Find our selection of reviews of arthouse films released on November 27.
An invitation to travel, two formidable documentaries and an ambitious first film on jihadist women… Film buffs are spoiled for choice this week.
“Grand Tour” by Miguel Gomes (5/5)
Avec Gonçalo Waddington, Crista Alfaiate, Teresa Madruga
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In the tradition of “Tabou”, which had already won him the directing prize in Berlin, the Portuguese director Miguel Gomes offers with “Grand Tour” a journey through time and space, freeing himself from the rules of the reconstruction for a work of incredible plastic beauty, rightly rewarded in Cannes. The plot seems simple: a civil servant of the British Empire – we are in 1918 – Edward goes to South-East Asia on a secret mission (and also to escape his upcoming wedding), followed, a day later, by his cumbersome fiancée… Molly (and her nervous laugh) still dreams of marrying him but learns the hard way in the sweaty Burmese nights that one can play with feelings. This disenchanted romantic argument above all allows the Lisbon poet to sublimate Asian culture and landscapes, to play with the very material of cinema – the black and white passages are sublime, the mixture of genres highly sophisticated.
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“Leni Riefenstahl, light and shadows” by Andres Veiel (4/5)
It's a documentary that leaves you speechless. Nourished by incredible archival images and interviews with the manipulative “Leni Riefenstahl, the light and the shadows” by Andres Veiel traces the life of the famous director of the Nazi regime, from her first films magnifying the bodies of Aryans to her last days, in the early 2000s, when she monetized her most abject memories. Creepy.
« Architecton » de Victor Kossakovsky (4/5)
The prologue begins with a long drone shot above the devastated Ukraine, its ruined buildings, its shattered churches while the sublime music of Evgueni Galperine resonates. Are we going to see a documentary on the conflict? This is a false lead. Victor Kossakovsky's new essay (“Aquarela”) is a philosophical reflection on architecture. With monumental images filmed in the four corners of the world, he asks a fundamental question: why concrete for the short term when the stone survives time, wars and the elements? To be discovered on the biggest screen possible.
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« Rabbia » by Mareike Engelhardt (3/5)
With Megan Northam, Lubna Azabal, Natacha Krief
For her first feature film, Mareike Engelhardt demonstrates real ambition: to reconstruct the journey of a young apprentice jihadist who leaves for Syria to join the Islamic State and its capital, Raqqa. The first hour offers something never seen before, at least in fiction cinema. Very documented, “Rabbia” follows the rise of its heroine (Megan Northam, the seed of a great actress) within the hierarchy of Daesh, first future wife of fighters, then prisoner of the matron then executioner in turn . It’s a shame that the story gets bogged down in the last third, becoming a more conventional boarding school film.
