The Teachers' Room, My Mother's Life, Bolero: What's new at the cinema this week
What to see in theaters
THE EVENT
THE TEACHERS’ ROOM ★★★★☆
By Ilker Çatak
The essential
Nominated for an Oscar for best foreign film, a challenging thriller about school which provides relevant reflection on the difficulties of the teaching profession.
The Teachers’ Room opens with a kaleidoscopic portrait of a school, in which teachers struggle to do the best they can with students who are often in difficulty. At the center of the equation, Carla, a young falsely idealistic teacher who puts her work before everything, finds herself in turmoil by accusing a colleague from the administration of having stolen her money. From there, the film will surreptitiously shift towards a psychological thriller by looking into the causes and effects of such an accusation, whether founded or not. Among the victims, the son of the accused, a student in Carla's class, rebels, and takes the story towards a terribly current questioning: that of the alienating power that a student can exercise over a teacher, and of the physical violence which always ends up happening. A film more important than ever.
Yohan Haddad
Read the full review
PREMIERE LIKED A LOT
BLUE GIANT ★★★★☆
By Yuzuru Tachikawa
Shot by the same director as Detective Conan: The Black Submarine (released last year), Blue Giant is another adaptation of a successful manga: the story of a young passionate saxophonist who makes everything become “the best jazzman in the world” and to do so sets up a group with a hyper-gifted pianist (but too clean on himself) and a messy (but diligent) drummer. The usual trio of typical action manga shonen (it works just as well in Naruto that in Hunter X Hunter). Blue Giant plays a very exciting tension between respect for the clichés of shonen and their rejection, a tension illustrated by a nice cinematic process: using the capture of movements of real musicians during concert scenes, in opposition to the traditional animation of the rest. The story is classic, the effect is epic.
Sylvesbe Picard
FIRST TO LIKE
MY MOTHER'S LIFE ★★★☆☆
By Julien Carpentier
Pierre, a florist whose small shop is a success, sees his fanciful and excessive mother re-enter his life after two years spent away from him. A voluntary distance on his part to seek treatment for the bipolar disorder from which she suffers, in a specialized place. My mother's life talks about this very unique illness where we go from the most total euphoria to the deepest depression, almost in the snap of our fingers. But without an ounce of miserabilism or obsession with a forced happy ending above ground. Thanks to subtly written characters and a duo of actors in tune. William Lebghil-Agnès Jaoui who, in the skin of these characters who everything a priori opposes, deploy treasures of nuances throughout these scenes where what binds them will gradually take precedence over everything else.
Thierry Cheze
Read the full review
BOLERO ★★★☆☆
By Anne Fontaine
After Police And Presidents, the very eclectic Anne Fontaine explores the throes of the creation of the Bolero by Maurice Ravel, long unable to find the inspiration for this order placed by the dancer Ida Rubinstein (Jeanne Balibar, irresistible). Even if its story evolving between flashbacks and forwards does not focus on 1928, this bias allows us to distance Bolero of the classic biopic that goes from birth to death. Helped by the beautiful light of Christophe Beaucarne, Anne Fontaine appears less academic than in Coco before Chanel and succeeded in conveying the way Ravel physically felt music. Raphaël Personnaz seduces with his composition, which perfectly reflects the erasure of the man the world would later celebrate. It's a shame then that the filmmaker does not follow through on her bias and does not close her story, in the wake of the premiere of Boléro. The gesture would have been stronger.
Thierry Cheze
HOLLY ★★★☆☆
By Fien Troch
Thierry Cheze
INCHALLAH A SON ★★★☆☆
By Amjad Al Rasheed
The first feature film directed by Amjad Al Rasheed and the first Jordanian film in history to be screened at the Cannes Film Festival, this contemporary drama follows the steps of Nawal, a thirty-year-old Jordanian woman plunged into a difficult situation after the death of her husband. Mother of a little girl when she would need to have a boy to directly benefit from an inheritance, Nawal will find herself dependent on the choices made by her husband's brothers. Starting from a law that actually affects women in Jordan, the filmmaker creates breathtaking suspense and successfully portrays a heroine who never loses her lucidity and fights with confidence to assert her rights. Thanks to a meticulous staging where the character constantly tries to extricate himself from stifling settings to gain his freedom, this story with crafted dialogue ultimately provides poignant, luminous and peaceful sensations.
Damien Leblanc
Find these films near you thanks to Première Go
FIRST TO MODERATELY LIKED
IMAGINARY ★★☆☆☆
By Jeff Wadlow
Killer bear cubs are tempting monsters, although this one seems sloppy. His name is Chauncey. And as Jessica returns to her childhood home with her family, her youngest stepdaughter Alice develops a strange attachment to this stuffed animal she found in the basement. In its retracted form, the dusty design of the teddy bear manages to achieve its evil doll effect, as if content to torture the viewer with its psychological hide-and-seek. But still it would have been necessary to exploit an original imagination… No less than ten horror film references emerge explicitly, like so many external signatures affixed to the work, from Poltergeist has Coraline Passing by Paranormal Activity, Insidious or Esther. Imaginary suffocates under his references.
Manon Bellahcene
Read the full review
14 DAYS TO GET BETTER ★★☆☆☆
By Edouard Pluvieux
At the request of his fiancée (also the daughter of his boss who puts pressure on him) who judges him too stressed and makes it a non-negotiable condition for their marriage, an executive (Maxime Gasteuil, in his first real major role in the cinema) finds himself embarked with his future brother-in-law on a wellness course. The comedy of Edouard Pluvieux (Public friends) plays on the clash of opposites, between this Cartesian and the other trainees, each more perched than the other. The start seems promising with scathing humor (in which Zabou Breitman excels as an internship coordinator) which unfortunately fades away slowly, the rough edges melting like snow in the sun to tend towards the inevitable happy ending. Too bad because 14 days to get better is populated with hilarious sketches and is worth the detour for the composition, it is impeccable from start to finish, with Romain Lancry as a naive and devilishly endearing brother-in-law.
Thierry Cheze
LIKE A SON ★★☆☆☆
By Nicolas Boukhrief
It's a fascinating subject which, like most of Nicolas Boukhrief's films, resonates strongly with current affairs. A teacher who has lost his flame comes across an isolated miner who has gone into a tailspin. The wild child is a Roma and is in trouble with the police. The former teacher then decides to save him. Despite him. Against him. But how far can he go in this crusade? Directed to the bone, stifling realism: it feels like the Dardennes at the beginning (a kid, stubbornness, a mission, and reality as a real obstacle). Except there is Vincent Lindon, who is both the film's best asset and its worst enemy. His presence impresses at first, raw, dense, before crushing everything, no longer letting the fiction and the other characters breathe.
Peter Lunn
HLM PUSSY ★★☆☆☆
By Nora El Hourch
Three inseparable friends expose the sexual assault of one of them online. A spark of revolt which, instead of uniting, will end up weakening their bond. For her first feature, Nora El Hourch takes the pulse of Parisian suburban youth without filters but on edge, exploring the complex entanglements of friendship, justice and social pressures, in the era of networks social and MeToo. HLM Pussy fails, however, to rise beyond its noble ambitions, leaving its female characters struggling in conventional roles and a slump of adolescent archetypes serving the emotional and sororal power that should have emerged from their announced “revolution”. If the dialogues take nothing away from the passion and spontaneity of its three endearing performers, they fail to truly transcend the social and feminist issues of the struggle.
Lou Hupel
THEWARRANTY ★★☆☆☆
By Nurith Aviv
This is a poetic and evocative film title, for a documentary whose subject is just as evocative: the letter “R” and its multiple pronunciations across languages. However, the magic of cinema stops there. With an elementary formal device, reduced to a simple succession of on-camera interviews and too discreet lyrical connections, the documentary disappoints in that it never fully embraces the sensitive power of its subject. Among the six people invited to tell their relationship to this letter as well as its pronunciation, a literature professor of Japanese origin, a Russian writer and an Algerian psychologist speak. By giving a global echo to its issues, the film raises political questions, particularly relating to migration. We then regret that the staging of the film, its editing in particular, is not as good.
Nicholas Moreno
FIRST DID NOT LIKE
THE CARNETS DE SIEGRFRIED ★☆☆☆☆
By Terence Davies
The Siegfried of the title is Siegried Sassoon, an English poet, famous in particular for his pacifist writings inspired by the horror of the First World War. Terence Davies, in the opening of his final feature film (the filmmaker died last October), places Sassoon's words on archive images of the fights – a minimalist but powerful device. The film then returns to the rails of a more classic biopic, telling at length the unhappy homosexual loves of its hero in the fashionable London of the 1920s, punctuated by hazardous temporal jumps towards the sixties, when the writer, on the evening of his life, converted to Catholicism. Davies wants to make people feel the pain of an existence broken several times – by war, love, social prohibitions – but the excessive length of the film, the very repetitive scenes of arguments between Sassoon and his lovers, and the stilted acting actors give the whole thing a monotonous and outdated appearance.
Frédéric Foubert
SHIKUN ★☆☆☆☆
By Amos Gitaï
Bold adaptation of Rhinoceros by Eugene Ionesco, Shikun captures the daily lives of the inhabitants of a building in the Israeli desert but struggles to shake off its theatrical roots. Amos Gitai's new project finds a contemporary echo by addressing the emergence of hatred within a hybrid and polyglot group. However, the film does not go beyond its concept and the parade of characters declaiming their story with a few witticisms does not allow us to appreciate the poetry it claims to achieve.
Downhold on Assie
Repeats
Night Rivert, by Kôzaburô Yoshimura
