Killers of the flower moon, Linda wants chicken!, A difficult year: what’s new at the cinema this week
What to see in theaters.
THE EVENT
KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON ★★★★★
By Martin Scorsese
The essential
Martin Scorsese brings together Robert De Niro and Leonardo DiCaprio in a thrilling criminal fresco with the overtones of a funeral march.
Discovered out of competition at the Cannes Film Festival, the new Martin Scorsese, adapted from The American Note by David Grann, is an impressive dirge, a twilight and majestic film looking back on a wave of murders committed against the Osage Indians in Oklahoma in the 1920s. Against a backdrop of hypnotic folk and blues, Scorsese films the postscript bloody and sordid Indian wars, carried by the duo De Niro-DiCaprio, in a delightful number of pathetic scoundrels, and the brilliant Lily Gladstone, who plays what could well be the most beautiful female character of the filmmaker since Sharon Stone of Casino.
Frédéric Foubert
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PREMIERE LIKED A LOT
LINDA WANTS CHICKEN! ★★★★☆
By Chiara Malta and Sébastien Laudenbach
Paulette has unjustly punished her daughter Linda, and to accept her mother’s apologies, the kid tells her to cook her late father’s recipe for chicken with peppers. But because of a national strike, stores are desperately closed. Paulette’s promise therefore looks more complicated than expected to keep… Far from the world of her impressive tale The Girl Without HandsSébastien Laudenbach signs with Chiara Malta a story of mourning disguised as an incredible comedy, where each character is characterized by thick black lines and a very specific color. Full of gags and narrative exploits, a form of euphoric and contagious resistance against fate and the established order.
François Léger
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A PRINCE ★★★★☆
By Pierre Creton
It is with a lot of nerve, a few fixed shots and the voice-overs of Matthieu Amalric, Françoise Lebrun and Grégory Gadebois, that Pierre Creton recounts the sexual and professional life of Pierre-Joseph, since he was 16 when he joined a center of training to become a gardener, he met Françoise, Alberto and Adrien, who each in their own way, left a mark on him, on him. A prince is a rare work that ventures into great eroticism, the antithesis of pornography. There is no longer any need to show off to seduce, we just need to let ourselves be captivated by what we are allowed to see of these men’s bodies (and imagine from these delusional visions. More than a fiction, a herbarium libidinal in the open!
Nicholas Moreno
FIRST TO LIKE
A DIFFICULT YEAR ★★★☆☆
By Eric Toledano and Olivier Nakache
Returning to the cinema after In therapy, the Nakache-Toledano duo extends its portrait of the post-confinement world by assuming a tone of social satire. The story of two over-indebted men who cross paths with environmental activists fighting against the climate crisis. To illustrate the meeting between contradictory ideologies, as in the great Italian comedies, their characters are moving with their flaws: as a father broken by grief, Jonathan Cohen is astonishing; Pio Marmaï impresses with his mix of dynamism and fragility; and Noémie Merlant, as an activist who has cut herself off from her desires, turns out to be very touching. Although the film suffers here and there from a few flaws in its political portrayal as in its sentimental intrigue, Nakache and Toledano ensure the essential: making the comedy a stimulating contemporary observation post which calls for awareness.
Damien Leblanc
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HUMAN COMEDY ★★★☆☆
By Kôji Fukada
With this Human comedydating from 2008 but unpublished in France, the Japanese Kôji Fukada adapts Balzac and therefore depicts the human condition, its universal procrastination which consumes the protagonists in a social triptych whose form echoes Tales of Chance and Other Fantasies of Hamaguchi where several acts are dedicated to disparate destinies which subtly intertwine. And of the three parts, the last, addressing the recent amputation of a man’s right arm and the place that the unfortunate person wishes to give to the mutilated limb (should it be buried? Keep it alive through phantom limb syndrome?) is the most successful. An ordinary life with an extraordinarily disturbed destiny where, brutally deprived of his right arm, a young married man must also come to terms with the happy event to come in his relationship when his infertility has been proven. Fukada perfectly sketches this deep loneliness that one can feel when faced with improbable situations of embarrassment which provide no escape.
Manon Bellahcene
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ANSELM – THE SOUND OF TIME ★★★☆☆
By Wim Wenders
Nicholas Ray, Pina Bausch, Yohji Yamamoto, Sebastiao Salgado… Portraits of artists are one of the common threads of Wim Wenders’ filmography. A few weeks before the release of his next fiction, Perfect Days, he delivers this documentary dedicated to his compatriot Anselm Kiefer. The visual artist is filmed in his vast workshops, working on his monumental works, which question ruins, nothingness and the German bad conscience. His tools? Flamethrowers, molten metal… Wenders uses 3D (of which he is one of the great champions) to give us access to the historical and philosophical depth of Kiefer’s work, in a sensory as well as a ‘intellectual. The film ends up going back to the childhood of the artist, born like Wenders in 1945, in a devastated country – an origin that he spent his life questioning.
Frédéric Foubert
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FIRST TO MODERATELY LIKED
THE TROLLS 3 ★★☆☆☆
By Walt Dohrn and Tim Heitz
For this third part, the franchise places Justin Timberlake’s past at the center of a meta plot linked to his own life: his disheveled-haired character recreates the boyband he formed twenty years earlier with his brothers. Hey, that’s good, N’SYNC are also making a comeback especially for the occasion. Very good PR move, certainly, but that will not make up for a narrative based on family resentments which does not hold up in length. Other characters will also come out of nowhere to unite against the alter egos of Sharpay and Ryan Evans in High School Musical. But although this is not a nugget of animation, the youngest will nevertheless be able to be thrilled by the frantic pace, the pop songs and the explosions of color which made the success of the saga.
Sarah Deslandes
IN GOOD COMPANY ★★☆☆☆
By Silvia Munt
In good company tells the story of the summer of 1977 of a teenager who fights for the right to abortion and women in the Spanish Basque Country. Silvia Munt (Afectados (remain standing)) depicts injustices, sisterly impulses, repeats the necessity of the struggle. But unfortunately his film tells more than it questions and struggles to create real originality. Close to recent Annie Anger with Laure Calamy but without the intensity.
Estelle Aubin
PREMIERE DID NOT LIKE
A WOMAN ON THE ROOF ★☆☆☆☆
By Anna Jadowska
Mirka is a woman without history. One morning, the sixty-year-old decides to rob a bank with an opinel, almost apologizing. The operation goes wrong. She is quickly caught by the police. The existential crisis of this old woman, filmed in slow, overexposed shots, will never really have an explanation. Yet that was the subject of the film. Anna Jadowska seems to have missed out.
Emma Poesy
And also
Priesthoodby Damien Boyer
The Tourouges and the Toubleusshort film program
The covers
The magnificentby Philippe De Broca
