The Successor, The Kingdom of the Abyss, The Empire: What’s new at the cinema this week
What to see in theaters
THE EVENT
THE SUCCESSOR ★★★☆☆
By Xavier Legrand
The essential
New film by Xavier Legrand after the triumphant To the hiltthis thriller about the post-mortem toxicity of a father manages to paralyze with irregularity.
After To the hilt, Xavier Legrand returns with a second feature which this time shows how patriarchy also exerts brutality on adult men. To do this, it tells the story of the young and anguished artistic director of a French Haute Couture house who has long since cut ties with his native Quebec but who is forced by the sudden death of his father to return to Quebec to take care of himself. of the succession, where he will then make a terrible discovery about his father. Once again adopting the psychological thriller genre, the filmmaker succeeds in a captivating first part where the fashion designer played by Marc-André Grondin experiences the return to his origins as a stifling chore. However, when the story openly turns into Greek tragedy, the desire to film the character’s astonishment at length strangely slows down the tension. Legrand’s direction fortunately enhances the last fifteen minutes, where a powerful emotion grips us to ultimately make this tale of the difficulty of freeing oneself from the weight of fathers terrifying.
Damien Leblanc
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FIRST LOVED IT
THE KINGDOM OF THE ABYSS ★★★★★
By Tian Xiaopeng
A completely psychedelic animated film, visually maddening, that turns your brain. This is what we feel about these adventures of a young girl who fell overboard during a storm during a sea cruise with her parents, and who will have to work in the service of a completely fanciful cook, in a restaurant-boat populated by bizarre animals. Tian Xiaopeng’s film sweeps you away with its visual madness and as soon as you get past the photorealistically animated prologue, the roller coaster starts in earnest and the race will barely slow down until its truly moving epilogue. A summit of its kind
Sylvesbe Picard
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PREMIERE LIKED A LOT
THE GENERAL’S Pawn ★★★★☆
By Makbul Mubarak
In a small Indonesian town, young Rakib works as a domestic worker in the mansion of a retired general in the middle of the municipal election campaign. While the ex-soldier takes the boy under his wing, his father figure becomes stifling and threatening, to the point of crushing and objectifying him. The General’s Pawn brings a breath of fresh air to the landscape of Indonesian cinema through an intense thriller that perfectly masters its codes. The relationship between the teenager and the man blinded by his past glories weaves a muted tension in the isolated residence surrounded by humidity and fog. By capturing natural light in long plays of reflections and camera angles, this first feature deals with the tragedy that hovers over its characters through the socio-political balance of power and the power of seduction that they entail. The revelation of a filmmaker.
Downhold on Assie
FIRST TO LIKE
THE EMPIRE ★★★☆☆
By Bruno Dumont
“ Beware of heroes and saints! », warns Beelzebub played by a hallucinated Fabrice Luchini, alone in a cathedral spaceship ready to amend a primitive humanity. The area to be conquered is made up of dunes, potato fields, an infinite sea… The North of Dumont, its territory. The filmmaker, a perfect misanthrope, continues his crusade where the “ evil triumphs by the force of things ” since ” humans suck “. The most destabilizing with this Empire is this complete nihilism where Dumont’s gesture seems detached from feelings, the very ones which through empathy, however unhealthy, made us vibrate in these previous films. The mess here is neither happy nor generous. Perverted naturalism certainly produces a disturbance but it gradually closes in on itself. Where are we? For what ? Dumont is elsewhere. Let’s follow him. Or not.
Thomas Baura
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SLEEP ★★★☆☆
By Jason Yu
A couple, an apartment, a baby on the way, and the daily grind that suddenly spirals into paranoid spins… Contrary to appearances, we are not in Rosemary’s babybut in Sleep, first feature by Korean Jason Yu. It begins as a comedy, with the tenderly ironic observation of this young couple on the verge of having a child, and whose pleasant existence will soon be turned upside down by the gentleman’s sleepwalking. His nocturnal behavior turns out to be more and more worrying: he scratches his cheek until it bleeds, almost throws himself out of the window… A former assistant to Bong Joon-ho, Jason Yu clearly went to a good school and strikes the right balance between fantastical thrills and social observation. The movie is called Sleep but impossible to nosedive in front.
Frédéric Foubert
WALK UP ★★★☆☆
By Hong Sang-soo
While Hong Sang-soo’s latest film (Nowadays) was released in the summer of 2023, the next one will be released in June and another is presented at the Berlinale this month, the most prolific South Korean filmmaker is therefore released Walk Up, where a famous director (played by the stalwart Kwon Hae-hyo) visits an old friend in the Gangnam apartment building she owns. This is an opportunity to explore each floor of the building and meet the different people who inhabit the place. Beyond the black and white image and the amusing discussion sequences, the director miraculously succeeds in creating disturbance with this sweet reverie where temporal boundaries are abolished and where loves and fantasies mingle to form a melancholy portrait, more or less autobiographical, of a mature artist who continues to discover the mysteries of desire and the joys of letting go.
Damien Leblanc
BYE BYE TIBERIADES ★★★☆☆
By Lina Soualem
Great-granddaughter of a long line of Palestinian women, Lina Soualem is the first in her family to be born far from Tiberias, a Palestinian enclave on the border of Lebanon and Syria. She owes this distance to her mother, Hiam Abbass, who left the country at a very young age to become an actress in Paris. It is the latter that is the focus of this moving documentary in which Lina Soualem retraces the family history, using very beautiful archive images. Hiam confides in front of the camera about his youth lived without theater or cinema, but also about the political upheavals which shook the life of the family (from 1948, several members were chased from their homes by the Israelis while other Palestinian villages were colonized or wiped off the map). Lina Soualem disobeys her mother’s mantra here, “don’t open up the pains of the past”to deliver a memory that is as poetic as it is political.
Emma Poesy
UNIVERSAL THEORY ★★★☆☆
By Timm Kroeger
Christopher Nolan is emulated even in the Swiss Alps. This is where the German Timm Kröger located the plot of his fantastic thriller evoking physical sciences, parallel worlds and quotes from Robert Oppenheimer, and confirming the existence of an international “quantum” cinema, under the influence of the director ofInterstellar. Universal Theory takes place in the early 1960s, at high altitude (the film itself is quite high), during a scientific conference during which a young researcher will test his hypotheses on the multiverse… Brewing the references (The PierResnais, the US film noir…), the film reveals its mysteries at a pace that is a little too languid, but wins the day in a final act where the romanticism of Kröger, his pop mischief, his plastic work on space distortions -temporal ones end up truly captivating
Frédéric Foubert
IT’S DARK IN AMERICA ★★★☆☆
By Ana Vaz
Every day in Brasilia, the police are called by residents who discover a wild animal escaping from the national park near their homes. “Can you come and collect this critter?”we hear them blowing into the receiver while the nocturnal shots of tamanduas, maned wolves, savannah foxes multiply on the screen… Carried by its sumptuous photography, this documentary restores with great grace the tensions between urbanization which has become crazy and the silent fauna which gradually loses its right of citizenship.
Emma Poesy
Find these films near you thanks to Première Go
FIRST TO MODERATELY LIKED
A LIFE ★★☆☆☆
By James Hawes
Nicknamed the British Schindler, Nicholas Winton saved hundreds of Jewish children living in Prague by organizing convoys to London, before the city fell to the Nazis in 1938. A gesture that remained little known until that evening in 1988 when the BBC invited him to testify by bringing together those who had survived thanks to him. James Hawes tells this story by moving back and forth between the two eras. The weakness of the staging of the part from the 1930s and the use of painful tearful music suggest that a documentary would have been a more appropriate form. But this option would have deprived us of Anthony Hopkins who played Winton in the 80s. Every second of his presence on screen is at once a delight, a marvel of precision, a peak of contained emotion which explodes here and there. there in a heartbreaking way. But it’s not enough to save everything.
Thierry Cheze
THE LAST MEN ★★☆☆☆
By David Oelhoffen
Born from a meeting between Jacques Perrin (legendary actor, director and producer who died in 2022) and David Oelhoffen (director of Far from men Or Enemy brothers), this war film set in 1945 in Indochina follows a group of foreign legionnaires hunted by the Japanese army who try to survive in the jungle to reach the nearest allied base. Oelhoffen describes the hell experienced by men fighting absurdly for the crumbs of the French colonial empire and transforms this historical story into an irrational fresco where the legionnaires resemble ghosts on the edge of madness. If a scent ofApocalypse Now floats in the air, the journey, however, comes up against a sort of automatism. Because the characters, forming a homogeneous and spectral troupe, are not sufficiently characterized to hold the attention and captivate, which ends up making this drama devitalized.
Damien Leblanc
THROUGH THE SEASONS ★★☆☆☆
By Hanna Ladoul and Marco La Via
We discovered the Hanna Ladoul-Marco La Via duo with We the coyotes, a first feature about a young couple confronted with the American dream. Contrary to the majority of critics, Première was not convinced by this charming but difficult film to keep up. Which is exactly what we feel when faced with this chronicle of a grandmother-mother-daughter relationship – which everything seems to oppose before coming together – on a farm where they raise chickens. The Catherine Deneuve-Andrea Riseborough-Morgan Saylor trio is impeccable but entangled in this thread-stitched story.
Thierry Cheze
FIRST DID NOT LIKE
DOUBLE FOCUS ★★☆☆☆
By Claire Vasse
A couple who have decided not to live together but in two separate apartments arouses incomprehension among their loved ones to the point of calling into question the strong bond that unites them. It’s difficult to be passionate about a story in which you don’t believe any of the twists and turns as the stakes appear so thin. To make it the subject of her first feature, author-journalist Claire Vassé must necessarily be certain of the opposite. But she never manages to convey it.
Thierry Cheze
And also
The goats ! by Fred Cavayé
The covers
The Name of the Rose by Jean-Jacques Annaud
A true story by David Lynch
