The Count of Monte Cristo, Quietly: day 1, Kinds of kindness: what’s new at the cinema this week
What to see in theaters
THE EVENT
THE COUNT OF MONTE CRISTO ★★★★☆
By Matthieu Delaporte and Alexandre de La Patellière
The essential
After having scripted the two parts of the Three musketeersAlexandre de La Patellière and Matthieu Delaporte transform Pierre Niney into Monte Cristo and create a breathtaking adventure film.
For decades, this novel by Dumas has obsessed the cinema. The problem of the Delaporte-De la Patellière duo was therefore simple: how to avoid making it one of these well-crafted and very smooth liners, stuck between cultural added value and dusty heritage? First back to the book. It’s all there, ready to use (it’s no surprise that Monte Cristo invented the superhero). But you still have to dress it up with your own obsessions and, if possible, drape it with a little modernity. This is what Delaporte and de la Patellière do, who seize this pure fantasy to inject their vision, cinema and a staccatto rhythm. Their film, faithful to the text, to its language, perfectly embraces the ups and downs of the story. His madness, his outrageous grandeur. A bit like the good Rappeneaus (which we think of), this Monte Cristo therefore has only one engine: movement. And, in the title role, Pierre Niney impresses with his elegance and fluidity.
Gaël Golhen
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FIRST TO LIKE
PLASTIC GUNS ★★★☆☆
By Jean-Christophe Meurisse
Can we reasonably make people laugh with a quintuple murder? Convinced that there is humanity to be dissected (and therefore laughter to be created) behind the gloomy Xavier Dupont De Ligonnès affair, Jean-Christophe Meurisse boldly tackles the subject through a comedy. Between morbid and absurd, he transforms XXDL into Paul Bernardin, who left to live his best life in Argentina after having ruined his entire family. Constantly provocative but rarely obscene, Meurisse seeks out the most twisted things in reality to tie it to his own already crazy universe. And under its air of black farce which pays the face of a society addicted to true crimes and news items, Plastic guns reveals a much deeper reflection on the definition of a monster.
François Leger
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THE HENNEDRICKS FAMILY ★★★☆☆
By Laurence Arné
Mother of a son who annoys her to go live with his father, Justine is in a relationship with Ludo, himself the father of another child, in a daily life much calmer than her first relationship but where the struggles of money are accumulate. And when everything seems to be going to hell forever, Justine decides to take her tribe on a road trip to the Atlantic, just to strengthen ties… The playing field of this first feature is undeniably marked out: atypical families , more decomposed than recomposed. But instead of forcing an artificial singularity at all costs, Laurence Arné had the great idea of embracing the world of US indie gems of the kind she adores as a spectator. Influences assumed and perfectly digested within which, in the role of the tender father-in-law, we rediscover a Dany Boon, taken out of his comfort zone. For a devilishly endearing result.
Thierry Cheze
THE MONK AND THE GUN ★★★☆☆
By Pawo Choyning Dorji
Why would a monk want to get a gun? With such a question as a guiding principle, The Monk and the Rifle multiplies the layers of humor and complexity in his story set in 2006 in Bhutan, during the holding of the country’s first democratic elections, even as it opens up to globalization… Suspense and comedy reinforce each other and it What emerges is a complex look at the democratic process, paradoxically imposed on a population who seemed to live well without it until now. But it is when The Monk and the Gun fully assumes its fabulous dimension that it becomes irresistible, maliciously mocking globalization and advocating instead a quasi-spiritual, anti-arms and anti-war discourse.
Nicholas Moreno
LEON ★★★☆☆
By Andi Nachon and Papu Curutto
The story could seem sewn with white thread. That of the grief strewn with pitfalls of Julia who has just lost her partner Barby with whom she had opened a restaurant and whose father of her son, absent since their breakup, returns to retrieve him. Except that for their first feature, the Argentines Andi Nachon and Papu Curotto had the great idea of shaking up the linearity of their story, of distilling back and forth between present and past to make the spectators lose their bearings but above all plunge them into the confusion that reigns inside the skull of its heroine, jostled between the difficulty of grieving and the need to find a way to bounce back as quickly as possible, even if it means selling what she and Barby had built together. The finesse of the writing of the characters (notably a mother-in-law and an ex, on whom our view evolves at the same time as that of Julia) does the rest. A success.
Thierry Cheze
LAKE CAMPING ★★★☆☆
By Eléonore Saintagnan
“A funny thing happened to me that I would like to tell you.” It is with a falsely inoffensive tone that Éléonore Saintagnan, who plays her own character in this documentary-style film, begins her story. The forty-something, big blue eyes and baby-faced, decides to go to the seaside to recharge her batteries. His car, which broke down in the middle of the highway, decides otherwise. Here she is stranded at the Lac campsite, where a handful of year-round residents live. The first minutes give rise to fears of the wanderings of a Parisian in the countryside: quite the opposite happens. The director is inspired by a local legend and takes the opportunity to paint a portrait of the inhabitants. This meditative stroll of great delicacy is enriched throughout by a soundtrack of electronic music, before concluding with a moving concert by the singer Rosemary Standley and her father, also father and daughter in the film.
Emma Poesy
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FIRST TO MODERATELY LIKED
KINDS OF KINDNESS ★★☆☆☆
By Yorgos Lanthimos
Lánthimos returns to his original misanthropy and examines with dark humor the dirty and paradoxical corners of the human mind. This sketch film brings together regulars Emma Stone, Willem Dafoe and Margaret Qualley (all impeccable), as well as the new kid on the block, Jesse Plemons (award for best actor at Cannes). Each actor plays a different role each time in three stories resembling arty and incongruous episodes of The Fourth Dimensionwhich come together on the themes of mental manipulation, control and addiction. Fascinating subjects that Lanthimos treats like a brat, knobs at 11 for the best – some hilarious passages – as for the worst – the unthinkable duration of 2 hours 45.
Francois Léger
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WITHOUT A SOUND: DAY 1 ★★☆☆☆
By Michael Sarnoski
The pitch of the saga Without a sound being of the minimalist type, the pleasures that these films provide are, in the long run, quite limited: how many more times will we be able to watch characters advance slowly, make an unfortunate noise, before a critter in the Does our overdeveloped hearing arise to eat them alive? The first two films seemed to have exhausted the concept. This new episode, a prequel focusing on new characters, promised to expand the mythology of the series by going back to “day 1” of the disaster and explaining, as the tagline on the poster says, “how the world became silent “. Except that once it has successfully established itself, it is content to replay the imposed figures of the saga, working to mechanically alternate moments of tension in scenes with strong sentimentality. We can certainly take pleasure in it, but on condition that we do not wonder why it is this very summary story which had the honors of “day 1”.
Frederic Foubert
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IN WATER ★★☆☆☆
By Hong Sang-soo
Everything is blurry in the image. The visual coquetry is assumed until the end and literally illustrates the doubts of the protagonist. Jeju is, in fact, a filmmaker who took an acting duo to a seaside resort to shoot a film, but inspiration is lacking. So in the meantime, he eats, he drinks and above all he talks. Everything and the little nothings that make it all. Then on the beach with the rocks and the tourists, something lights up. It turns. Still blurry in the image. Then Jeju sits down near his interpreters and evokes a sequence that he would like to put in place, a story of one world to another and of a man, in between, who would sink into the sea to disappear . The water of the title in short. It’s simple, not very long and always vague. South Korean Hang Sangsoo, undoubtedly the most productive filmmaker currently active (two features per year on average), shoots even when he doesn’t have much to say. Hats off to the artist!
Thomas Baura
FIRST DID NOT LIKE
THE CHILD WHO MEASURED THE WORLD ★☆☆☆☆
By Takis Candilis
A rich Parisian real estate developer learns of the death of his daughter in Greece, his country of origin, and, at the same time, that he is the grandfather of a little boy suffering from autistic syndrome. A melodrama under the sun, predictable and unconvincing about this improvised meeting between two members of the same family, which Takis Candilis – former director of fiction on TF1, who is returning to directing 42 years after his first feature – deemed fit to graft in a rather artificial way the socio-economic issues of his country.
Emma Poesy
Et also
Joan Baez: I am a noise, by Miri Navasky and Karen O’Connor
Are you going to give up? of
