Acid, La Petite, Les Feuilles Mortes: What’s new at the cinema this week
What to see in theaters
THE EVENT
ACID ★★★☆☆
By Just Philippot
The essential
The second film by Just Philippot brings together Guillaume Canet and Lætitia Dosch in a post-apocalyptic road movie set against a backdrop of acid rain.
Two years later The CloudJust Philippot is back with Acid, much more wealthy and ambitious in the realm of fantasy. It follows a separated couple and their daughter Selma, reunited to escape the acid rain that is falling on France. Staying in the open air is synonymous with death – the water eats away at the skin at lightning speed – so the little family takes the side roads to try to reach a hypothetical safe place. Post-apocalyptic road movie, Acid summons War of the Worlds by Spielberg and The road by John Hillcoat, with stunning visions of the end of the world. A great intimate show which is constantly embodied in movement. But after the first fifty minutes, which are quite grandiose, the scenario loosens up slightly and forces its characters into immobility, leading to a slightly cunning conclusion which would have deserved to be a little more shattering.
François Léger
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FIRST TO LIKE
THE LITTLE ★★★☆☆
By Guillaume Nicloux
Adapted from the novel by Cradle by Fanny Chesnel, The little follows the steps of a widowed and lonely cabinetmaker who learns of the accidental death of his son and his companion. The couple was expecting a child from a surrogate mother living in Belgium and Joseph decided against the advice of those around him to go looking for this young woman to convince her that he could take care of this baby. Attracted by the subjects of mourning and resilience, the filmmaker treats his story with restraint by focusing on the meeting between two beings who everything seems to oppose but who will have to find common ground. Addressing the legal status of GPA in the background and highlighting the rebirth in the protagonists of hope and vital energy, the filmmaker gives a golden role to Fabrice Luchini and his film deploys from start to finish a humility almost too demonstrative but highly comforting.
Damien Leblanc
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DEAD LEAVES ★★★☆☆
By Aki Kaurismäki
So here is a melodrama. Two silent, lost souls – a lonely supermarket cashier and an alcoholic worker – meet in a karaoke bar. It’s love at first sight. Destiny is not kind. Between repeated layoffs, accidents and twists of fate, life, as in the song by Prévert and Kosma, “ separates those who love each other… » Kaurismäki resembles his characters in this way, wild and discreet beings, not very comfortable in a reality that imposes conformism. The deliberately static staging owes its tension to the bodies that inhabit it awkwardly seeking a point of support. It is indeed Chaplin that we are resurrecting. Here he has the appearance of a lost dog without a collar, bearing the famous surname. Aki or the bias of the tender.
Thomas Baura
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LIKE A WOLF ★★★☆☆
By Caroline Glorion
At 26, Lili raised her three children alone before social services wrongly took them away from her on suspicion of abuse. To get them back, we only advise him one thing: take care of appearances and fit into the boxes. Impulsive, crude, and described as infantile, she struggles to get there, despite isolation, precariousness and incidentally the ambient sexism. Without revolutionizing French social drama, Caroline Glorion exercises a benevolent gaze on her female character (played by Mathilde La Musse) whom life has never helped. Without pointing the finger at the young woman, she raises all the obstacles that jeopardize her ability to regain her footing, notably through the prism of careful dialogues.
Sarah Deslandes
DESERTS ★★★☆☆
By Faouzi Bensaïdi
Discovered at the Quinzaine des Cinéastes, Deserts begins as a sketch film with a very “Coenian” zaniness. We follow two nickel-plated feet, employees of a collection agency in Casablanca, roaming villages to extract money from over-indebted families. The absurdity of the situation gives rise to a succession of vignettes where humor reveals all the violence of the situations. Then, suddenly, Deserts bifurcates. When this duo takes charge of a man to take him to the authorities in exchange for a reward and the man in question flees. The film then switches from comedy to western… poetic, completely abandons its two anti-heroes to follow this third man, who we will discover was forcibly separated from his wife by one of the latter’s suitors, who then forced her to marry him. And this turnaround, which could seem shaky, takes place in total fluidity, because it is the fruit of the same gentle madness to explore the two sides of the same coin: the precariousness and the dominant patriarchy which plague Moroccan society. Amazing.
Thierry Cheze
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FIRST TO MODERATELY LIKED
THE GOLDEN BUTTERFLY TREE ★★☆☆☆
From Pham Thien An
Here it is. The Caméra d’Or of the last Cannes edition. A film that had everything to succeed: a young director full of talent, an endless wandering in the Vietnamese countryside, between mysticism and heightened spirituality. However, it is hard to hold on to it! The film opens with a road accident in Saigon. Thien loses his sister-in-law, but gains a nephew who he must now take care of. In order to find the child’s father, he begins an odyssey towards his native land and reconnects with his faith in a succession of long but dazzling sequences, so much so that it is difficult to see anything other than a technical prowess. Because the apathetic pace of this documentary approach and its unjustified length weigh down the story, which turns out to be rather soporific…
Lucie Chiquer
LAST DANCE! ★★☆☆☆
By Delphine Lehericey
François Berléand is not in the habit of being rare in the cinema. But we had lost the habit of seeing him play the leading roles as he does here with Delphine Lehericey (The Middle of the Horizon) as a septuagenarian who, finding himself suddenly widowed, decides to mourn by honoring the promise made to his wife: to perform, in secret from his family, in the creation of contemporary dance staged by the choreographer La Ribot that she this had to interpret. Everything here is too wise, too programmatic to fully seduce but the film has the merit of not wallowing in the pure emotional register (and Berléand’s restrained performance has a lot to do with it) and of not treating – as so often – contemporary art with a mocking look, in the scenes which, passing through the body more than through words, are the best of Last dance!
Thierry Cheze
PREMIERE DID NOT LIKE
GOING GREEN ★☆☆☆☆
By Yohann Charrin
Régis Blondin, the patriarch of a typically Parisian family, decides to organize a surprise vacation for his wife and his phone-addicted teenagers. Sometimes judging, sometimes judged, “Parigot” is placed at the center of the story as he returns to the setting of his childhood, the Vercors, and must face “neo-rurals” who squat his lodging. We felt it coming, the scenario of Going Green leaves an impression of déjà vu and fails to surprise or go beyond monotonous twists and turns that are scattered throughout. The film certainly has the merit of integrating new faces into its cast, and of addressing current themes, such as decline, but this is unfortunately done through characters locked into archetypes and predictable.
Sarah Deslandes
FOLLIA ★☆☆☆☆
By Charles Guérin Surville
Four years later Sincerity, a friend’s film eyeing Rohmer’s cinema, a reference too overwhelming for him, Charles Guérin Surville no longer convinces with his second feature, where he aims to play between fiction and real life, notably through a director’s character trying to put the connections together. pieces of his existence after his accident. This story, rich in traps and pretenses, is intriguing in its first minutes, even if it pushes some of its performers into an exaggerated game that is not easy to master. And then, little by little, but much too quickly, we understand the puzzle that the filmmaker intends to draw here. From then on, we become bored as he distills his final pieces and begins to explain what we had understood for a long time.
Thierry Cheze
And also
Captain!short film program
Cats at the museumby Vasiliy Rovenskiy
Zouby Claire Glorieux
The covers
Classified peopleby Yolande Zauberman
I love you neitherby Serge Gainsbourg
Hester streetby Joan Micklin Silver
