A Woman’s Life, Farewell Cruel World, Les Ensorceleuses 2: what’s new at the cinema this week
What to see in theaters
THE EVENT
A WOMAN’S LIFE ★★★★☆
By Charline Bourgeois-Taquet
The essentials
The director of Les Amours d’Anaïs successfully combines her taste for marivaudage with social concerns around a failing French hospital system. Léa Drucker is dazzling there.
We discovered Charline Bourgeois-Tacquet with Les Amours d’Anaïs, in the field of marivaudage which this time she mixes with more societal considerations by embracing the deleterious state of the French hospital system. A mixture of genres united in one and the same character. Gabrielle, a maxillofacial surgeon and head of department who holds almost everything on her shoulders (her relationship, her mother, her sister, her team, etc.) without ever showing a sign of weakness. A working girl suddenly struck by the unexpected, a love story with a writer who came to her department in search of inspiration for her next novel. The Life of a Woman follows its hectic pace which only slows down in these moments of intimacy, where desire and voluptuousness suddenly invade her life and therefore the screen. The success of the gesture is based on a straight line writing but also on the writing that embodies Gabrielle. Léa Drucker fascinates with her way of taking charge of the tone of the story while gradually revealing the flaws that inhabit Gabrielle and her cracking armor.
Thierry Cheze
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PREMIERE LIKED A LOT
GOODBYE CRUEL WORLD ★★★★☆
By Felix de Givry
At the age of 14, Otto Vidal sent a suicide letter to his tormentors, classmates who, under cover of night, tracked their prey to the point of exhaustion. He jumps from a bridge but emerges unharmed and decides not to reappear. A hijacking of the film-testament, an initiatory story whose universality shines through in a film grain blurring temporal boundaries and in the almost absence of modern technologies, Farewell Cruel World, first feature film by Arco’s co-writer, resonates with the burning news of a suffering adolescence. We read it in the melancholy of the big blue eyes of the young and brilliant Milo Machado-Graner before his character gradually discovers that in this world of bullies and disappointments, there is still a little hope.
Chloé Delos-Eray
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FIRST TO LIKE
PINK ★★★☆☆
By Markus Schleinzer
In the 17th century when the wars of religion hit Europe, a woman pretends to be a man in order to recover an estate in the heart of the German countryside. If the community first welcomes this “revenant” as one of their own, doubts about his identity begin to arise. By his very style – ultra-contrasted and grainy black and white, rigor of the frame, harshness of the subject – Markus Schleinzer represents the pain of being in the world. Rose’s cover-up is seen as a provocative gesture against a population gullible by greed. The crudest realism clashes with the apparent artificiality of the staging (we border on the auteurist pose). And, at the center of all attention, the face of Sandra Hüller becomes the sensitive territory of the film. His gaze, both sad and bravado, unfathomable and penetrating, conveys a thick mystery.
Thomas Baura
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OASIS- DON’T LOOK BACK IN ANGER ★★★☆☆
By Dylan Southern and Will Lovelace
If you have no interest in Oasis, you can move on. Some rock docuses manage to transcend their subject to reach a wider audience than the circle of fans, but this one doesn’t even have the ambition, to tell the truth. Its goal is to celebrate the group, its anthems, its legend, and also its audience which transformed, in the summer of 2025, the patching up of enemy brothers Liam and Noel Gallagher into a first-rate cultural event. During the first twenty minutes, absolutely fabulous, we believe we have gold. This is the time devoted to tour rehearsals, when a little suspense still lingers: what will the atmosphere be like when the brothers are finally reunited in the same room? This kind of thrill, giving the impression of accessing an intimate truth about the Gallaghers, will unfortunately be absent from the rest of the film. The group’s communication is today as closed as its setlist. So Don’t Look Back In Anger unfolds a series of extracts from concerts (frankly euphoric), mini-portraits of fans and snippets of interviews with Liam and Noel – funny, but less inspired in terms of punchlines than in their golden age. But the fans will not shy away from their pleasure.
Frédéric Foubert
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THE SURVIVORS OF CHE ★★★☆☆
By Christophe Réveille
October 1967, surrounded by dozens of European and South American defenders of the revolution, Che Guevara dreams of overthrowing power in Bolivia. Abandoned by the local peasants, he and his followers found refuge in the jungle where they suffered repeated assaults from the army, aided by American intelligence. Che and most of his people were killed or arrested. Six partisans, posted in the mountains, manage to escape. Chased by some 4,000 soldiers, they tried to reach Chile, 2,400 kilometers away. A journey full of dangers, lasting five months from which not all of them escape. Vincent Lindon narrates this extremely clever documentary which beautifully alternates testimonies and archive images, when they exist, with numerous animated sequences filling in the story when real images are missing. A great way to revive a forgotten page of history.
Anne Lenoir
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FIRST TO MODERATELY LIKED
PRESSURE ★★☆☆☆
By Anthony Maras
When the Landings are announced in The Battle of Gaulle, Churchill asks in a completely innocuous reply if anyone has seen his meteorologist. This sentence was not a coincidence. Anthony Maras starts from this mouse hole, stretches it, and produces Pressure, a funny film which presents the Second World War from the point of view of a genius-meteorologist who ordered the sending of the Allies to Normandy on the morning of June 6. Like a counterpoint to the usual great frescoes, Pressure therefore reduces global issues to a few concrete decisions, weighing heavily on the shoulders of an ordinary meteorologist (Andrew Scott). But if the material scope of the film amuses at first, it very quickly finds its limits. The meteorologist’s dilemma, for example, is weighed down with dripping pathos, between his wife who misses him and the soldiers who despise him. In short, a small object that can rain or shine, but will not win the film on the Second World War.
Nicholas Moreno
BILLIE MELODY ★★☆☆☆
By Christine Paillard
In front of Christine Paillard’s camera (for his first solo feature film, two years after Why You Smile?, co-directed with Chad Chenouga), Roschdy Zem is a ghost-dad, in the literal sense. His character dies, in fact, in the first minutes but returns physically to the screen saved from limbo by the imagination of his 14-year-old daughter – the Billie of the title -. She tries to find her way, encumbered by this cruel loss. The bet on the fantastic within a rather naturalistic drama partly – but insufficiently – saves the whole thing from its banality.
Thomas Baura
HAIR, PAPER, WATER… ★★☆☆☆
By Nicolas Graux and Minh Quy Truong
Nicolas Graux and Minh Quy Truong placed their camera here on the border between Vietnam and Laos and shot the portrait of Cao Thi Hâu, an old lady from the Ruc community, born like many people of her generation in a remote cave, before their government decided to move them in the 1950s. A woman who lives only to pass on her language and knowledge to her grandchildren. The form of this feature film produced over two years, experimental, far from the linear story, is often confusing. It nevertheless manages to perfectly reflect the fragility of transmission and offers a sensory journey that is anything but ordinary.
Anne Lenoir
PREMIERE DID NOT LIKE
THE WITCHERS 2 ★☆☆☆☆
By Susanne Bier
Despite a mini and nice cult effect that surrounded it, we did not see the absolute necessity of giving a sequel to The Bewitchers by Griffin Dune, released in 1998. And given the result, we were not necessarily wrong. With an uninspired Susanne Bier at the helm, we find Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman as witch sisters trying to break the ancestral curse weighing on their lineage and condemning to death any man with whom she or their descendants fall in love. This smooth story, each twist of which we can guess, spans more than two soporific and often confusing hours in terms of special effects and acting (the supporting male roles, Lee Pace and Solly McLeod stand out as strong candidates for the Razzie Awards). And the Sandra Bullock-Nicole Kidman duo all that? The biggest failure of the film – which collects them – is to never really play on their complicity and their humor. At least a third episode seems compromised.
Thierry Cheze
FLUSH ★☆☆☆☆
By Grégory Morin
Even if Flush had been a short film, it would have been too long. Starting from a very stupid concept (with his head stuck in a Turkish toilet, a man seeks to win back his ex and escape drug traffickers), the film laboriously attempts to raise the level by playing the genre card. The result falls short: everything is sluggish, we don’t believe in anything, and Jonathan Lambert has little choice but to shout throughout. Just as uninspired, the staging also slips, drowned out by the references that it cheaply pastiches (Nicolas Winding Refn, Gaspar Noé, etc.). When the color palette oscillates between blue and orange (it’s original!), the sets and costumes, although minimalist, seem false, still too clean. The failure comes from there, and above all from this inability to produce an ode to the material, taken in all its diversity: comical, sanguine, shitty etc. Why so much wisdom and moderation?
Nicholas Moreno
And also
Officially appointed to Stéphane Guarrigues
The Heroes of the Louvre by Elie Chouraqui
The Sea by Sahi Carmeli-Pollak
The covers
Akira by Katsuhiro Ōtomo
The Sunday Woman by Luigi Comencini
