The Boy and the Heron, The Kidnapping, Flo: New releases at the cinema this week
What to see in theaters
THE EVENT
THE BOY AND THE HERON ★★★★☆
By Hayao Miyazaki
The essential
After ten years of absence, Hayao Miyazaki returns with a splendid film. Either the spiritual epic of a young bereaved boy, which fascinates the eye as much as it questions the future and the legacy that the Japanese master will leave.
Ten years after THE Wind rises, accompanied by a hasty rumor of retirement artistic by Hayao Miyazaki, the arrival of the new film by the immense Japanese filmmaker constitutes a major event. It all began with a huge fire which pushed young Mahito to run through the streets to try to reach the hospital where his mother died then, marked by mourning, to leave Tokyo with his father to settle in the village where his mother had grown up. There where he will meet a strange heron who will guide him into a world populated by ghosts and magical secrets.
The journey of the young hero summons Alice in Wonderland Or Pan’s Labyrinthbut the masterful deployment of the Miyazakian unconscious is definitely unlike any other. The Boy and the Heron questions the future of the planet and wonders if it is possible to re-enchant the world. Miyazaki thereby questions his own destiny: will he find heirs or will the filmic universe he created disappear with him? Inhabited by these powerful questions, this fable which deals with survival becomes madly exhilarating.
Damien Leblanc
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PREMIERE LIKED A LOT
ZORN I, II AND III ★★★★☆
By Mathieu Amalric
He is the pope of avant-garde jazz. A musical alien who shamelessly passes from the most radical exercise noise to the most fluid of lounge melodies. Zorn I, Zorn II And Zorn III directed by Mathieu Almaric, friend and admirer of the musician, are three puzzle documentaries which capture live pieces of the mad saxophonist’s daily life and concerts. Originally composed as filmic breaths broadcast in the middle of his marathon concerts, they finally have the right to a theatrical release and basically remind us that what links the cinema of Amalric and the music of Zorn: the same obsession for rhythm, a telluric and overflowing energy entirely devoted to art, and an ogre’s appetite for life.
Gaël Golhen
MARX CAN WAIT ★★★★☆
By Marco Bellocchio
The same week as his new film Pick up, here comes this documentary by Marco Bellocchio, discovered at the Cannes Film Festival in 2021 and which we longed to see again because it moved us so much. Better yet, this Marx can wait considers itself a cornerstone of the Italian’s work as it illuminates it deep within its depths. It is the story of Camillo, Marco’s twin brother, who committed suicide at the age of 29, a Rimbaldian hero whose political torments of the time (1968) and the disillusionments that went with them, got the better of his faith and of his reason. Bellocchio reunites his family, breaks an omerta, and wonders about this missing double whose ghost hovers above a filmography which never ceases to confront: consciousness and unconsciousness, commitment and renunciation, wounded intimacy and tortured emancipation. Essential.
Thomas Baura
FIRST TO LIKE
PICK UP ★★★☆☆
By Marco Bellocchio
Pick up is the story of a slow agony, that of the Papal States and their progressive attachment to the Kingdom of Italy from the death of the inflexible Pius IX in 1878. With, in the middle of this inevitable chaos, a child born in a Jewish family from Bologna in 19th century Italy, baptized without his parents’ knowledge by his nanny, then torn from his family by the Inquisition, his fate quickly becoming a power issue for the church. Bellocchio bathes its frames in a magnificent evening light. Everything is in place, beautifully composed and yet there is this feeling that the essential is missing. Its staging only achieves transcendence in fits and starts. We would have liked to see Bellocchio make a great film about the brutality of the adult world seen through the eyes of a frightened and tormented child. The filmmaker deliberately imposes a distance.
Thomas Baura
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INSIDE ★★★☆☆
By Vasilis Katsoupis
A gifted art thief finds himself trapped in a luxury New York penthouse when the security system goes haywire. Trapped in this golden prison, the burglar will have to survive with the little water and food available. Psychological survival not devoid of humor, Inside would very much like to go beyond its initial premise to tell the story of the inanity of rich collectors and the social crushing of the weak by the powerful. But the film remains stuck at the first level. The fault of the solid but without genius staging of Vasilis Katsoupis which does not, however, prevent Inside to function as a pure perverse spectator pleasure, where the weathered and malleable face of Willem Dafoe – more and more fascinating – becomes a kind of canvas projecting in turn anxiety, madness and euphoria, with a stunning intensity .
François Léger
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MARGUERITE’S THEOREM ★★★☆☆
By Anna Novion
With this third feature film in fifteen years (after The big people And Meet in Kiruna), Anna Novion manages to fascinate us with a mathematician character whose trajectory initially seems marked out. Marguerite – played to perfection by Ella Rumpf – is finishing a math thesis at the ENS when she suddenly gives up her studies to experience a more adventurous life in the heart of Paris. Riveted to the emotions of a heroine who feels out of step with the world, this learning story passes through different atmospheres (the shy mathematician will become a formidable Mah-jong player in dark rooms) and is based on a setting in an energizing scene thanks to which this filmic, intellectual and sentimental theorem is resolved hands down.
Damien Leblanc
GHOST PORTRAITS ★★★☆☆
De Kleber Mendonça Filho
The intimate is universal. We know this only too well. The intimate is political, geographical, architectural, nostalgic or melancholic. He is also a movie buff. This is what Kleber Mendonça Filho essentially tells us (Aquarius And Bacurau) with this feature-length documentary. The 54-year-old Brazilian returns to Recife, his birthplace and Brazilian capital of the state of Pernambuco. He observes his childhood home, his memories, his neighbors, their fences, his streets, his cinema. Wanders from face to face. Mixes archive images, film extracts and personal impressions. He films, all in poetry, the emotion of the places and the unfolding of time. And we find almost something Rohmerian in this hazardous navigation through the colorful city which shows us that identity is geographical, or “geo-social”.
Estelle Aubin
THE LAIR OF OPPOSITES ★★★☆☆
By Léa Rinaldi
Under the guise of an episode of 90′ surveys, the Compagnie des Contraires, sets up its marquee in Chanteloup les Vignes, a town located in the Paris suburbs, where vandalism reigns. Neusa Thomasi, a valiant undocumented Brazilian, is behind this solidarity project. This fighter grants an enchanted parenthesis to a youth losing his elevation. The children escape from the tension that surrounds them by verbalizing the tirades of timeless plays. Well aware of the context, Neusa does not infantilize this youth prematurely confronted with an environment hostile to innocence. Theatrical performances bring together a disarming tenderness where budding actors exercise the great cultural gap within this dome which freezes time and marks minds in a moving way. A documentary, filmed over 3 years, like a glimmer of hope.
Manon Bellahcene
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FIRST TO MODERATELY LIKED
FLO ★★☆☆☆
By Géraldine Danon
Florence Arthaud falls into the water, struggles… and her life comes to the surface. It’s all there: the inaugural car accident, his baptism at sea in Newport in 76, sailors, flirting, courage and freedom. But there are also ramblings, between whispered truths and fantasized reconstructions, like this love story with Kersauson culminating in a wedding scene bigger than life. The puzzle story is a little disjointed, sometimes too thick. But the film benefits from two unstoppable advantages. The sea scenes, filmed with a sense of vertigo and adventure, are breathtaking – his Route du Rhum 90 will drive any Virtual Regata fan crazy. And then there is Stéphane Caillard. With her lioness hairstyle, grasseye voice and breathtaking charisma, she does justice to this woman who, more than a sportswoman, was deep down a true rock star.
Peter Lunn
MMXX ★★☆☆☆
By Cristi Puiu
MMXX i.e. 2020, year zero of Covid. Cristi Puiu releases his “masked” film for us, divided into four chapters, a priori distinct dramatically, except for the redundancy of a character ensuring a semblance of a link. First it’s a psychologist who sees a patient full of herself, then a young woman – surrounded by two big idiots – painfully trying to get news from a friend who has been hastily admitted to a maternity ward. We continue with two nurses who talk about an Albanian mafia. Said mafia whose extreme brutality we will see in a final, lighter part. Each time, the staging, with demonic precision, reflects a concern. So much palaver does not make an epic, even if it is still. Puiu once again takes on the role of entomologist of a threatened and not really glorious human species.
Thomas Baura
And also
Completely burnt outby Gilles Legardinier
Invaluableby Eric Fraticelli
Mr. Mayorby Karine Blanc and Michel Tavares
