Anatomy of a Fall, Hypnotic, The Last Voyage of Demeter: New in theaters this week

What to see in theaters

THE EVENT
ANATOMY OF A FALL ★★★★☆

By Justine Triet

The essential

A suspense around a woman writer accused of the death of her husband. A fresco-style trial film. Justine Triet signs her best film with, as a key, a Palme d’Or as undisputed as it is indisputable

It all starts with a lifeless body found at the foot of a chalet. That of Samuel, aspiring to a literary career in which his wife – and mother of their visually impaired son Daniel – Sandra excels. What add frustration in a couple where everyday life has ended up giving birth to the slow poison of disenchantment? What makes Sandra the ideal culprit of this possible murder or explain that at the end, Samuel decided to commit suicide? Such is the permanent doubt in which Justine Triet keeps us for… 2h30 where, through her staging, the director shatters the filmic codes of the trial film through a set of zooms, low angle shots and camera movements fully mastered. And this staging – there is at the service of a masterful scenario. Because it intertwines with a fluidity never faulted the difficulty or even the impossibility of giving birth to THE truth, a reflection on the couple in the light of the upheavals caused by #Metoo and the exploration of the judicialization of the intimate , a phenomenon that has continued to grow in recent years. Finally, this great film is also that of an immense actress: Sandra Hüller. So much we could see him and see him again without ever being able to guess what is hidden behind his eyes, if “his” Sandra is only sincerity, Machiavellianism or precisely deeply human, therefore a little of both! An exciting Palme d’Or.

Thierry Cheze

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FIRST LOVED

GHOSTS OF ISTANBUL ★★★☆☆

By Azra Deniz Okyay

A dystopia rewarded in 2020 with the Grand Prize of the Critics’ Week in Venice and which, since then, has not aged a bit. A long first like a hell of a challenge: telling the complex chaotic state of Turkey in just 90 minutes. We follow three main characters with intertwined destinies in a city that violently repressed demonstrations lead to the brink of blackout. A young activist dancer who aspires to become a professional. A woman working in garbage collection whose son is incarcerated for a crime she is sure is innocent. And a small drug trafficker also living off real estate scams by housing Syrian refugees. One night time, Ghosts of Istanbul manages to embrace the complex situation of the country without ever being in the film catalog. Thanks to the writing of its characters who are all but reduced to archetypes and to this tense thriller atmosphere that shakes up the simple societal chronicle. A love female dogs with Turkish sauce.

Thierry Cheze

THE WAR OF THE GODS ★★★☆☆

By Ji Zhao

It is complicated, The War of the Gods. Complicated because its rather muddled story of mythological science fiction would pass Final Fantasy XVI for a Basho haiku. Complicated because his team of bounty hunter heroes are so pumped about the team of cowboy bebop (same characters in a ship accompanied by jazz!) that we are at the limit of the blockage… And despite everything, we cannot help but remain speechless in front of certain totally hallucinating scenes, dizzying to the point of madness (mountains which turn into paintings on paper during a cyclopean fight), changes of scale and materials that only the most mastered animation (the director signed the amazing White Snake in 2019) can afford. We are somewhere between show and show, in short.

Sylvester Picard

INFILTRATED ★★★☆☆

By Justin Lerner

In Guatemala. Two sisters. Sarita and Bea. Young, carefree and pretty. One evening Bea decides to go clubbing and drags her sis to the bars. But Sarita gives up on the way, goes back to bed and discovers the next day that Bea has not returned. She will then join her boyfriend’s gang to find out what happened… This is the start of a frantic quest and the discovery of the world around her. Most striking in Infiltrated, this is obviously the daily life of gangs. The women working in the labs, the kids collecting the money, the scales and the spies, the savage murders… everything is shown with a frightening realism. We capture this reality through the wide eyes of Sarita, but staged in a visceral and almost documentary way. It’s shock, tense. A real discovery.

Peter Lunn

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FIRST TO MODERATELY LOVED

HYPNOTIC ★★☆☆☆

By Robert Rodríguez

A cop’s daughter is missing. Years later, the latter finds himself faced with a series of robberies which could be linked to the kidnapping of his child. The dad is Ben Affleck. Square jaw, (wet) cocker spaniel eyes, flexing muscles and freaking out: the actor isn’t bad, but not very good either. When the first robbery starts, another actor will eat the screen: William Fitchner appears and steals the film. We have seen her slender silhouette in a good part of the Hollywood thrillers of her last thirty years (Strange days, Heat Or Dark Knight). Here, he plays the villain of the story, a guy with frightening psychic powers. And he is fantastic. The very very B charm of this over-excited (messy) and Nolanian thriller owes him a lot.

Gael Golhen

VERA ★★☆☆☆

By Tizza Covi and Rainer Frimmel

After the success of Daughters of Olfa, Vera reminds us that mixing docu-fiction genres is not necessarily a guarantee of success… despite the flamboyant character that the Tizza Covi-Rainer Frimmel duo follows and stages: the daughter of Giuliano Gemma, icon of 60’s spaghetti westerns. Because the plot they develop (her relationship with an 8-year-old boy and his father, a small-time scammer) interferes with the endearing portrait of this woman who has always struggled to make a name for herself. and to exist for what it is.

Thierry Cheze

MY LIFE IS A CHALLENGE ★★☆☆☆

By Stephan Rytz

Suffering from Parkinson’s since he was 35, a former golfer challenged himself to cover a thousand kilometers in the Swiss Alps. With his journey, this sports enthusiast intends to prove that life does not end with illness. If the portrait is touching and allows you to learn more about the disease, the film does not spare itself some good feelings which question. Does a good patient have a duty to be resilient?

Emma Poesy

PREMIERE DIDN’T LIKE

THE LAST VOYAGE OF THE DEMETER ★☆☆☆☆

By André Ovredal

This year between Renfield And this Last Voyage of Demeter, the traditional adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula seems to have given way to specific and gendered focuses. In the latter, the frame tightens on the transport by boat of Count Dracula from Transylvania to England, in a register intended to be horrific. The vampire is then traded for a monstrous figure emptied of its original substance, in a frankly hideous design. Properly mechanical, this Last trip suffers from the repetition of its same scenes and from a scenario that becomes predictable by dint of systematically reproducing the device where the vampire goes out at night to drink blood. Reducing the story to the sole setting of the boat behind closed doors therefore becomes a trap in which the film seems to sink. The cinema is far from having exhausted this modern myth, but here it only seems to mobilize it as if to draw from it a horror film as uninspired in its direction as embodied by its cast…

Nicholas Moreno

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PAYMENT ★☆☆☆☆

By Nimrod Antal

At ease on planes (Nonstop), commuter trains (The Passenger) and even snowplows (Cold blood), Liam Neeson was the perfect candidate for a car lock-up. In Berlin, while driving his children to school, a businessman receives a call from a madman who explains to him that the vehicle will explode if its passengers get out of it. Phone Game in a car ? A fun concept on paper, especially when you know how convincing Liam Neeson can be when he pulls out his phone – see the anthology speech by Taken. But Compensation is terribly lazy, dull, weighed down by his mushy twists and, above all, the cata interpretation of Neeson, more monolithic and sleepy than ever, and who has trouble making us swallow the idea that he is the father of the two kids sitting in the back seat. Their grandpa, yes, that would have been more believable.

Frederic Foubert

And also

The Smurfs celebrateby William Renaud

The covers

Dear daddy, by Dino Risi

ghost of loveby Dino Risi