“Rematch”, “Disclaimer”, “A Devoted Friend” and “Werewolves”

THE MORNING LIST

The series of the week are placed under the sign of lies and pretenses, whether literary (Disclaimer), playful (Werewolves), technological (Rematch) or downright psychiatric (A devoted friend).

“Rematch”: Kasparov against Deeper Blue, the chess madman and IBM’s pawns

It’s an old story – the victory, in 1997, of the Deeper Blue computer, designed under the aegis of IBM, over one of the greatest chess players in history, Garry Kasparov. The project of Rematch is to elevate this episode to the rank of a turning point in the history of humanity, as the first manifestation of the ascendancy that artificial intelligence could gain over its creators. You would have to be both a grandmaster and an engineer from MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) to judge the validity of the proposition.

What appears on the screen is a series of perfect classicism, which uses means whose development dates back well before the invention of digital intelligence. For ease of understanding, the characters will speak in English, including in flashbacks which take us back to Kasparov’s (Christian Cooke) Russian childhood. There will be on one side a fallible hero (his greatest enemy being the paranoia he has retained from years spent on the borders of dissidence) and on the other an evil multinational, embodied by the character of Helen Brock ( Sarah Bolger), an IBM executive more devoid of affect than Deeper Blue. In the middle, there is the champion’s mother (Trine Dyrholm) and his new manager. This last role was entrusted to Aidan Quinn, who reprises the character of an ordinary man confronted with the genius he played in Elementary. The method overlays the complexity of the story with the deceptive simplicity of entertainment without really illuminating the issues of this confrontation. T. S.

“Disclaimer”: two families torn apart by a secret

Back behind the camera six years later RomaMexican filmmaker Alfonso Cuaron takes advantage of the significant resources of Apple TV + and the scale of the serial format to adapt the eponymous bestseller by American Renée Knight into seven episodes. THE disclaimer is this warning placed at the beginning of a film, a book, or even a series, to break the link between the work and reality. Quite the opposite is happening here, where a self-published novel shatters the existence of Catherine, a successful documentary filmmaker, by revealing a secret that she has kept firmly under lock and key for twenty years. The revelation then threatens her marriage to Robert, a rich heir, her work as a journalist for which she gives her all, and even the physical and psychological integrity of her drug addict son.

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