Life of Chuck, Dragons, Indomitables: New in the cinema this week
What to see in theaters
The event
LIFE OF CHUCK ★★★★★
De Mike Flanagan
Essential
Mike Flanagan abandons horror to sign his most moving film. A reflection on ordinary life which turns out to be extraordinary, carried by a unrecognizable Tom Hiddleston.
Chuck Krantz dances on an American suburban sidewalk. Around him, the world crumbles – California has no electricity, the roads crack, the Internet makes the soul. But Chuck dance, and suddenly everything lights up. This is Mike Flanagan: Transforming the apocalypse into epiphany, making despair a springboard towards grace. With Life of Chuckthe master of contemporary horror (Haunting of Hill House, Doctor Sleep) Operates a radical turn which is not really one. Because behind the Jumpscares of his previous films was already hiding this obsession: how to survive the conscience of our death? Stephen King had explored this theme by writing this news a few years ago, Flanagan translated it on the screen. The film plays cards on the table as soon as it is opened. Mystical, strange, fantastic, it is structured in three acts, in reverse chronological order, which will only make sense at the end. And with a crazy grace and ambition, Flanagan delivers here a consumer version of the mental delusions of Charlie Kaufman; A Life is beautiful For Apocalypse time. In a period when mainstream cinema seems to have given up to really move us, Life of Chuck is a saving UFO.
Gaël Golhen
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First like a lot
SISTER MIDNIGHT ★★★★☆
De karan kandhari
After his compatriots Payal Kapadia (All we imagine as light) Et Sandhya Suri (Santosh ), Karan Kandhari in turn tells a story of an Indian woman refusing to submit to the dictates of a patriarchal society. And sign the most azimuted of this trio although starting from a subject that lends itself to everything except entertainment: arranged marriage. In this case that of Uma landing in Mumbai to live with a man whom she does not know and as little prepared as him in life as a couple. Except that UMA, unable to hold a home as the tradition requires, has absolutely nothing of a passive victim who laments his fate. She swears like a carter, clashes her husband, clearly displays her sexual frustration … so that her impulses will gradually transform her into a horrific creature. A thousand places of the societal film, Sister midnight The manifest punk is manifested, doped at the Burlesque comedy. A hectic anthem at Girl Power.
Thierry Cheze
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First a love
DRAGONS ★★★☆☆
Dean DeBlois
From the first minutes, one wonders why Dean Deblois wanted to transpose in live-action his own animated masterpiece of 2010. The wonder of the first dragons, his visual poetry and his Miyazakian swerves diluted in this photorealistic adaptation which mechanically reproduces the original. Mason Thames and Nico Parker do their best, but they play in a shackles that are too rigid to be able to shine and appropriate the roles of Harold and Astrid. There remains Gerard Butler more imposing, and above all more threatening and tender than in the original. And if the dragons are magnificent, there is basically only a big adventure film, sometimes exciting, often disappointing, which copies its model a little less without ever justifying its own existence. A conscientious remake but devoid of soul that does not succeed in flight.
Pierre Lunn
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Indomitable ★★★☆☆
De Thomas Ngijol
The second film made solo by Thomas Ngijol is the fictional adaptation of a document made in 1995 by Mosco Levi Boucault, A crime in Abidjan. There was a criminal investigation in the Ivorian megaloped by Commissioner Kouassi with violent methods and the drift of a youth ravaged by drugs. Ngijol therefore goes on traces already tracked, in a world transposed here in Yaoundé in Cameroon but whose overflows of life and death form the same chaos. He himself takes charge of the embodiment of the (anti-) hero to which he added an intimate dimension. In the investigation and its ravages, Ngijol intends above all to paint a portrait of an equally abrasive father in his relationship to his children. Violence is not experienced by the person concerned as the vector of a distancing but the catalyst capable of preventing concealment and therefore installing confidence in understanding. This a priori unbearable brutality, neither the filmmaker nor the actor seeks to get around it or kiss him. She is there, in the air of a film always at a good distance from her subject.
Thomas Baurez
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The meeting of the summer ★★★☆☆
By Valentine Cadic
The title could have been that of a Rohmer film. And the ever crushing shadow of the man of Tales of the four seasons plane on this Do you go to summer. This same singular look at youth, this same ability to embrace a space known to all – in this case here Paris – and make it rediscover it through the eyes of a heroine and her way of taming it. This heroine is called Blandine. She came from Normandy to attend the Olympic Games and find a half-sister lost sight of for 20 years. Accustomed to calm and loneliness, nothing in this bubbling city seems compatible with this 30 -year -old. But this first long, however, tells the story of his metamorphosis. Gently. At her own pace as if nothing had happened, she will ignore the opposite winds and dare to get lost, provoke meetings to become mistress of her destiny. A film with a disarming charm that reveals an actress of an incredible grace: Blandine Madec.
Thierry Cheze
DIRT ★★★☆☆
Luna Carmono
No one is healing from his childhood, Chang Ferrat. And nothing can better illustrate this first length of Luna Carmoon which is part of the footsteps of his compatriots Charlotte Wells (Aftersun) et Charlotte Regan (Scrapper) who, like her, staged little girls struggling with unreliable parents. Her Maria grew up in London in the 80s with a loving mother but suffering from a syndrome that makes her pile up in their apartment monceaux of detritus collected in the streets. A traumatic childhood but buried in a corner of his memory until his 18th birthday where his foster family arrives, a thirty -something, ex -child placed, who will bring everything up to the surface. This pitch can have an air of deja vu but in addition to the striking composition of Saura Lightfoot- Leon, it is by its sensory staging creating an altered reality blurring the realism of the situations that Luna Carmoon is amazing. A strong film on resilience.
Thierry Cheze
A NORMAL FAMILY ★★★☆☆
De Hur Jin- Ho
Apart from blood ties, nothing brings Jae-Wan and Jae-gyu closer. Two brothers. One materialist lawyer obsessed with the lure of gain, the other idealistic surgeon confronted on a daily basis with the injustices of Korean society which he tries to correct. Each of their dinners, with their wives, turns to the clashed with speckled foil expressing their contempt for each other. Until the day when their adolescent children are involved in an ultra-violent news item. And where, to save them from a certain condemnation, the meaning of everyone’s moral will be turned upside down. Dominated by a permanent tension climate, this adaptation of Dinner From Dutch Kees Prins seduced by his way of jostling our certainties of spectators and by his portrait to the vitriol of an inspired youth, capable of all baseness because certain that their parents will save them the bet. An creaky social satire that deconstructs the myth of the family as a protective cocoon.
Thierry Cheze
A NEW OLD PLAY ★★★☆☆
De Qiu Jiongjiong
This (very) Chinese feature film retraces the route of an actor of the Sichuan theater for almost three hours, the secular particularity of which is marked by the rapid change of the masks of the actors on stage. For his first fictional feature film Qiu Jiongjiong, so far known for his documentary work, is directly inspired by the figure of his grandfather and assumes the baroque bias of his staging. The story divided into tables fully made in the studio, plays the amazement by the cinema effects of the first ages. Everything here is only apparent decorations, outraged make -up, incessant games of lights and shadows. The action begins with two messengers who go to a large actor-clown to accompany him to his last home. The opportunity to go up for a time when the often brutal mutations in Chinese history of a tormented 20th century are emerging. Impressive.
Thomas Baurez
The words they had one day ★★★☆☆
The Raphael Pillosio
The images are there. Faces of women in black and white. Each has the power of rebellion in the look. Sound is missing. In fact of sound, it is precisely the word that created emptiness. What we see date of 1962, all these women are mainly Algerian women freshly freed from French prisons. Activists for the independence of their country, the authorities had therefore muzzled them. The director Yann Le Masson, fiercely opposed to the colonial wars had then decided to film them when they left. More than 50 years later, the missing soundtrack again deprives these protagonists of their right to express their revolt. With this investigating film, Raphael Pilloso goes in search of missing words. A journey that takes him to Algeria to meet these women whose identity is sometimes blurred, the memory weakened by the vagaries of time when it is not the bodies that have definitively erased. Powerful.
Thomas Baurez
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First a moderately love
D’ddul a leila ★★☆☆☆
de Lela
Exile, the father, the Iraqi identity, the roots: so many subjects that make this film a bordered experiment, in mirror of the wanderings of this director in memory fragmented by amnesia. Despite an overflowing creativity and obvious vulnerability, difficult not to get lost in the artistic gesture of this bruised woman. By scattering her drawings, her songs, her neuroses, and her memories to widen better in her past, it is the spectator that she ends up forgetting.
Lucie CHIQUE
First did not like
Different ★☆☆☆☆
Of Lola Doillon
A first sequence shows us the anxious discovery of the open-space in which Katia (Jehnny Beth), a journalist of a company magazine, must now work. Lola Doillon (And who are you on?) firstly manages to make her disorder felt of which we do not yet measure the real range (Katia will soon learn that she is autistic) but which we can easily share the discomfort. The film could therefore consider itself as a criticism of an ultra-normous world where the desire for transparency and sharing makes relationships paradoxically opaque relationships if we are different. What he seeks to be without really achieving it. By quickly making a diagnosis on the discomfort of her heroine, Different becomes, in fact, suddenly academic and programmatic as if it was necessary only to illustrate by the scenario this discrepancy failing to grasp the physical and organic scope by the other tools of cinema. Damage.
Thomas Baurez
And also
Forced holidays, from Stéphan Archinard and François Prévôt-Leygonie
