Reality, Closing Your Eyes, The Jungle Bunch 2: New in theaters this week
What to see in theaters
THE EVENT
REALITY ★★★★☆
By Tina Satter
The essential
An exciting film both in substance and in form about a whistleblower – the very first convicted under the Espionage Act under the presidency of Donald Trump, in 2018 – where Sydney Sweeney impresses in the title role.
An NSA employee, Reality Winner was in 2018 the first whistleblower convicted under the Espionage Act under the Trump presidency for having leaked a document revealing an attempted Russian hack in the latter’s election. And to tell it, Tina Satter has chosen a hybrid form, between fiction and documentary. By relying on the transcription of the audio recording of the interrogation of Reality Winner by two FBI agents but by having the situation replayed by actors. The result is exciting. Firstly because it puts us instantly in the head of Reality – disconcerted to see the FBI agents arrive at her home – then in the strange – very Lynchian – atmosphere of this interrogation. The form here totally marries the content to question the notion of reality, eminently more complex than it seems at first glance. And all this is carried by an exceptional Sydney Sweeney in the role of this young woman with disarming normality and her way of gradually revealing her complexity.
Thierry Cheze
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FIRST TO MANY LOVED
KASABA ★★★★☆
By Nuri Bilge Ceylan
A few weeks later THE Dried herbsits distributor Memento has the good idea to offer this Kasaba, the very first feature film directed by Nuri Bilge Ceylan in 1999. The action takes place in the 1970s and begins in a school class where the teacher has his pupils read aloud the rules that govern Turkish social life. And the children’s faces literally take possession of an action that matches the languor of suspended time. Kasaba is a wonderful film about the gaze. The beauty of the compositions testifies to the importance of an expressiveness enhanced by a divine naturalism (one thinks a lot of Tarkovsky). This film is as much a discovery (it remained unseen in France) as a sign of recognition (all of Ceylon is already there) Hurry to the theaters!
Thomas Bauras
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CLOSE EYES ★★★★☆
By Victor Erice
For his first feature film since The Dream of Light in 1992, Victor Erice staged both the story of a shooting, a film within the film around a child to be found in the depths of Asia, then that of an actor who disappears, interrupting at the same time creation. Ellipse. Two decades have passed. The mystery of this evaporation remains whole. However, the unfortunate director solicited by a TV show, agrees to dive back into his memories, to close his eyes to find the spirit of the absent. From there, Erice weaves a film about memory, the permanence of things, and the absolute desire to fix images whose power does not depend on their mere presence but on an arrangement within a mysterious continuum. Dizzy.
Thomas Bauras
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FIRST LOVED
SECOND YOUTH ★★★☆☆
By Gianni Di Gregorio
After The Lunch of August 15, Gianni and the women, good for nothing And Citizens of the world, Second youth marks a break in continuity for Gianni di Gregorio. Because if he still plays the central role in an atmosphere of benevolent fantasy, for the first time the character is no longer called by his first name but Astolfo and the action leaves Rome for a small Italian village That of the ancestors of this teacher penniless retiree who moved there after being evicted from his Roman apartment. From this starting point, Gianni Di Gregorio draws the story of a rebirth. That of this man who will overcome loneliness by making a band of colorful friends but above all by finding love again. These scenes facing a septuagenarian character also aspiring to find a second youth are a happiness all the more pure as Di Gregorio had the great idea of calling on Stefania Sandrelli for this role (THE Conformist). Whimsical, joyful but capable of bringing tears to your eyes without you seeing anything coming, Second youth is a gem of Italian comedy.
Thierry Cheze
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THE ACES OF THE JUNGLE – OPERATION AROUND THE WORLD ★★★☆☆
By Laurent Bru, Yannick Moulin and Benoît Somville
Six years after thwarting the plans of an evil koala, the Aces of the Jungle are back to save their territory. This time, a strange pink foam, which explodes on contact with water, threatens the forest one month before the rainy season. No choice: in order not to see their house reduced to dust, the fine team must quickly find an antidote. Then begins a long and perilous journey modeled on theice age 2 (the melting of the ice or the disappearance of the jungle, each with its own environmental problems…). This second opus, in the vein of the first, is marked by some nice finds, a colorful “American-style” animation, and humor primarily intended for children. But it also reserves a good dose of references and second degree that can make parents smile.
Sarah Deslandes
STRANGE WAY OF LIFE ★★★☆☆
By Pedro Almodóvar
Exploring these days the short form in English, Pedro Almodóvar aims, after The Human Voice in 2020, to deliver his own version of the western in thirty minutes. With in the center Silva (Pedro Pascal), a cowboy who crosses the desert on horseback to visit Sheriff Jake (Ethan Hawke), whom he knew well twenty-five years earlier when they were hired killers. We quickly discover that the two men had romantic ties but also that Silva made this trip in a very particular interest. With a brilliant sense of melodrama and sensual use of scenery, the filmmaker portrays melancholy, aging heroes who recall that at age 73 years old, he too begins to look back with nostalgia. And we regret all the more to have to leave these romantic cowboys so quickly.
Damien LeBlanc
WHEN THE WAVES RETREAT ★★★☆☆
By Lav Diaz
In black and white borrowing its gritty expressiveness from early cinema, Lav Diaz recounts here the moral crisis of a police lieutenant. The man, tired of the horrors the state forces him to commit to fight crime, seeks redemption. Above all, he sees psoriasis covering his skin, the marks of a badly damaged karma. At the same time, a man just released from prison sets out to find him for revenge. The deceptively languid staging of the Filipino filmmaker adept at long formats – his woman who left, Golden Lion at Venice in 2016 flirted with four hours – seeking above all to capture through duration, the senses – even the reason – of the spectator. It happens that within an often fixed frame, the bodies remain in suspension or on the contrary, dance, as if to return a confiscated energy. It is for those who populate Lav Diaz’s films to refuse their own annihilation. Shadows thirsting for light, refusing darkness.
Thomas Bauras
THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE ★★★☆☆
By Patrick Chiha
Love seen as a Faustian pact that promises a crossing of time under the protective neon lights of the fake nights of a discotheque. May (Anaïs Demoustier) and John (Tom Mercier, revealed by Synonyms by Nadav Lapid) thus see rhythms and modes follow one another like irremovable vampires waiting for the big night. The arrival of Mitterrand in power, the ravages of AIDS, the attacks on the World Trade Center…, so many time markers that pass and slip away in the off-screen of a reality kept at a distance. The Beast in the Jungle, freely adapted from a short story by Henry James, is a film with dark romanticism, dark poetry, which under its baroque scrolls deploys a claimed sensuality. And if it sometimes comes up against its own limits (narrative redundancies and stylistic affectations), this singular object seduces.
Thomas Bauras
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FIRST TO MODERATELY LOVED
ABDELINHO ★★☆☆☆
By Hicham Ayouch
Abdellah loves shimmering colors and provocative dances. His own Morocco is more like Rio de Janeiro, hence his nickname Abdelinho. By building his story around the clash between this ignited samba host and an enlightened fundamentalist televangelist, Hicham Ayouch does not do half measures. On the one hand, the fanatic who has come to save the country from the disbelievers who dance to the “Devil’s music”; on the other, the hero of modern times who came to free him from his conservative Muslim doctrines. Not to mention that in the midst of this joyful chaos, our Brazilian (at heart) falls in love with a television heroine. But the forbidden and the inaccessible end up losing their charm in too many scenes that sound like the daily meeting of a bad Brazilian soap opera. Wanting too much to confront the mores of these two cultures, Ayouch falls into a caricatural antagonism at the heart of a badly put together telenovela-like plot that never allows this light and colorful comedy to rise to the height of ambitious social satire.
Lou Hupel
And also
Blue Beetleby Angel Manuel
The covers
Farewell my concubine, by Chen Kaige
Do not swallowby Gary Oldman
