Find our reviews of the main films coming out on September 25, 2024.
The return of a great American master, the remake of a cult erotic film and a cracking documentary… The menu for the week is plentiful.
“Megalopolis” by Francis Ford Coppola (3/5)
With Adam Driver, Giancarlo Esposita, Shia LaBeouf
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Should you make the film of your dreams at all costs, despite the events that have continually derailed it? This is the question we can ask ourselves with “Megalopolis”, a film so hoped for, at the opposite end of what we could have expected. Forget your desires for “The Godfather” or “The Apocalypse”, the director wanted his film to be a snub.
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A return to the roots of his cinema: rebellious, fundamentally independent, uncompromising. It took nerve to invest 100 million dollars of his own pocket to create this diatribe on power, to dare to have a schoolboyish sense of humor, actors happy to overdo it, to take on sequences that are too long, sometimes failed… Coppola has made a unique, crazy UFO film that doesn’t care about pleasing. Fabrice Leclerc
“Emmanuelle” by Audrey Diwan (3/5)
With Noémie Merlant, Naomi Watts, Will Sharpe
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The project was still a real risk. Offering a contemporary version of the most cult erotic film in the history of French cinema at the cinema, when pornography is just a click away, is taking the risk of attracting neither the horny fish in the fishbowl nor the prudish of the new cinephilia to the cinemas.
When it was announced, many feared that the film would be a manifesto against the long-dominant Male Gaze in the form of a feminist scathing attack that would pluck the feathers of the barnyard roosters. But that is to misunderstand Audrey Diwan. “Emmanuelle” is her. The film is an extension of what was already underway in “The Event”: the exploration of female solitude in front of her physical and social body. Yannick Vely
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“Riverboom” by and with Claude Baechtold, Serge Michel, Paolo Woods… (3/5)
Afghanistan, in the aftermath of the 2001 attacks. Three young journalists travel through this dangerous country, at the heart of the current geopolitical chessboard. But with “Riverboom”, you don’t expect what you’re going to see. Really not. A documentary about the heroism of war reporters? No, more like a kind of explosive road trip where we follow some bumbling idiots in unknown lands.
This tale of a journey that hesitates between the violent and the burlesque is not always in good taste, but it is sometimes tender, often funny and bears witness to a carefree and vanished youth. A snapshot of fraternity, iconoclastic and unclassifiable. So necessarily interesting. Fabrice Leclerc
