Vice-Versa 2, Maria, The Bikeriders: what’s new at the cinema this week
What to see in theaters
THE EVENT
VICE-VERSA 2 ★★★☆☆
By Kelsey Mann
The essential
Effective, sometimes very funny, but without genius: is the sequel to Vice-Versa the perfect symbol of Pixar of the 1920s?
Riley, the heroine of Vice versa grew up and became a teenager. The puberty red alert goes off and jaded workers ravage the little girl’s brain, leaving a nameless mess and setting the stage for the new team: Anxiety, Embarrassment, Boredom and Envy. The clash with the elders, Joy, Anger and the others, will play out while the heroine takes part in a hockey camp which will test her self-esteem and her concept of friendship. It’s quite fast, clever and funny, but where Vice versa transformed the cunning of its mechanisms into an absolutely perfect melodrama, shot through with incredible moments of grace, Vice-Versa 2 aims for efficiency alone by resuming the plot of the original film, final included, with rather funny new ones which take the film towards something Roger Rabbit light, but still smell like horizontal creative brainstorming a mile away. Because yes, it’s indisputable, Pixar was better before; the new teams do not have the genius of dream team beginnings.
Sylvestre Picard
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FIRST TO LIKE
MARIA ★★★☆☆
By Jessica Palud
By adapting Vanessa Schneider’s book, Jessica Palud takes on the shattered destiny of Maria Schneider, for a long time reduced only to Last tango in Paris Bertolucci (whose Palud was… the assistant on The Dreamers) and its butter scene, which has become unwatchable. Some will regret the somewhat academic side of the whole thing but the main thing is elsewhere. In the way in which Palud takes hold of this story, in her desire to make the words of a young woman heard on the big screen who expressed her pain at the time, her rage over the humiliations she suffered without being heard. By putting words to evils Maria does not tell the story of a victim but celebrates a resistance fighter who fell on the front of indifference. And Anamaria Vartolomei embraces this bias with a composition where finesse, intensity and letting go are one. An incandescent actress who restores a part of this mystery that was stolen from Maria Schneider during her lifetime
Thierry Cheze
THE SUMMER WITH CARMEN ★★★☆☆
By Zacharias Mavroeidis
It’s summer in Athens and two homosexual friends, Démos and Nikitas, have decided to devote it to writing a screenplay supposed to obey the request of the French producer to finance it: that it be funny, sexy, Greek and on a low budget! This is the start of this multi-layered meta comedy. A film about a film in the process of being written, taking inspiration from… a film that did not see the light of day, the one that Démos and Nikitas had tried in vain to develop two years earlier. The Summer with Carmen plays at the same time with the rules of screenwriting and unapologetically sexy gay imagery. Here the flesh is never sad, the bodies exult in a completely natural way without it being a provocative subject or gesture. A gay comedy of manners which also has the originality of developing a real story of friendship between two homosexuals and succeeds in making its little original music heard in the world of queer cinema.
Thierry Cheze
DETECTIVE CONAN: THE 1 MILLION DOLLAR STAR ★★★☆☆
By Chika Nagaoka
Every year since 1997, the franchise Detective Conan (and its genius investigator hero stuck in a little boy’s body) produces a new animated film (sometimes even two, for example in 2015). They have largely remained unpublished here, but in recent years, we have had the chance to see them in theaters, so don’t deprive yourself! Okay, the plot of this opus is particularly convoluted, but the way in which the franchise renews itself is particularly impressive. After the techno-thriller style Impossible mission from the previous film, The Black Submarine, The 1 million dollar Star explores the history and icons of Japan through the legend of katanas providing access to legendary treasure. It’s not great, but it’s still good quality.
Sylvestre Picard
SINJAR, BIRTH OF GHOSTS ★★★☆☆
By Alex Liebert
In the province of Ninawa, in the northwest of Iraq, the gaping wound of the Sinjar valley opens, which is told, embodied by the voice of the Iranian actress Golshifteh Farahani. There, on August 3, 2014, Daesh forces surged to commit the unspeakable. Ten years later, for his first feature, Alexe Liebert adopts the classic device of the documentary-testimony, but thickens it with striking photograms, texts, songs and dignified silences, which gives substance to these surviving souls, haunted by the ghosts of the departed. Conscientiously, the camera links the macrocosm of arid landscapes to the faces hollowed out by the tears of Yazidis in search of a catharsis that will never come; all in such a sophisticated outline, that it unfortunately sometimes lapses into an inappropriate formalism.
Chloé Delos- Eray
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FIRST IS SHARED
THE BIKERIDERS ★★★★☆/ ★★☆☆☆
By Jeff Nichols
FOR
Inspired by a cult photography book by Danny Lyon about a biker gang in the sixties, The Bikeriders examines to the point of absurdity the sensual and monstrous relationship between the American hero and his mount. Like a succession of photographic shots, the sequences have their own world, almost autonomous. Their interaction depends on the damaged beings who populate them, striving to give meaning to an outlaw existence disconnected from reality. In this the film, furiously lucid in its tragic beauty, thwarts the fresco side that it seemed to announce (the strong homage to the Freed). The sexy varnish (leather, stars and sticks, etc.) is flaking. America according to Nichols, steeped in worries and hopes, has never seemed so disillusioned.
Thomas Baura
AGAINST
All along The Bikeriders, we see Jeff Nichols chasing his fantasy of the great American novel of motorized rebellion. The problem is that he couldn’t decide which film he wanted to make. He hesitates between Scorsesian exploration of a ritualized underworld, and a postmodern fetishism inherited from The Loveless by Kathryn Bigelow, where the bikers looked more like fantasy projections than beings of flesh and blood. The film only really works on its group portrait side, skipping nicely from one secondary character to another, offering each their scene, their moment. But these scattered moments never aggregate into a coherent whole. It’s very soft, too wise. The “Freedmen biker movie » remains to be done.
Frédéric Foubert
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FIRST TO MODERATELY LIKED
NEW WORLD ★★☆☆☆
By Vincent Cappello
In his first feature, Vincent Capello tells the fate of an Afghan who fled his country for Paris where he tries to integrate with the help of a resourceful young man who took him under his wing. Remarkably interpreted, this story with noble intentions but never mawkish nevertheless struggles to make its singularity heard compared to recent films (They are alive, The survivors, A few days no more…) who were able to find a more assertive angle to go beyond the tragedy of the situations encountered.
Thierry Cheze
SIX FEET ON EARTH ★★☆☆☆
By Karim Bensalah
This first feature by Karim Bensallah echoes the recent The Last of the Jews by Noé Debré, in this tragicomic way of showing young people who are not necessarily heroic – even apathetic – refusing to submit to what their origins seem to demand of them. Sofiane, son of an Algerian diplomat, works in a Muslim funeral company to get out of a bad situation. Despite its obvious strength, the film struggles to fully probe the inner wanderings of this protagonist whose permanent indecision ends up turning against him.
Thomas Baura
MY ENVIRONMENT ★★☆☆☆
By Milo Chiarini
For his first attempt at directing solo (without Sabrina Nouchi, his accomplice in In ground and pound And Just a point – which remained unpublished in theaters -, to whom he still gave a role), Milo Chiarini lends his features to Nico, a repentant criminal released after twenty years in prison. An anachronistic shadow who, at forty, has never really lived, he passes from the prison environment to the family, without ever really freeing himself from his demons. Emanating from this figure of quiet strength, whose violence is in fact never far away, the sketches of the plot, which are slow to emerge, erase all the reliefs of a film based mainly on a device of confinement by the frame , a bit like Son of Saul – but without the memory context. A stifling, somewhat superficial effect, supposed to illustrate the workings of social determinism, but which transforms modesty into length without ever really succeeding in drawing the viewer into this story of impossible escape.
Chloé Delos- Eray
FIRST DID NOT LIKE
HER & HIM & THE REST OF THE WORLD ★☆☆☆☆
By Emmanuelle Belohradsky
He (Victor Belmondo) is Marco, in his twenties, a little lost in life, who helps out a friend by replacing him in an emergency center for elevators. She (Galatea Bellugi) is the young woman he will try to help out when she calls him at 3 a.m., anxious because she is claustrophobic and stuck in an elevator car. And the rest of the world… which seems to have decided to gang up on them, on this Valentine’s Day night to prevent them from meeting again. With her first feature film, Emmanuelle Belohradsky aims to mix romantic comedy and thrilling chase. But this mixture of genres never works due to a weak scenario and an inability to distill rhythm into its story. Such a film required flawless precision mechanics, a thousand miles from the work almost here.
Thierry Cheze
FIRST DID NOT LIKE IT AT ALL
OUT OF TIME ☆☆☆☆☆
By Olivier Assayas
Everyone remembers the great exodus following the announcement of the first confinement to prevent the spread of Covid-19. The inhabitants of big cities, suddenly frightened at the idea of living within the four walls of their apartment, hurriedly returned to their second home, the promise of an ordeal in the countryside. The social injustice that this (mood) movement made salient called for restraint. Olivier Assayas went with his brother and respective partner to the family home in the Vallée de Chevreuse. Four years later, completely ashamed, the filmmaker comes out of the woods and gives us a self-titled fictionabout this eventful life in the great outdoors. Vincent Macaigne, down-tempo, rigorously affected phrasing, has the heavy responsibility of embodying the filmmaker here. A filmmaker who rewards us with a pseudo-Truffaldian voice-over of complete ridicule. The deflated from confinement finally hold their monument
Thomas Baura
Et also
Caligula- The Ultimate guy, by Tinto Brass
Nature, by Mickael Perret
Nomad, by Patrick Tam
Survive, by Frédéric Jardin
The covers
Let’s get lost, by Bruce Weber
