Aftersun
- What to see
Drama by Charlotte Wells, 1h52
Aftersun
features a father and his daughter.
A week's vacation in Turkey, you can't refuse.
The club is not what they imagined, but Sophie is ready to share her leisure with this dad who has his arm in plaster.
She is 11 years old, does not let go of her camera.
He plays with her.
She is perhaps the more mature of the two.
She will fly away.
He sinks.
By the pool, she looks at the boys.
Meanwhile, Calum is sobbing sitting on the edge of the bed.
It's not going strong.
He tries to put on a good face, fights like a kid, throws chunks of bread at the dancing GOs.
As an adult, Sophie thinks back to this stay.
How did she not see it coming?
It was a world of ice cream and sunscreen, scuba diving and karaoke.
.
Charlotte Wells disdains chronology, cultivates distance, a certain coldness befitting the mystery of this summer like no other.
There was, yes, the water park, the carpet dealer, the rides, the pool games and the Macarena.
There was this apparent complicity.
The director does not press the i's.
The image is sometimes pasty like a hangover.
It is a film on the verge of tears, a bereavement that does not say its name.
The talent splashes the film.
Please, for once, let's forget the blockbusters.
IN.
Read alsoOur review of Ghost Therapy and Aftersun: to be or not to be with the other
A little brother
- To see
Drama by Léonor Serraille, 1h56
After
Saint-Omer,
The Women of the Square
and
Tirailleurs
,
A Little Brother
would have enough to give grain to grind on the end of the invisibilization of the Blacks in the French cinema.
But Léonor Serraille's film, presented in competition at Cannes in 2022, is anything but a militant and edifying work.
He does not claim to defend any memory or any cause.
Her heroine, Rose, represents only herself.
Léonor Serraille is inspired by the story of his companion (black) and father of his two children.
Rose arrives in France from the Ivory Coast.
She moved to the Paris suburbs with two of her sons, Jean and Ernest, at the end of the 1980s. The fathers do not appear in the landscape.
Rose is not just about skin color or status (immigrant, single mother).
She's a beautiful female character, superbly played by Annabelle Lengronne.
She is by turns happy, sad,
sensual or angry.
Neither holy nor submissive, employed as a maid in a hotel, she raises her sons with principles and seduces men with her charm.
The story is both chronological and star-shaped, each part corresponding to a member of the family.
After Rose, 19-year-old Jean (Stéphane Bak) takes over.
Without a father or landmarks, the brilliant student loses himself in bitterness and anger.
Ernest is the last pivot in this story of a Franco-African family.
The teenager spends a vacation by the sea at a friend's house.
When he returns home, Rose tells him that Jean is gone.
One ellipsis later, Ernest is a young adult living in Paris.
He has the features of Ahmed Sylla.
Having become a philosophy teacher, he talks about Blaise Pascal and asks his students about time.
A Little Brother
is a film about passing time, the time of memory, regrets and hopes.
Léonor Serraille stages a final face-to-face between Rose and Ernest, a conversation that is both banal and heartbreaking between a mother and her son.
And there is this letter from Jean to his little brother.
A tear runs down Ernest's cheek.
She carries torrents of emotion.
E.S.
Read alsoOur review of A little brother, an African family far from the clichés
Tel-Aviv-Beirut
- What to see
Drama by Michale Boganim, 1h56
The little cat.
Tanya returns to the house to pick him up.
Fouad, his father, shouts to him that he must leave, that the Hezbollah men are coming.
Smoke rises towards the sky, the population shouts.
Tel-Aviv-Beirut
, which probably did not benefit from a blockbuster budget, manages without difficulty to transcribe the atmosphere of a region at war: the South-Lebanon of 1982. After hours of waiting, IDF soldiers finally open the border to Israel.
Tanya and her father are safe and sound.
And desperate.
They leave behind their country and the memory of Nour, the mother, killed by a bomb while she was singing an air of Najat Al Shaghira.
Exiled in Israel like thousands of others, Fouad seeks in vain the support of a Hebrew officer, Yoshi, to whom he had, as a member of the Lebanese Christian forces, lent a hand during the occupation of the country by Tsahal.
And whose friend he had become.
This missed promise is the pivot of the film.
Twenty years later, in 2006, Israel again invaded Lebanon.
It's Yoshi's family's turn to face violence.
A symmetry settles in the pain.
Led by the spirited Tanya (Zalfa Seurat), Tel-Aviv-Beirut advances at high speed with, in the background, the melodies of Avishai Cohen.
Despite some blunders,
a real dramatic breath runs through the film.
Without excessive gravity.
The rhythm must have something to do with it.
Michale Boganim, who signs his second feature film there, does not seek to highlight the origins of these conflicts, but to show some consequences.
BP
Read alsoOur review of Tel-Aviv-Beirut: disunited hearts
Asterix and Obelix: The Middle Kingdom
- We can see
Comedy by Guillaume Canet, 1h51
We had left the irreducible Gauls in Brittany, under the leadership of Laurent Tirard (
Le Petit Nicolas
).
Ten years later, Guillaume Canet takes up the torch with Asterix and Obelix
: the Middle Empire, for
which he imagined the scenario.
Canet, ambitious and humble at the same time, follows in the footsteps of Alain Chabat, the ex-Nul being the reference.
Sound
Asterix and Obelix: Mission Cleopatra
(2002) gave a boost to the characters of Uderzo and Goscinny and federated the largest audience.
The first minutes of Canet's film are very soft.
Jérôme Commandeur (Abraracourcix), Audrey Lamy (Bonnemine), Pierre Richard (Panoramix) and Philippe Katerine (Assurancetourix) purr.
Guillaume Canet (Asterix) and Gilles Lellouche (Obelix) stamp their feet.
Everything changes with the arrival of Jonathan Cohen (Graindemaïs), a Phoenician merchant who has come to the aid of Princess Fu Yi, daughter of the Empress of China, imprisoned by the traitorous prince Deng Tsin Quin.
And the adventure takes off outside de Gaulle when a cohort of exotic characters crosses paths with Asterix and Obelix, who have left in a chariot.
Canet has fun playing Tiger and Dragon
pastiche .
Alongside this acrobatic kung-fu, the fight of the Gauls is getting old.
But Asterix and Obelix manage to get their fibula out of the game. On another, more unexpected ground.
Lellouche brings a mixture of playfulness and candor to Obélix.
As for Canet, we know since
Rock'n'roll
that the actor-director hardly spares himself.
His masochism is not always tinged with self-mockery and his best role to date remains the serial killer policeman in
The Next Time I Will Aim for the Heart.
Asterix is anything but a psychopath.
But Canet makes him a fallible being, a weakling without muscle or particular genius, dependent on a magic potion and rejected lover.
He has neither the trickery of Christian Clavier, nor the energy of Clovis Cornillac nor the eloquence of Édouard Baer.
He is an ordinary, restless Gaul.
Perfect alter ego of the Frenchman of the 2020s, inhabitant of a world in crisis.
But who can always count on his friend Obélix.
Under a blockbuster look, a beautiful eulogy of friendship.
E.S.
Read alsoWhat is Asterix and Obelix: The Middle Empire really worth?
Ghost Therapy
- We can see
Comedy by Clay Tatum, 1h44
At the time, they didn't know each other that well.
Whit was one of those high school friends you ran into in the yard without really being intimate.
Here he is claiming to be his only friend.
Clay can't believe it.
This photographer is not a workaholic.
He is looking for himself.
His fiancée tries to shake him off.
He chooses the most appropriate haircut to get a job.
The result - a hairstyle à la Du Guesclin - is not a success.
His girlfriend deserves it.
Why is this Whit still in their paws, with his little purple coat?
She prefers to go away for a while.
Here are the two boys together.
This Whit is weird.
The others don't see it.
The reality finally catches the eye.
Whit is a ghost.
As soon as Clay has had enough, he locks her in the car.
Does the metropolis upset him?
Never mind, let's go to a chalet in the mountains.
The outcome will be cruel, unpredictable, terribly human.
In
Ghost Therapy
, Clay Tatum, who also has the main role, revives this independent cinema, made of odds and ends.
He does not hurry, welcomes digressions with obvious happiness.
Freedom reigns in this daily and abracadabrant story.
It's three times nothing.
This is already a lot.
IN.
Read alsoOur review of Ghost Therapy and Aftersun: to be or not to be with the other
Knock at the Cabin
- We can see
Thriller by M. Night Shyamalan, 1h40
M. Night Shyamalan here adapts a novel by Paul Tremblay published by Éditions Gallmeister under the title
La Cabane aux confins du monde
.
Cabin or chalet, both translations are possible.
Isolated on the edge of a lake in New Hampshire, Eric and Andrew, a gay and charming couple, spend their holidays there with Wen, their 7-year-old granddaughter.
Two men and two women break in with homemade medieval weapons.
After tying up the little family, they explain to her as calmly as possible that she must sacrifice one of her own to avoid the end of the world (suicide is excluded).
Eric and Andrew think they are dealing with Jehovah's Witnesses but the four horsemen of the Apocalypse want to be persuasive by launching plagues (tsunami, epidemic, plane crashes) that television images come to attest.
fake news?
The suspension of disbelief of the protagonists and spectators resists for a long time.
We don't know which foot to dance on.
Is this a metaphor for Trumpism?
A plot against progressivism, beleaguered by retrograde forces?
Hardcore conversion therapy?
Shyamalan's know-how is intact but it is difficult to understand where he is coming from.
Or else we are afraid of understanding too well.
E.S.
Read alsoOur review of Knock at the Cabin, the drama of the lake
The Worst Neighbor in the World
- We can see
Dramatic comedy by Marc Foster, 2h07
His alarm clock invariably goes off at 5:30 a.m. every morning.
Otto Anderson (Tom Hanks) grumbles, grumbles and gets up, as grumpy as the day before.
Come rain, shine or snow in this residential Pittsburgh neighborhood, newly retired Otto curses it all.
Depressed, suicidal, he wanders around his house and overcomes his boredom by doing security rounds in the neighborhood to check that everything is in order.
Nothing finds favor in his eyes: the motorists who crush the lawns, the waste deposited in the wrong recycling bins, the young cyclist who leaves his bike lying around... and worst of all, the arrival of new neighbors, a young couple formed by Marisol (bright Mariana Treviño), Tommy (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo) and their two adorable little girls.
Tom Hanks excels at playing this embittered widower who fiercely recalls the Walt Kowalski portrayed by Clint Eastwood in
Gran Torino
.
Filmed with finesse and without fuss by director Marc Forster,
The Worst Neighbor in the World
is adapted from the Swedish bestseller
Old, grumpy and suicidal.
Life according to Ove,
by Fredrik Backman, published in 2012, itself adapted to the cinema in 2015. The great advantage of the American version undoubtedly lies in the performance of Tom Hanks.
This is indeed a “feel good movie” camouflaged as an intimate drama.
We come out comforted, smiling, with this unspeakable desire to see life on the bright side.
OD
Read alsoOur review of the Worst neighbor in the world: Eastwood-style Hanks
Amore mio
- We can see
Drama by Guillaume Gouix, 1h20
Lola (Alysson Paradis) refuses to attend her husband's funeral and takes her 8-year-old son and older sister Margaux (magnificent Élodie Bouchez) on a bereaved road trip to southern Italy.
For his passage behind the camera, Guillaume Gouix refuses to stage himself and focuses on this supercharged sisterhood relationship which electrifies the story.
A delicate, sensitive and very touching first film.
OD
The Mountain
- We can see
Comedy by Thomas Salvador, 1h52
After
Vincent has no scales
, an artisanal, burlesque and poetic superhero film, actor-director Thomas Salvador is unraveling in the Alps.
Bartelby des cimes who would prefer not to come back down, he has a crush on the mountains and Louise Bourgoin, chef in a mountain restaurant.
It's beautiful, contemplative and too long.
ES
Huda's Trap
- We can see
Drama by Hany Abu-Assad, 1h30
A pale light, a muscular interrogation.
In Nazareth, a Palestinian militia arrests a woman suspected of having collaborated with the Israeli secret services.
Moral dilemmas jostle in this sober but effective thriller, which is inspired by real situations.
BP
Maurice, the fabulous cat
– We can see
Animated film by Toby Genkel and Florian Westermann, 1h33
This is a cat with a dog.
Maurice, a feline with a carnivorous smile wanders from town to town in the company of an ingenuous flautist.
Big-hearted troubadours?
Oh no.
The venal tomcat claims to rid the public square of the swarms of rats that invade it - for a hefty payment of course.
Nobody suspects that he is in cahoots with the rodents, until the day when formidable competitors arrive who put the whole scam in danger.
This adaptation of a novel by Terry Pratchett concentrates in 93 minutes all the wacky touch and the crisp irreverence of the British master.
Maurice's swaggering tongue is worth all the pussies in the world.
CS
