A single price of €4 to discover the films of the moment in French cinemas.
Like every year since 1985, cinemas are celebrating in June.
For this 37th edition, professionals in the sector hope to find an audience that has been shunning theaters since the Covid-19 crisis.
As a reminder, Europe recorded a dark year in 2021 with a 60% drop in attendance over the year.
2022 does not seem to have started any better, cinemas suffered a 41.6% drop in attendance in January 2022 and the same in February compared to the same months of 2019. On the program for this edition, American blockbusters, animated films and French comedy.
Our selection.
Elvis
Baz Luhrmann biopic, 2h39
With Austin Butler, the King has unearthed the ideal performer for this biopic where the music finds its place.
It's as if the immortal interpreter of
Heartbreak Hotel
had never left the building.
It's simple, Austin Butler is Elvis.
From the first images, we are convinced to see the King incarnate before our eyes.
Better than the thousands of look-alikes and other clones that have appeared since his death nearly forty-five years ago, Butler masterfully interprets the role, or rather the roles, Elvis was so multiple, from his appearance at the age of 19. until his death at age 42.
WE
Read alsoOur review of
Elvis
, by Baz Luhrmann: the many faces of the “King”
Buzz Lightning
Animation by Angus MacLane, 1h49
In
Buzz Lightyear
, young space ranger sidekick to cowboy Woody in
Toy Story
crashes his big turnip-shaped exploration ship on a hostile planet.
With the help of his partner, Izzy Hawthorne, he intends to get the human colony stuck on this inhospitable star out of trouble.
In this arduous task, he will be helped by a band of very sympathetic broken arms, not to mention a robot cat called Sox, as cute as he is resourceful.
Director Angus MacLane and Pixar seize this cosmonaut in the green and white suit and invent a flamboyant destiny for him.
An animated film worthy of a 1960s space opera.
OD
Read alsoOur review of
Buzz Lightyear :
Toy Story
's cosmonaut
flies on his own
Decision to Leave
Drama/Thriller by Park Chan-wook, 2h18.
His nights are longer than his days.
The doctor calculated: this Busan policeman wakes up forty-seven times an hour.
Might as well stay up.
Hae-joon takes the opportunity to multiply the hideouts in the dark.
He has his work cut out for him.
His latest case is, shall we say, bizarre.
The corpse of a mountaineer is found at the foot of a rocky peak.
A priori, it is a banal accident.
Not so sure.
Why not a suicide?
The hypothesis is to be considered.
Things get complicated with the wife of the deceased.
No apparent emotion.
The day after the accident, she resumed her work, which consists of massaging lonely old ladies.
A detail disturbs the inspector: she has a scratch on her hand.
There is not just that.
Over the interrogations, the cop falls in love with the suspect.
It does
Park Chan-wook, the director of this urban thriller offers sudden escapes to the sea or the mountains.
The feelings are of a constant photogeny.
The plot meanders, with its pitfalls, its dead ends.
It's a maze of suppositions, an ocean of beauty cradled by Mahler's
5th Symphony
, in which one loses oneself with enchantment.
As with Proust, the character dries up for someone who is not his type.
So he continues to watch her at the bottom of his building, desperately looking for her on a beach at low tide.
There are days when we say to ourselves that, yes, cinema is definitely an art.
Hover.
IN
Read alsoOur review of
Decision to leave
: fragments of a murderous speech
Incredible but true
Comedy by Quentin Dupieux, 1h14.
Alain (Alain Chabat) and Marie (Léa Drucker) are very happy.
At 50 and something, they are finally owners.
The peculiarity of their pavilion burns their lips.
In the basement there is a hatch.
It hides a tunnel.
If you take it, you suddenly find yourself outside twelve hours early and three days younger.
Quiet.
It will take a dinner with a couple of friends who also have something au gratin to announce to them for them to break the silence.
With
Incredible But True
, Quentin Dupieux is not afraid of the absurd.
It is an area he masters.
He knows how far to go too far.
At home, the strange - a giant fly in the trunk of a Mercedes, a forties literally crazy about his fringed jacket - belongs to everyday life.
The director has the art of stretching the scenes, maintaining the suspense thanks to hilarious dialogues and actors who obviously can't believe they are having so much fun.
We see in this the vast misery of the time, the frustration that reigns in the most united couples, the ambiguous relationships at work.
Obviously, the machine breaks down.
Otherwise, it wouldn't be funny.
IN
Read alsoOur review of
Incredible but true
, by Quentin Dupieux: time is everything
Top Gun: Maverick
Action movie by Joseph Kosinski, 2h17
Thirty-six years later, "Maverick" is back in service.
And it sucks.
This time, Tom Cruise and his elite pilots have a mission to accomplish, if not impossible, at least perilous: to destroy a clandestine uranium enrichment plant in an enemy country.
The training sequences and the mission itself are dizzying.
Cruise, now an instructor, must train "Rooster" (Miles Teller) who is none other than the son of "Goose", his teammate who died accidentally in the first
Top Gun
.
Trauma and remorse don't stop Cruise's iconic shots on a motorbike, hair blowing, racing an airplane.
He continues to defy the clocks.
A game of American football on the beach allows him to show off his pecs.
"It's not the plane that counts,
is his other mantra.
Aboard an F-14, another relic of the 1980s, Cruise fears no one.
Top Gun: Maverick
wards off the fear of aging, an anxiety of the Hollywood star shared by a good part of humanity.
E.
S.
Read alsoCannes Film Festival: should we go see the sequel to
Top Gun
with Tom Cruise?
El Buen Patron
Comedy by Fernando León d'Aranoa, 2h00
They were only missing that.
The licensed accountant camps in front of the factory, sleeps in his car, brandishes banners, summons his children, yells into a megaphone.
Now is really not the time.
Blanco scales are on the verge of winning the Excellence Award for the best company in the region.
A commission is likely to tumble unexpectedly.
The boss does not take off.
Is it his fault if there was a social plan?
He announced it with a heavy heart.
The market is not joking.
From the top of his balcony, this brave fifty-year-old delivers a speech to his troops that is as satisfied as it is purring.
Javier Bardem shines as the paternalistic and clumsy CEO of a company where everything goes down the drain.
A particularly tasty social comedy.
E.
NOT.
Read alsoOur review of
El buen patrón
: the quiet farce
Between life and death
Drama/Thriller by Giordano Gederlini, 1h35.
It's the kind of thriller, tense and sticky, from which you don't come out unscathed.
Entre la vie et la mort
features a silent, exhausted, disillusioned protagonist, direct heir to the heroes we saw in the American thrillers of the 1970s. The story takes the viewer to Brussels.
A confined megalopolis filmed like the New York
of William Friedkin 's
French Connection .
Leo Castaneda (Antonio de la Torre, as magnetic and tortured as Roy Scheider) is a Spaniard with a troubled past, who became a simple driver on line 6 of the Brussels metro.
One evening, he meets the feverish and familiar gaze of a young man left alone at the edge of the quay.
The boy voluntarily disappears under the tracks…
OD
Read alsoOur review of
Between Life and Death
: Dark Belgian History