Memory, La Belle de Gaza, Abigail: What’s new at the cinema this week

What to see in theaters

THE EVENT
MEMORY ★★★☆☆

By Michel Franco

The essential

When the meeting of two broken souls gives birth to the most unexpected love story. Michel Franco splits the armor and it suits him well

A film like a puzzle in which we discover unexpected pieces until the final image. We first meet Sylvie, whose need for a structured daily life built around her work, her daughter and her evenings with Alcoholics Anonymous so as not to relapse. And then at a high school reunion, she thinks she recognizes Saul as one of her classmates who sexually assaulted her. Saul who, that evening, will follow her, sleep outside her apartment and no longer remember anything in the morning because of the illness which destroys his memory. Sylvie will quickly understand that her memory is also playing tricks on her, but this encounter will forever change everything within her, giving her the courage to confront her past and hope to find love again. With this moving melodrama, Franco cracks the armor like never before, but in a climate of tension and instability which nip any sentimentality in the bud.

Thierry Cheze

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PREMIERE LIKED A LOT

THE BEAUTIFUL OF GAZA ★★★★☆

By Yolande Zauberman

In this documentary which closes his trilogy begun with How to have sex with an Arab? And M, Yolande Zauberman goes in search of a trans woman who fled Gaza to walk to Tel Aviv. The film is structured in a succession of portraits which reveal an extraordinary breath of life (and death). The involuntary instigator of this trip, this Belle from Gaza, will remain untraceable. But its absence ends up becoming the very legitimacy of a story which feeds on the mystery it arouses and of which night is the great organizer. As in American noir films, darkness does not seek to hide a shameful truth so much as 'to reveal through dissimulation the pain of the beings who inhabit it. Darkness is first of all a refuge for these women left to their own devices in a world that refuses them. Yolande Zauberman with her camera is not an intruder who comes to extract some sensations during an immersion. The exchange materializes through the grace of a staging close to the beings from which a tragic beauty emerges. Powerful.

Thomas Baura

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FIRST TO LIKE

SALEM ★★★☆☆

By Jean-Bernard Marlin

Djibril, locked in a psychiatric hospital, remembers his past. As a child, he was a prominent member of a Comorian gang, in love with Camilla, a gypsy from the enemy band of Grillons… Until the day Camilla became pregnant… Six years later Scheherazade, Jean-Bernard Marlin returns to set up his camera in Marseille with this Shakespearean drama which risks disconcerting his early fans. In an anti-realist movement, the film evokes this forbidden love through astonishing fantastic sequences. This material allows Marlin to question a social phenomenon little discussed in French cinema: do false prophets hold a part of the truth? But the filmmaker does not bother to explain his point, preferring to leave the viewer with some imagination while focusing on the romantic dimension of his story. The spontaneity of the actors, chosen during a wild casting process, makes the whole thing even more moving.

Yohan Haddad

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ADAM IS CHANGING SLOWLY ★★★☆☆

By Joël Vaudreuil

With this animated film, Canadian Joël Vaudreuil creates a touching (and often very funny) fable about the discomfort and trauma of adolescents, particularly those who are not lucky enough to have a body – and a mind. – within the norm. We follow Adam, a 15-year-old young man who is too tall, self-conscious, and hunchbacked, whose physique has the astonishing particularity of changing depending on the mockery and negative comments that those around him don't hesitate to throw at him. Through this deadpan portrait of an outcast who just wants to escape his bubble, Vaudreuil casually questions the mechanics of ordinary harassment by derailing the clichés of high school films. A film on the margins, zany and singular.

François Leger

GREENHOUSE ★★★☆☆

By Lee Soi-hui

Moon-Jung is a home caregiver for an elderly couple. He is blind, she has a neurodegenerative disease and cannot manage herself. Moon-Jung skillfully juggles domestic chores and her incarcerated son, until an accident forces her to make an unmanageable decision… With a lot of dark humor and a keen sense of suspense, director Sol-hui Lee signs a psychological thriller about decline and the way society pushes ordinary beings to commit the irreparable. A first film not free from faults (the slightly disappointing conclusion and certain scenes bordering on the credible), but whose slow pace and the modesty of the direction manage to reflect the cruelty of the trap into which she has put herself. -even its protagonist.

François Leger

ANOTHER LIFE THAN MINE ★★★☆☆

By Malgorzata Szumowska and Michal Englert

Forty-five years in the life of a transgender woman. In Poland in the 1980s, Andrzej feels stuck in a life that is not his own… The pitfall of the thesis film is avoided by this portrait in the form of an intimate epic, a hushed odyssey where the destiny of the The heroine emerges through brief, elliptical scenes. In the background, it is also the history of Poland that parades, from communism to capitalism – and, from one to the other, its constant indifference to the rights of transgender people. Malgorzata Hajewska's poignant interpretation cements it all.

Frédéric Foubert

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FIRST TO MODERATELY LIKED

ABIGAIL ★★☆☆☆

By Matt Batinelli and Tyler Gillett

A gang of kidnappers who don't know each other seize a girl and confine her overnight in a strange house. Things will escalate in an unexpected way (if you haven't seen the trailer), and extremely gory (at least by American standards). Behind closed doors hyper bis, it's a rather interesting exercise in style, provided there is style: and the directors of the last two Scream to date fail to inject enough into Abigail so that the film becomes a real B series, as joyful and fun as its parents aspired to be. As is, Abigail resembles little more than a spin-off of resident Evil : fortunately, the casting performs well, notably Melissa Barrera and especially the adorable (and very strong) Kevin Durand, perfectly at ease in this type of film. It even seems like he deserves better than that.

Sylvestre Picard

LAZY.ES ★★☆☆☆

By Karim Dridi

How to film a marginal fringe of society? Like a road movie, Lazy·are follows the journey of two women who separate before finding each other again, and offers a myriad of micro-events, all ordeals to overcome when living on the margins of the system, without housing or fixed work. It’s a shame that the political dimension of these destinies never ignites the staging and is confined to a few symbols: a finger thrown at a cop or an anti-racist slogan on a sweater…

Nicholas Moreno

ASSEMBLY ★★☆☆☆

By Sofiene Mamdi

The gesture testifies to a desire for cinema which crosses the screen. With her first feature, Sofiene Mamdois signs the longest film made up of a single film in the history of French cinema. But all in his obsession with form (where he shows real virtuosity), he sacrificed the substance of his story over the course of a stringy scenario whose air gaps end up damaging the climate of suspense at the end. cord that he aims to create here.

Thierry Cheze

Et also

Anhell 69, by Will Ashurst

Public Enemy No. 0, by Amalric Gérard

39-45 They have not forgotten anything, by Germain Aguesse

Parabolic Uchronietzsche, by Alexandre Bellas

The covers

The Ascension, by Larissa Chepitko

Tears of joy, by Mario Monicelli