Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom, Father’s Daughter, Journey to the South Pole: What’s new at the cinema this week

What to see in theaters

THE EVENT
AQUAMAN AND THE LOST KINGDOM ★★☆☆☆

By James Wan

The essential

Aquaman 2 concludes the DC universe launched 10 years ago. A degenerate film that pulls in all directions, but where some great ideas float through.

That’s it, it’s the end. With Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom, Warner closes a ten-year superheroic parenthesis during which the studio tried to compete with Marvel by creating its own shared universe. After a summary of what has happened off-screen since the first Aquaman, James Wan plants the seeds of a great adventure film with around ten minutes of exploration under Antarctica, where the famous Lost Kingdom is hidden. But Twenty thousand leagues under sea tinged with horror, which Wan seems keen to realize will be cannibalized by the character of Aquaman, always as hollow and under-incarnated by Jason Momoa and weighed down by an insane scenario, where we are carried from one scene to another without another form of trial. It’s often dismaying, but it’s absolutely impossible to be bored by this bizarre spectacle.

François Léger

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PREMIERE LIKED A LOT

HER FATHER’S DAUGHTER ★★★★☆

By Erwan Le Duc

The essential

A tightrope nursery rhyme about the father-daughter relationship. As in PartridgeErwan Le Duc sublimates reality by bathing his story in an amusing melancholy.

Eight minutes. This is the time it takes Erwan Le Duc to lay the foundations of his story, in a succession of shots without dialogue, to fabulous music by Julie Roué: Etienne is 20 years old, falls in love with Valérie, their daughter Rosa is born , Valérie disappears, Etienne becomes a single father. Ellipse. Rosa is 17 years old and must leave the nest to begin art studies. But who are they without each other, they who have always built themselves together? The director of Partridge then takes us into a wild dance, where the big sparkling eyes of Nahuel Perez Biscayart and the sweet nonchalance of Céleste Brunnquell swirl. Crazy, almost surreal scenes follow, where father and daughter try to find meaning in this new beginning. And the film reinvents itself as its protagonists evolve. Her Father’s Daughter combines bold staging and meticulous writing. A real tangy candy that gives back a taste for life.

Lucie Chiquer

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MENUS- PLEASURES ★★★★☆

By Frederick Wiseman

By tackling the Troisgros house, three Michelin stars and taken over from generation to generation by the same family, Frederick Wiseman (Welfare, City Hall…) films the restoration in the same way as a hospital or a town hall, that is to say in such a way as to reveal its concrete functioning by editing majestic sequence shots. But the particularity of this Pleasure Menus consists precisely of having fun by showing the refinement of this restaurant, a unique feeling in this vast filmography where it is especially illustrated by its critical views pointing out major dysfunctions. And we come away from the film like a meal at one of their tables: very full, but oh so satisfied.

Nicholas Moreno

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FIRST TO LIKE

TRIP TO THE SOUTH POLE ★★★☆☆

By Luc Jacquet

Director of the triumphant The emperor’s walk (released in 2005), Luc Jacquet this time shares his fascination with Antarctica in a very personal film story, his voice comments on striking images he took of the South Pole. Having remembered during a trip there in 2021 that it was exactly 30 years since he first explored this vast polar expanse, the filmmaker indulges in original thoughts about what he calls the kingdom ice and attempts to explain the reasons for the irrepressible human attraction to these majestic landscapes. Introducing the idea that the future of this icy continent is threatened, just as human life on Earth is, the film constitutes both an ecological treatise and a melancholy reflection on the magic of Antarctica, which Jacquet films in black and white to better capture its timelessness and the hope of its eternity.

Damien Leblanc

A DREAM TEAM ★★★☆☆

By Taika Waititi

Clearly, Taika Waititi does nothing to make people like him. From film to film, we discover a new aspect of his way of seeing cinema (the bad taste of Jojo Rabbitthe laziness of Thor…). And there, bam, Waititi releases his best film since Boy (2010)! Strict adaptation (even the VF title has not changed) of a documentary recounting the struggle of the American Samoa national soccer team to score at least one goal in the 2001 World Cup qualifiers, A dream team fueled by reused clichés (the Maoris seen as crazy backwards) and a staging of incredible weakness. And yet, in the end, it works. Not really by effort, a little by miracle, by the grace of a speech piqued Sunday Hellan iron Michael Fassbender and a sublime actress (Kaimana, who plays a trans footballer), the film finally becomes what it wants: a nice effort to sanctify the lose integral.

Sylvestre Picard

FOR YOUR WEDDING ★★★☆☆

By Oury Milshtein

Long-time production director in cinema, Oury Milshtein is unknown to the general public but suddenly at the age of 65 he makes his first documentary film in which he recounts his life in an incredible way. HAS both son of a famous painter (Zwy Milshtein) and former son-in-law of Enrico Macias (whose daughter he married thirty years ago), Oury had five children with two different women and often visits his father’s grave. late psychologist. Relying on archive images but also filming himself in the present, the filmmaker notably summons his reconstituted family during filmed dinners which take the form of shattering psychoanalyses where both love and the suffering of mourning are expressed. This striking self-portrait wonders what parents bequeath spiritually to their children and allows us to laugh and cry around origins and identity. Which, in these times, does a lot of good.

Damien Leblanc

THE SETTLERS ★★★☆☆

By Felipe Galvez

THE western seems to be coming back at full gallop in 2023, the genre being reinvested with a new and much more aware perspective on the atrocities committed by the settlers. In this case, three horsemen recruited by an owner who are responsible for dispossessing the inhabitants of their area, in Tierra del Fuego, in Chile at the beginning of the 20th century. The interest in looking at this plot lies in the duplication of its analysis of the situation: the horror comes both from the colonizing act and from the virile man. No homoerotization of these bodies, on the contrary. If the strength of the story had been equal to the beauty of the shots and the settings, this would have been a very great contemporary western. But alas the plot never really sticks, unlike the gaze of these dominated men and (especially) women, whose silence resonates in discreet solidarity with that of Lily Gladstone in Killers of the Flower Moon.

Nicholas Moreno

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FIRST TO MODERATELY LIKED

MY FRANCE TO ME ★★☆☆☆

By Benoît Cohen

So alone after the death of her husband, France welcomes a young migrant who fled Afghanistan, Reza, into her large Parisian apartment. She wants him to integrate by quickly finding a job, but he dreams of long studies at Sciences Po while her son, exiled in New York, is worried about seeing a foreigner take his place in the home. Benoit Cohen (Our darling children) here adapts his novel, a bestseller in 2018, inspired by the story of his own mother. Fanny Ardant is striking in the role of this woman full of contradictions, who needs Reza at least as much as he needs her. But the desire to convey messages about living together pushes Benoît Cohen to highlight things too much, gradually stifling his story and the emotion he aims to create. Good intentions that are totally counterproductive.

Elodie Bardinet

INSPECTOR SUN AND THE CURSE OF THE BLACK WIDOW ★★☆☆☆

By Julio Soto Gurpide

Arachnophobes, move on! An amusing mix between Hercule Poirot and Inspector Gadget, this animated film follows Inspector Sun, a spider detective with more than questionable skills… As he boards an air convoy heading to San Francisco, he is forced to solve the problem. enigma surrounding the murder of Doctor Bugsy Epinestone. Black widow, cricket, fly, ant and praying mantis will cross his path and be added to the long list of suspects. What a great feat to make this gaggle of insects endearing! But this charm fails to last: the revelations surrounding the investigation accumulate and weigh down the story, which would have needed a more polished conclusion. Fortunately, the offbeat humor makes up for these plot differences.

Lucie Chiquer

FIRST DID NOT LIKE

MUNCH ★☆☆☆☆

By Benoît Cohen

We complain enough about seeing too many biopics devoid of point of view not to welcome the way in which Henrik Martin Dahlsbakken takes hold here of the figure of the painter Edward Munch. Like Haynes with I’m not there for Dylan, he makes the author of Shout by four different actors (including a woman) at four periods of his life, even daring anachronism since the last one takes place in Berlin in the 2000s, 50 years after his disappearance. These back and forth intend to tell the story of the man as much as the artist, his inspirations as well as his complex relationship with creation. But the stylistic exercise unfortunately takes precedence over the rest and keeps the non-expert viewer at bay. All with some not very happy gestures like these shots with a sky in the background similar to his paintings which appear gimmicky. Munch certainly moves away from Peter Watkins’ reference film which focused on the painter’s youth but without convincing.

Thierry Cheze

A BODY UNDER THE LAVA ★☆☆☆☆

By Helena Giron and Samuel M. Delgado

In the middle of a turbulent ocean, three men swim to a desert island before setting off. It is 1492 and the travelers flee together from Christopher Columbus’ boat which condemns them to death. So, they wander through the volcanic landscapes of the Canary Islands to sow their punishment. Silent (we can count the dialogues on the fingers of one hand), they carry with them the burden of future massacres caused by their crew. Belonging less to an adventure film than to archive work, A body under the lava slips images from other productions into a plot that is difficult to see clearly. The hybrid product loses us with its characters and is sometimes more like the work projected on the walls of museums. Despite its rare subject and its short duration (almost expeditious), this conceptual journey escapes us without giving us the means to participate in it.

Bastien Assie

And also

Preserve, by Frédéric Forestier

Jeff Panacloc- In pursuit of Jean-Marc, by Pierre François Martin-Laval

Recovery

My name is Nobodyby Terence Hill