The Creator, The Goldman Trial, DogMan: what’s new at the cinema this week
What to see in theaters
THE EVENT
THE CREATOR ★★☆☆☆
By Gareth Edwards
The essential
The director of Rogue One embarks on a beautiful science fiction odyssey, but which does not reach the level of its models.
We are in 2070 and beyond: the revolt of artificial intelligences embodied in robotic bodies has degenerated to the point of nuclear conflict and divided the world in two. On one side, the intolerant West led by a militaristic USA, on the other a more open New Asia which considers robots as thinking beings in the same way as humans. Joshua, a former special forces officer, carries out a dangerous mission on behalf of America: find the creator of AI in order to end the conflict for good. We would like to be able to describe Gareth Edwards’ new film as a revolution in the field of sci-fi cinema, an exciting and visionary odyssey, but the result is difficult to separate from its sources. It’s a beautiful and careful film, very nicely designed but which doesn’t offer anything very new compared to the latest great sci-fi films like Blade Runner 2049, Alita: Battle Angel Or Ghost in the Shell
Sylvestre Picard
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PREMIERE LIKED A LOT
THE GOLDMAN TRIAL ★★★★☆
By Cédric Kahn
Since at least Saint-Omer by Alice Diop, the trial film seems to obsess our filmmakers. In competition with a Palme d’Or, Justine Triet (Anatomy of a fall) and at the opening of the Quinzaines des Cinéastes, Cédric Kahn with his Goldman trial seem to look at each other from a distance. Kahn made the most radical proposal, opting for (almost) total immersion in the criminal court where, in November 75, the fate of Pierre Goldman, a young, angry rebel, accused of having killed two pharmacists in the middle of Paris was played out. during a robbery. Behind this very political affair (supposed racism in French society), there are men and women who struggle with their truths and their lies. Kahn establishes a tension through words which constantly keeps his film on a psychological ridge. Certainly, one of the greatest French films of the year
Thomas Baura
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DON’T EXPECT TOO MUCH FROM THE END OF THE WORLD ★★★★☆
By Radu Jude
Two years later Bad luck banging or loony porn UFO object, apotheosis of burlesque, Radu Jude does it again. In a falsely documentary approach, the camera fixed to the door follows Angela, a crazy production assistant who travels around Bucharest in a car for the casting of an advertisement. Exploited by the firm that hires her, despised by the men she meets, Angela becomes cynical, vulgar, abject. Also hypnotic when she plays her alter-ego Bobita, a masculinist influencer, actress Ilinca Manolache captures attention in this extraordinary role and screws up everything in her path. Politicized at its heart, this scathing comedy has the elegance of remaining at a distance, as if to better allow introspection. Radu Jude is not afraid of anything, and especially not of letting his film speak for itself.
Lucie Chiquer
FIRST TO LIKE
DOGMAN ★★★☆☆
By Luc Besson
Dogman is an excessive film. Mixture of destroy melodrama and revenge movie paranoid, he is driven by a mannerist vision which sometimes falls short of the mark, but regularly achieves a strike. When Dogman appears, he is covered in blood and glitter, wearing a wig that makes him look like Marilyn. Faced with a police psychologist, he will then, gradually, tell his tragic story – from his childhood martyr to the drag queen cabaret via the wheelchair. Narcos who blow up a house, a wild child raised by dogs, a transformer who sings lip sync The crowd by Piaf… Don’t look, you’ve never seen this anywhere. But if we have to find the reason for this strange success, we can put forward three words: Caleb Landry Jones. An extraordinary actor, who just by his intensity manages to transcend his role as a nice freak and push all the cursors into the red. A real performance.
Peter Lunn
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NEW START ★★★☆☆
By Philippe Lefebvre
For his second feature, Philippe Lefebvre (The Whistler) is interested in empty nest syndrome. The one that hits the couple in their fifties, Alain and Diane when their youngest son takes off and that pushes Alain to try to save this failing union with a daring tactic: leaving Diane in the hope of rekindling the flame at home. Nothing very original in this pitch, certainly, nor in the production of this remarriage comedy. And yet the charm works. That of a clever and rhythmic situation comedy (co-written with Maria Pourchet, author of Western, a major novel of the literary season), rich in carefully knitted secondary characters. And that of the Karin Viard-Franck Dubosc duo who, trained together at the Rouen Conservatory, find themselves for the first time as headliners in the same film. The contagious energy of one and the mezzo vocce playing of the other combine wonderfully.
Thierry Cheze
YOUNG CINEMA ★★★☆☆
By Yves-Marie Mahé
Among the legendary manifestations of cinephilia which make the younger generations salivate in the wake of the Biarritz Film Festival, the Young Cinema Festival was born in 1965 in Hyères. Until 1983, it was the privileged French venue for the cinematic avant-garde, welcoming Leos Carax, Chantal Akerman, New Wave filmmakers and actors and just as many heated debates and even controversies. If the documentary generally succeeds in retracing the history of this event, it sometimes unfortunately relies too much on its available archives, and a rudimentary montage of chronological sequences. Let’s understand it, however: why deny ourselves the pleasure of listening to Claude Chabrol or Marguerite Duras talk about innovative films, which we would dream of (re)seeing screened at the cinema, or in a new festival of this caliber?
Nicholas Moreno
AT CLEMENCEAU ★★★☆☆
By Xavier Gayan
The days pass and the same faces follow one another at the Clémenceau counter. In this PMU bar in Saint-Raphaël solitudes meet. Representatives of what is sometimes called peripheral France. Some were even Yellow Vests. Equipped with a simple camera, Xavier Gayan roams the bar and tries to capture the truth of the damaged characters he meets there. Paradoxically, these tight shots of ordinary conversations between bar regulars quickly take on a powerful political coloring. All are affected by great tragedies: racism, sexual violence suffered during childhood, unemployment. The whole thing is imperfect, like its characters, and sometimes drags on. But the documentary maker captures a form of truth and paints a moving portrait of working-class France.
Emma Poesy
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FIRST TO MODERATELY LIKED
NON-ALIGNED: SCENES FROM THE LABUDOVIC ARCHIVES ★★☆☆☆
By Mila Turajlic
By focusing on filming archival research and then explaining the place that cinema occupied in the Non-Aligned Movement (on the Western and Eastern blocs), Mila Turajlić offers a fascinating documentary subject. But between the heaviness of explanations and the memories told by Stevan Labudović (chief cinematographer of Yugoslav President Tito), the film wants to do too much and struggles to highlight the preciousness of the images it discovers.
Nicholas Moreno
CINE-GUERILLAS: SCENES FROM THE LABUDOVIC ARCHIVES ★★☆☆☆
By Mila Turajlic
After Non-aligned, the second part of the documentary diptych by director Mila Turajlić focuses on the images that Stevan Labudović (the operational chief of Yugoslav President Tito) produced in Belgrade, at the United Nations or even during the Algerian war. While it is moving to discover the liveliness of this heritage, the film struggles to find the subject from which to document the war of images of this era for the anti-colonial struggle.
Nicholas Moreno
PREMIERE DID NOT LIKE
STROKE OF LUCK ★☆☆☆☆
By Woody Allen
The star of Stroke of luckits main attraction is neither its script nor Match Point, neither Paris, nor the Woody Allen style but Melvil Poupaud! Brilliant and hilarious as a Machiavellian bourgeois orchestrating the loss of his wife’s romantic lover. Except that Stroke of luck wants to be less a performance film than a well-set thriller in a postcard Paris and that’s where it gets stuck. Because the postcard conceals neither cruelty, nor biting, nor irony. And because in terms of cinema, Allen’s change of scenery in Paris is reduced to a series of bourgeois clichés, far from the fantasized and ghostly vision that the filmmaker projected on New York.
Sylvestre Picard
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CLUB ZERO ★☆☆☆☆
By Jessica Hausner
Miss Novak, the new nutrition teacher (Mia Wasikowska, brilliantly robotic) at a very chic private high school, introduces her students to “ mindful eating “. Under its influence, the kids drastically reduce their daily food rations, in order to reach a so-called higher level of consciousness… A true-false sneering thriller, which pays off the champions of personal development and the wealthy parents who have resigned. Jessica Hausner (Little Joe) applies to its staging the purity that Miss Novak expects of her high school students, but this plastic minimalism prevents the film from going off the rails. Mired in falsely salient satire, Club Zero torpedoes any possibility of creating discomfort (a harmless scene of ingested vomit). Not so funny and always where you expect it.
François Leger
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WE HAVE A DREAM ★☆☆☆☆
By Pascal Plisson
This documentary opens with a little girl born prematurely, with one leg amputated, in the middle of a dance class and then alongside her twin who did not have to experience this tragic twist of fate. What she tells Pascal Plisson (On the way to school), a disarming smile on her lips, is overwhelming and the promise of spending time with her and her loved ones is exciting. Except that won’t happen. Because the project here is to meet, in the four corners of the world, children who, like her, have not given up on any of their dreams because of their disability. Beautiful, unassailable intentions. But embracing six destinies in 1h30 requires skimming over each one and gives a catalog of Epinal images to this film corrupted by its sentimentalism, symbolized by the omnipresent syrupy music which accompanies it and seems to seek to twist the arm of those who did not shed their little tear.
Thierry Cheze
GOLDFISH ★☆☆☆☆
By Hugo Bachelet, Clément Vallos and Matthieu Yakovleff
Guillaume suffers from a neurodegenerative disease, he forgets everything. Before leaving for a treatment center, his friends take him for a weekend. If the scenario of this melodrama offers some vague adventures, it offers no resolution to its poor characters. With a few exceptions (Denis Lavant, who seems to have chosen the wrong film), the actors are as bad as the narrative, incapable of choosing sides between humor and emotion.
Emma Poesy
And also
Pebble, cabbage, owl, short film program
Dance ! , by Godfrey de Maupeou
Self-fiction, self-migrationby Fabienne Le Houérou
Xaraasiby Raphaël Grisey and Bouba Touré
Recovery
Mark Dixon, detectiveby Otto Preminger
