (Quincy Jones, Pierre Richard, Barbra Streisand…), archive images of a insane richness and above all plunged behind the scenes of an artist at work until his last breath (his final concert at the Philharmonie de Paris) which shows him driven by a passion that is still as strong as ever lively but also brittle, rough, rough.
Thierry Cheze
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MARMAILLE ★★★☆☆
By Gregory Lucilly
Kicked out by their mother, a teenager dreaming of becoming a breakdance star and his big sister who is raising her baby alone find themselves placed with their father whom they had never met. Brat recounts their long and difficult reconstruction. A 100% Reunion production, this first feature has the major quality of offering, through this story, a fascinating portrait of this island, stripped of any cliché. And its accuracy on all levels (interpretation, in-depth writing of the characters, etc.) makes us forget a too abrupt ending. A real curiosity.
Thierry Cheze
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CROSSING ISTANBUL ★★★☆☆
By Levan Akin
There are regions of the world that we see so little on screen that we would be unable to imagine what types of characters inhabit them. At the beginning of Crossing Istanbulwe meet two of them in Georgia (Lia, a boorish retiree, and Achi, an overexploited young man) who leave together for the Turkish city to find Tekla (the niece of the first), whom the second says he met and knew. On site, they discover a whole culture, national certainly, but queer also: tracing Tekla's footsteps will lead them in particular to the trans district. Throughout the quest and meetings (with Evrim, a lawyer-activist for example), we especially see two generations circling each other, forced to go through cohabitation to understand each other respectively. The film rarely departs from its program, but imposes its melodrama in places and with characters of great preciousness.
Nicholas Moreno
100,000,000,000,000 (HUNDRED THOUSAND BILLION) ★★★☆☆
By Virgil Vernier
Talented representative of a half-naturalist, half-magical cinema, Virgil Vernier (Mercuriales, Sophia Antipolis) likes to invest in architecturally spectacular places to create unique destinies. Here, in the heart of Monaco and a futuristic-looking construction site aiming to extend the city onto the sea, the filmmaker recounts the journey of Afine, an 18-year-old escort boy who will meet several female characters during the Christmas period. By exploring the melancholy of lonely individuals confronted with the consumerism of the world, the filmmaker creates a fascinating storybook atmosphere where souls need comfort but where the ferocity of social inequalities eventually returns. Shrouded in a soothing light, this bittersweet film moves you with its gallery of lost children condemned to wander in settings whose coldness is all the more cruel as it is adorned with falsely heavenly finery.
Damien Leblanc
SHAMBHALA, THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN ★★★☆☆
By Min Bahadur Bham
Shambhala opens with a marriage: that of Pema with three men from the same siblings. Polyandry is the order of the day in the heart of the Himalayas, where this revered woman shares her affection between Tashi, the man she is in love with, Karma, a devoted monk, and Dawa, a little brat. Everything is going well until the day the announcement of her pregnancy is blackened by a rumor of an extramarital affair, prompting a cowardly Tashi to retreat to the mountains and a resilient Pema to go looking for her. It is at this precise moment in the film, 50 minutes already gone, that the title appears. Then begins the immense journey of a woman in the wake of her own providence, ready to reconnect with her solitude first, and then her plenitude. An epic as salutary as the air of these mountain pastures cut off from the world, which reminds us how precious it is to take the time. Invigorating.
Lucie Chiquer
A PAESE OF RESISTANCE ★★★☆☆
By Shu Aiello and Catherine Catalla
In a small village in Calabria where a migrant reception association punctuates everyone's daily life, the sudden arrival of Matteo Salvini in power – and with him, the end of subsidies granted to the structure – has the effect of a bomb. “They turned what was an excellence into a problem”testifies a resident, who leads the revolt against this unjust decision. This very interesting documentary provides images of this healthy revolt… and proves that in Europe, withdrawal is not inevitable.
Emma Poesy
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FIRST TO MODERATELY LIKED
THEIR CHILDREN AFTER THEM ★★☆☆☆
By Ludovic and Zoran Boukherma
Against a backdrop of social disenchantment, in the middle of the 1990s, in a valley where the blast furnaces no longer smoke, three teenagers, two boys and a girl, for four summers, live for whatever it takes, and learn to love each other, to to fight, to grow. It was the novel by Nicolas Mathieu (Goncourt 2018), it is now the film by the Boukherma brothers. But where the book hit hard (and right), its adaptation pours into a syrupy nostalgia. The staging in fact plays the card of saturated colors, and attempts to breathe glamor into the industrial landscapes of the ravaged East. A few visual flashes poorly mask the absence of bite or sharpness which were the prize of the original material. There remains the solid casting. All the actors are filmed like Greek demigods (imperial Paul Kircher, strong and fragile Ludivine Sagnier or wildly beautiful Sayyid El Alami), but by trading heartbreaking melancholy for forced feel-good, the directors betray deep down the essence of Mathieu's novel.
Gaël Golhen
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CONCLAVE ★★☆☆☆
By Edward Berger
The ceremonial choice of a new pope, with its hundreds of confined cardinals, its immutable rituals, has enormous cinematographic potential, which has recently interested filmmakers as different as Moretti, Sorrentino or Meirelles. In ConclaveEdward Berger draws inspiration from a novel by Robert Harris to tell the story of a tense papal election. Behind closed doors, machinations, big casting… The film can be enjoyed like one of those neo-whodunit Agatha Christie style, without a corpse, but with a vintage Ralph Fiennes as Hercule Poirot of the Vatican. Behind the mechanics of the thriller, it is also about telling how the Church is shaken up by the outside world, between terrorism, populism, societal developments… Everything is a little heavy, but rather entertaining, until an unforgettable final twist . How can I explain why? Conclave among the favorites for the next Oscars? The ways of the Academy are impenetrable.
Frédéric Foubert
NIKO THE LITTLE REINDEER, SANTA MISSION ★★☆☆☆
By Kari Juusonen and Jorgen Lerdam
In the third part of his adventures, Niko is about to join the Father's flying reindeer team where his father officiates but to do so he must triumph over the young and intrepid Stella. And if we are at first seduced at first by the unexpected asperities of a story where it is a question of friendly betrayal like a father falling from his pedestal, the race for the happy ending quickly regains its rights, erasing all these rough edges for fear of displeasing its very young target audience. Damage.
Thierry Cheze
FIRST DID NOT LIKE
LIMONOV, THE BALLAD ★☆☆☆☆
By Kiril Serebrennikov
Serebrennikov and Limonov. The Russian fever filmmaker who portrays the Muscovite black prince. We expected a nihilistic and troubled work, the result is lukewarm and almost embarrassing. The director of Leto However, it attacks a golden character, Limonov, a Ukrainian poet who became a tramp in New York and then a more than controversial political rebel. The film follows this jack-of-all-trades in his wanderings, and particularly during his period in New York where he experienced a destructive passion with Elena, a sublime model who led him into a spiral of excess. Ben Whishaw is great in the role of this unmanageable dandy, but the film struggles to get off the ground. Everything is too wise, sanitized. Because by focusing on these New York years, Limonov forgets most of the historical context and avoids the most disturbing aspects of its hero, notably his political slippages, sent in a final box. Result: a film in English (a heresy) which claimed to probe the Russian soul and misses its fascinating protagonist, hero and contemporary bastard.
Peter Lunn
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DADDIO ★☆☆☆☆
By Christy Hall
Films taking place entirely in the cabin of a car: this is one of the micro-trends (not ultra-exciting) at the end of the year. After The Choicewhere Vincent Lindon resolves his existential problems at the wheel of his Renault Laguna, here Daddiowith Sean Penn as a New York taxi driver, and Dakota Johnson in the back seat. During a traffic jam between JFK airport and Manhattan, the passenger will take stock of her love life, and benefit from the life lessons of the weathered veteran who holds the wheel. Director Christy Hall never manages to visually energize the exchanges between the two actors, contenting herself with recording their theatrical ping-pong – a string of clichés about love, sex and the uberization of the world. Supposed to be a “vehicle” for its performers (as the Anglo-Saxons say when talking about a tailor-made score), Daddio remains at a standstill.
Frédéric Foubert
And also
Guadalupe: mother of humanity, by Andrés Garrigo and Pablo Moreno
The Lives of Infamous Men, by Gilles Deroo and Marianne Pistone
The Covers
The Tale of Tales, by Yuri Norstein
Without knowing anything about her, by Luigi Comencini