Innocence, My Robot Friend, Vermin New releases at the cinema this week

What to see in theaters

THE EVENT
INNOCENCE ★★★★☆

By Hirokazu Koreeda

The essential

A kid behaving strangely, a shady teacher, a mother who is worried… Hirokazu Kore-eda tells the mysteries of childhood like a detective thriller, in a film with a convoluted structure, but which ends up shocking.

The new Koreeda is built around a twisting story “à la Rashomon » which multiplies points of view to tell a few days in the life of two CM2 children, their parents and their teachers. Something intense is playing out in their lives, but so indescribable that it will take time, detours and false leads to understand it. A mother raising her child alone is worried to see him adopting increasingly strange behavior: young Minato comes home injured from school, throws himself out of the moving car… Is he the victim of mistreatment from an abusive teacher? Or is he harassing Yori, one of his classmates? Kore-eda piles up the clues, complicates the case by creating narrative and poetic rhymes, in a plot that is almost like a detective film, and where the viewer himself is invited to find his way through the narrative maze. Then, once the pieces come together, Innocence ends up being struck by lightning. Because as always with the filmmaker, the delicacy of the line does not prohibit, far from it, a harshness and bitterness in the societal observation.

Frédéric Foubert

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PREMIERE LIKED A LOT

MY ROBOT FRIEND ★★★★☆

By Pablo Berger

Images, sounds and music… and not a single dialogue to tell the story of a friendship between a dog and a robot that he commanded to break with the loneliness that weighed on him in the New York of the years 80. You will not see more sensitive, more joyful and more heartbreaking at the end of 2023. By following the (mis)adventures of this dog forced to abandon his robot – turned off after having taken a dip in the ocean – on a beach which closes its doors that same evening until the following summer, Berger succeeds in everything. The growing strength of the bond between the two friends, the suddenness of their separation, the cartoonish strategies imagined by the dog to enter this beach and remove his robot, the forced mourning of their friendship. All with animation as clear and elegant as its story, never seeking to target this or that audience, child or adult. A tour de force.

Thierry Cheze

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FIRST TO LIKE

VERMINES ★★★☆☆

By Sébastien Vaniček

Do horror and social issues go well together? Sébastien Vaniček proves that yes with this first feature, centered on a group of young people fueled by the desire to escape the hell of the neighborhood where they live. At the center of this microcosm, Kaleb, a little guy living off the resale of sneakers, imagines himself cultivating his own garden, as he sets out to do on the scale of his bedroom where butterflies, slugs and other insects coexist. or less benevolent. When he unknowingly brings back a killer spider that reproduces at an incredible speed, a group of miracles will come together to try to escape this gradual threat. Sébastien Vaniček makes people coexist here Arachnophobia And Wretchedmultiplying the anthology scenes by taking advantage of the spaces of the building, moving brilliantly from a tiny bathroom to the filthy underground where the incredible climax of the film takes place.

Yohan Haddad

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DREAM SCENARIO ★★★☆☆

By Kristoffer Börgli

Nicolas Cage in cage. Or almost. His character – Paul Matthews, an insignificant teacher – soon realizes that almost everyone dreams of him. Suddenly he is the passive hero of the sleeping people. Which doesn’t stop it from going “viral” on social networks and attracting communicators ready to gorge on the beast. All this Kafkaesque rise in power results halfway through in an inevitable reversal of value because man taking action upsets an order which had been precisely established on his passivity. With this film labeled A24 with Ari Aster producing and the spirit of Charlie Kaufman hovering between the lines, the Norwegian Kristoffer Borgli, discovered with Sick of Myself, continues here to caricature, not without superbly, our egocentric and overly connected world.

Thomas Baura

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A MATTER OF HONOR ★★★☆☆

By Vincent Perez

“All my hope is in iron” said Charles III, Duke of Bourbon. This is a bit like what Colonel Berchère (Vincent Perez), a violent man, obsessed with honor and ready to draw his sword at the slightest opportunity, might proclaim… When he enters into conflict with Clément Lacaze (Roschdy Zem, marmorean), a taciturn master of arms and tired of the violence of the time, these are two conceptions of the world which will clash. Vincent Perez films this obsessive rivalry between two men with great effectiveness. If Berchère seems prisoner of his strange conception of honor, the character of Lacaze tells of the weariness of conflicts, a new need for harmony and equality. Very influenced by The Duelists by Rildey Scott, A matter of honor dust off the cloak and dagger film. On guard!

Peter Lunn

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FIRST TO MODERATELY LIKED

5 HECTARES ★★☆☆☆

By Emilie Deleuze

A high-level researcher decides to leave Paris and his comfortable daily life to settle with his wife in Limousin, where he bought five hectares of land, without ever having set foot there. The urban man confronted with the countryside… The new Emilie Deleuze (his first since Makeover in 2016) hardly suffocates under originality. But has the merit of never locking its urban and rural characters into archetypes and of blowing here and there – an epic around the purchase of a tractor, in the lead – a wind of madness which, alas, never carries away this story far too established, far too wise to fully seduce. Too bad because with a cast of the level of the central trio Lambert Wilson-Marina Hands and Laurent Poitrenaud as supporting roles (Lionel Dray, brilliant as a depressive peasant and terribly endearing), there was enough to make us think outside the box.

Thierry Cheze

And also

This house, by Miryam Charles

Kina & Yuk: Fox of the ice floes by Guillaume Maidatchevsky

The Segpa on skis, by Ali and Hakim Bougheraba

The covers

Assaultby John Carpenter

Fear and desireby Stanley Kubrick

Mary at all costby Peter and Bobby Farrelly