What to see in theaters
THE EVENT
A BEAR IN THE JURA ★★★☆☆
De Franck Dubosc
The essentials
Filmmaker Franck Dubosc changes genre and creates a very frosty black comedy. Touching and perfectly played.
After his two directorial films, Everyone standing et Rumba lifeFranck Dubosc has obviously decided to change genre and register. At the beginning ofA Bear in the Jura we follow, in the middle of the French mountains, migrants responsible for transporting drugs for a mafioso. An impalement, a pile-up and a few gunshots later, a poor local guy finds himself with a pile of money too big for him. This is the start of the trouble where the decor is not just a pretext. By giving a new framework to his cinema, Dubosc also gives it a new heart. His calm gaze, attentive to reality, creates relief where there is none in this good-natured and moving gendarme (Poelvoorde, full of tenderness), this woman who is bored but who will gradually get caught up in the game (Calamy, speed and whimsical) or this cop who is smarter than expected. Because if the black comedy against an immaculate background is well put together, it is on the fringes of the plot that this Ours finds its true carburetion. In the numb intimacy of the natives. In their slow-motion dialogues and attention to detail which become amusing without warning.
Gaël Golhen
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PREMIERE LIKED A LOT
EEPHUS – THE LAST LAP ★★★★☆
De Carson Lund
This first feature by Carson Lund (director of photography and star of the indie collective Omnes Films) chronicles the match between two amateur baseball teams, who meet for the very last time, the field of their small town in New England soon having to be replaced by a school. These average Americans, no more friends than that, but unfailingly linked by the habit of playing together for years, pace around their autumn-colored stadium, down beers, room together, and their day is made up of long periods of waiting and sudden accelerations end up drawing a languid virile epic, a bit like lo-fi, minimalist Howard Hawks. Under his air of not touching it and his deadpan humor, Eephus brilliantly tells how certain pieces of collective history disappear, without fanfare.
Frédéric Foubert
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PEPE ★★★★☆
By Nelson Carlo de los Santos Arias
The marketing claims it's the “fantasy epic” of Pepe, Pablo Escobar's hippopotamus. This is both accurate and completely false. A thousand miles from a fucking Netflix narcofilm, Pepe is a dizzying trip revolving around its subject – told by the voice with multiple accents of the ghost of the animal – without really showing it, treating the poor and monstrous Pepe, lugged from Africa to Colombia like the Loch Ness monster disoriented in the jungle ofApocalypse Now. Just that? Yes, but be warned: Pepe didn't win the Silver Bear in Berlin for nothing. The cinema experience, which questions the myth by constantly filming alongside it, is radical (the debate on the false and the true takes place around a marital dispute between an old fisherman and his wife, the sequence shots are interrupted by black or white screens…) but not far from being unforgettable.
Sylvestre Picard
TOTTO-CHAN, THE LITTLE GIRL AT THE WINDOW ★★★★☆
De Shinnosuke Yakuwa
The turbulent schooling of a little girl like no other, from 1940 to 1945, while Japan plunges into war. Adaptation of a best-selling autobiography by a veteran of Japanese “children’s” animation (he has signed tons of Doraemon), Totto-chan is defined, a bit like the Blitz by Steve McQueen, like an animated heir to Hope and Glory et Empire of the Sun. Totto messes up Japan's tidy traditions, between unbridled militarism and narrow-minded obedience, and finds refuge in a special school alongside the outcasts of the system. Armed with superb animation (Totto's facial expressions, constantly in motion, are irresistible), the film takes advantage of its most lyrical flights to confront you, like its heroine, with the experience of mourning with disarming frankness.
Sylvestre Picard
FIRST TO LIKE
BIRD ★★★☆☆
By Andrea Arnold
Bailey is 12 years old and lives in a squat with his brother and father. Bailey could be the little sister of the heroine of Fish tankthe film that revealed Andrea Arnold 15 years ago. Because like the great filmmakers, she basically only plows a furrow, this social cinema where she excels through her ability to direct young talents (the flamboyant Nykia Adams), to become one with her heroines but also through her way of not never confine his story to the sordid. Once the situation is established, the filmmaker shows this child who, as puberty approaches, seeks to escape social and family determinism. First alone then accompanied by an enigmatic character who tumbles into her life. The Bird of the title, similar to an angel who fell from the sky or a superhero who has lost his superpowers. And it is precisely thanks to him… that Andrea Arnold leaves her comfort zone to venture for the first time, not without mastery, into the realm of fantasy. And this intriguing journey would not have been the same without Bird's interpreter, Franz Rogowski, his freedom of play, the poetry which surrounds each of his gestures or his looks.
Thierry Cheze
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THE SOURCE ★★★☆☆
Of Mary Jober
In an isolated village in Tunisia, a couple saw their two sons Mehdi and Amine abandon them and their youngest brother to join ISIS. A sudden departure that left them devastated. Until the day when Mehdi returns accompanied by his veiled fiancée and tells them of Amine's death. What to do in such a situation? Caught in a moral dilemma, his mother decides to hide the couple – and to keep their presence secret from the police officer, who is a friend of the family – to prevent her son from being taken away from her again. A gesture which will obviously not be without consequences. For his first feature which dialogues with the recent RabiaMeryam Joobeur approaches this complex subject by creating a contrast between the ultra-realism of the situation and the assumed dreamlike treatment of its depiction in images, thus reflecting the disorder of this mother gradually losing her bearings. And the mastery with which she does it commands admiration
Thierry Cheze
EVERYTHING WILL BE FINE ★★★☆☆
De Ray Yeung
With a title like that we suspect that everything will go wrong. And yet, he's not entirely lying. Because the gentleness that punctuates this dramatic story diffuses the sensation of possible appeasement. In Hong Kong today, Angie and Pat, in their sixties, live as a couple. The sudden death of one of them will create tensions within the family of the deceased, anxious to recover the apartment where the two women lived lovingly. This bedroom drama moves slowly like an Ozu film. The setting gradually becomes a prison where the weight of traditions and conventions coagulate, the force of which ends up crushing beings. Ray Yeung (Spring in Hong Kong) takes off the big shoes that such a story suggests, opting for the subtlety of feelings, even if they are cruel and unjust. In a Hong Kong society that is not very friendly to LGBT+ people, such a film, by its very universality, is a good way to move the lines.
Thomas Baurez
QUEENDOM ★★★☆☆
By Agniia Galdanova
Gena Marvin is a queer artist performing in impressive performances where she takes on the appearance of mutant, spidery, quasi-alien creatures. It's not happening in a drag show but in the streets of Putin's Russia. Documentarian Agniia Galdanova followed her from 2019 to 2023, as Russia invaded Ukraine and her creations became increasingly political and courageous. Queendom is a powerful portrait of an artist who puts her life on the line, and transforms that life into a work of art at every moment.
Frédéric Foubert
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FIRST TO MODERATELY LIKED
LOVE IN THE PRESENT ★★☆☆☆
John Crowley
Florence Pugh and Andrew Garfield in a melodrama by John Crowley (Boy A already with Garfield, Brooklyn). Four excellent reasons to arouse real curiosity around this story of love at first sight born… from an accident and the romantic passion that results from it, struck by illness. Florence Pugh lives up to all expectations, impressively powerful and delicate throughout the emotional roller coaster that her female chef character goes through. Certain scenes (including a childbirth) leave an impression. And yet, we never completely abandon ourselves to what is playing out on the screen. The fault is this choice of story in flashbacks and flashforwards which creates repeated soft stomachs but above all gives the sensation of an artifice aimed at protecting at all costs the story from a surge of emotions which could rhyme with sentimentality. This melodrama with these actors and this director would have deserved something more frontal.
Thierry Cheze
QUIET LIFE ★★☆☆☆
De Alexandros Avranas
When a Russian family is refused asylum in Sweden, their already austere daily life worsens when the youngest falls into an unexplained coma. If the minimalist and rigid staging gives the film a surreal atmosphere, nothing here is science fiction: the story evokes the real syndrome of resignation which affects refugee children. But in wanting to border on dystopia while shedding light on a very real fact, Quiet Life becomes confused and loses sight of what he aspires to denounce.
Lucie Chiquer
MAJA, A FINNISH EPIC ★★☆☆☆
De Tina Lymy
What was the world like before capitalism? No doubt the one in which Maja, little blonde head and main character of this “epic” straight out of Little House on the Prairie – Finnish version – evolves. Forced to marry a fisherman, the little girl embraces her destiny as a 19th century woman for almost three hours. An existence punctuated by motherhood, work and war, which the film follows… without ever having offered a real strong point of view on what it shows.
Emma Poesy
FIRST DID NOT LIKE
SIX DAYS ★☆☆☆☆
By Juan Carlos Medina
Six days. The time remaining for an inspector to find the perpetrator of a child kidnapping which turned into a tragedy before the case is closed. The promise therefore, a priori, of a film under tension, boosted by the guilt of this cop for having let the murderer escape and the pressure put on by the mother of the deceased boy. A promise unfortunately not kept because of a scenario with poorly constructed twists and turns, an exhausting soundtrack and a direction that is too rarely inspired. Juan Carlos Medina has still not confirmed the promises of his first feature, Insensitive.
Thierry Cheze
MIKA EX MACHINA ★☆☆☆☆
By Déborah Saïag and Mika Tard
Mika Tard (in front of and behind the camera) finds his motorcycle covered in various objects every day, until a padlock hidden in his chain almost sends him into the background. An investigation then begins to find the person responsible, with the help of his group of queer and feminist friends constructing from the wildest to the most distressing hypotheses. A little game from which we unfortunately quickly feel excluded, because we show ourselves incapable of transcending the situation to tell, as if ambitiously, something about human relationships in our society.
Thierry Cheze
And also
the pyramid, by Damien Faure
Schirkoa, the city of fables, by Ishan Schukla
The Covers
The Chained, de Alfred Hitchcock
Rebecca, de Alfred Hitchcock
