Migration, Suddenly Alone, Building 5: What’s new at the cinema this week
What to see in theaters
THE EVENT
MIGRATION ★★★☆☆
By Benjamin Renner
The essential
When the co-director ofErnest and Celestine meet the creator of The White Lotus…A mischievous animated film.
The new animated film from Illumination studios brings together a new duo: the co-director ofErnest and Celestine and the creator of The White Lotus, the Frenchman Benjamin Renner and the American Mike White. On the program: the adventures of a family of mallards leaving their peaceful New England pond for the first time and confronting their fears of the unknown for a great journey to Jamaica via New York. A hymn to the need to leave one’s comfort zone to enjoy life, populated by irresistibly mischievous characters and an undeniable sense of rhythm. But it is above all the success of Renner’s transition from a minimalist animation style to computer animation and 3D which proves to be a real success. Migration will amaze you without ever falling into the race to amaze you.
Thierry Cheze
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PREMIERE LIKED A LOT
SUDDENLY ALONE ★★★★☆
By Thomas Bidegain
Adapting a novel by sailor Thomas Bidegain, it tells the story of the setbacks of Ben and Laura, a couple for 5 years, who are traveling around the world by boat and find themselves stranded on a depopulated island near the Antarctic coast due to a storm. as winter approaches. Thanks to a realistic treatment of anxiety and danger, Suddenly alone offers a brilliant setting for its two remarkable actors, Gilles Lellouche and Mélanie Thierry. Linking the struggle for physical survival and the exploration of intimate feelings finally laid bare, Bidegain shows how this couple must take inventory of their romantic relationship to try to resist a trying nature. The narration thus alternates, with unstoppable fluidity, between moments of despair and bursts of energy for an exciting result.
Damien Leblanc
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GODZILLA MINUS ONE ★★★★☆
by Takashi Yamazaki
Official prequel designed to celebrate 70 years of the legendary Godzilla from 1954, Godzilla Minus One does not have the ambition to be a beast reboot: no rereading of the franchise with the aesthetics of the 2020s: director Takashi Yamazaki, already in charge of the visual effects of the magnificent Shin Godzilla (which has finally been released on Blu-ray in France, seven years after its Japanese release), gives his film a stunning retro patina, where we find Spielbergian flashes (those ofAlways and Sea teethbrought together in the same film), characters straight out of 1950s sci-fi movies (the scientist with glasses who presents his eccentric plan to defeat the monster on slides)… GMO can be appreciated above all as a great, bright and professional adventure film, which beautifully celebrates the strength of the collective in the face of government inertia. Minus One will be released in French theaters for two days only (December 7 and 8, in IMAX), so don’t miss it.
Sylvestre Picard
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FIRST TO LIKE
THE CHIMERA ★★★☆☆
By Alice Rohrwacher
In her fourth feature, Alice Rohrwacher features a singular archaeologist, capable of detecting Etruscan tombs hidden in the ground using only the power of magical intuition. A young man at the head of a gang of grave desecrators who sell the fruits of their plundering to the highest bidder but who, detached from the world around him, seems possessed or rather dispossessed of everything. Like her archaeologist, the Italian filmmaker has a unique way of considering the staging and her camera seems to replace the lens of a camera constantly searching for the shot to capture. Hence this impression of controlled floating. It borders on auteurist affectation but this falsely languid advance suits this film-an assumed dream.
Thomas Baura
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THE CHILD OF PARADISE ★★★☆☆
By Salim Kechiouche
Comedian with unstoppable charm, Salim Kechiouche (Criminal Lovers, Mektoub, My Love…) goes behind the camera for the first time with this portrait of a rising actor and his conflicting relationships with his ex-wife, his son, his old friends and his city, which exert uncontrollable pressure on him. With his documentary approach, the actor-director unveils a film of astonishing sincerity, depicting with great accuracy the pressure that weighs on these hopes of French cinema who try to rise to avoid falling into oblivion. Behind the disillusions, Salim Kechiouche plunges the viewer into the heart of a painful (and inevitably autobiographical) family story, inviting them into the cramped kitchen of an aunt seen as a wise man in order to heal the insurmountable death of the mother.
Yohan Haddad
LEVANTE ★★★☆☆
By Lilla Halla
For her first feature, the Brazilian Lilla Halla features Sofia, 17, a player with undeniable talent approached by a renowned training center who seeks to have an illegal abortion after learning of her unwanted pregnancy and violently clashes with fundamentalist conservatives . Because in Brazil, while the residue of Bolsonaro’s policies remains, abortion is still illegal and criminally repressed. In a demanding gesture, Lillah Halla decides to make it the substance of this film carried by the fiery performance of Ayomi Domenica Dias, both a diatribe of an archaic system and a celebration of the right to dispose of one’s body. A true cry of insurrection and celebrating sorority, Levante unequivocally testifies to the effervescence of an anger which will never again be repressed.
Lucie Chiquer
FREMONT ★★★☆☆
By Babak Jalali
Square format, grainy black and white, generally still shots… we find in the direction of the Iranian Babak Jalali, the stigmata of an indie cinema of the 80s of which Jarmusch was then the leading figure. But although burdened with this apparent heritage, Fremont also and above all traces its own path. Donya, 20, is an Afghan refugee who lives in her community near San Francisco but does not intend to be reduced to her roots, even less to her social status. The story advances in an enveloping languor whose apparent monotony is thwarted by this heroine who sees all the characters she meets find a strong sense of calm in her contact. And the staging, of rare elegance, succeeds in instilling an incredible charm.
Thomas Baura
THE BIG SHOP ★★★☆☆
By Yoshimi Itazu
Akino is an apprentice janitor. Not in a building as you might expect, but in a department store. In this chic establishment inspired by Parisian shopping centers, the young woman is responsible for accompanying customers and responding to their often eccentric requests. We thus follow for a little over an hour the first beginnings of this little heroine, clumsy and endearing, within her new company. One detail stands out: the sellers are all human. Customers are animals. The scenario of this Big store fits in a pocket handkerchief. If the great mystery of the film – what world are we in? – is only used in the last minutes to convey an environmentalist message, the characters are upsetting every second.
Emma Poesy
BUNGALOW ★★★☆☆
By Lawrence Côté-Collins
The purchase of a new apartment or a house to renovate proves in 99.9% of cases a source of repeated hassle, the incredible aspect of which constitutes an inexhaustible source of inspiration for screenwriters. And it was precisely nourished by his own painful experiences that Quebecer Lawrence Côté-Collins imagined this Bungalow where a young couple on the verge of becoming parents think they have found their cozy little nest without realizing that the signing of this house in the suburbs of Montreal marks first and foremost the beginning of their descent into hell. The shadow of the Coen brothers hangs over this well-shaken black comedy. Throughout situations where the director has chosen the weapon of burlesque as the central piece of her satire against the excesses of a consumer society which pushes us to always want more. beautiful, ever bigger, ever more gleaming before the social pressure it induces causes the most fragile to implode in mid-flight in their quest for inaccessible postcard happiness. A film as joyful as it is grating.
Thierry Cheze
THE SOILED DOVES OF TIJUANA ★★★☆☆
By Jean-Charles Hue
A Mexican city like an infinite cinematographic territory. After half a dozen shorts and a feature-length fiction film (Tijuana Bible), Jean-Charles Hue tells Tijuana through a documentary dedicated to prostitutes selling their bodies there to survive and pay for the dope to which they are addicted. With its camera, never intrusive and yet incredibly close, Hue bears witness to their distress without an ounce of miserabilism, through the grace of its enveloping production.
Thierry Cheze
KOKOMO CITY ★★★☆☆
By D. Smith
From the first images, their charisma radiates. Daniella, Dominique, Koko and Liyah are transgender and African-American sex workers. In front of the camera of director D. Smith, they speak with great humor about their experiences as trans women: the first operations, the sometimes complicated relationships with heterosexual men who come to see them without assuming their desires. The very careful production does justice to its colorful characters.
Emma Poesy
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FIRST TO MODERATELY LIKED
BUILDING 5 ★★☆☆☆
By Ladj Ly
A few men slowly lower a heavy coffin through the endless staircase of a suburban tower block. With this introductory sequence as impressive as it is accusatory, Ladj Ly describes the project of his film. The unsanitary conditions of the buildings, the social poverty in the suburbs… this is all that the film tells about as it follows Haby, a young activist for housing rights, who, along with other residents of the neighborhood, tries to resist evictions. After Wretched, the filmmaker explores suburban life through another prism. He would like to do his The Wire French but falls into all the traps that he was partly able to avoid in his first film. Didactic, artificial in the sequence of situations and caricature in the acting and in the characterization of the characters, Building 5 is no longer driven by anything other than good feelings, agit-prop and the desire to settle scores. This is legitimate, but all this makes fiction Manichean and ineffective.
Gaël Golhen
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BLUE SUMMER ★★☆☆☆
By Xiao Bai Chuan
For her first feature discovered at the Filmmakers’ Fortnight, Chinese director Zihan Geng portrays a 15-year-old teenager, a shy child of divorced parents, whose heart races for the rebellious daughter of her father’s new partner. An initiatory love story with an air of déjà vu, because of characters locked into archetypes. Too bad because the play on colors and the grain of the image expresses with great finesse the troubles of adolescence and the contradictory feelings that accompany it.
Thierry Cheze
And also
The Mechanics of Thingsby Alessandra Celesia
Merry Christmasby Clément Michel
Paris Lost & foundby Kartik Singh
