A simple accident, walking or sink, a big bold beautiful day: new features at the cinema this week
What to see in theaters
The event
A simple accident ★★★★ ☆
Of Jafar Panahi
Essential
Jafar Panahi signs a drama by the absurd by auscultating the Machiavellian cogs of the mullahs regime. Using an ultralight device, the staging manages to create axes of tension permanently. Palme d’Or deserved de Cannes 2025
It all starts in the interior of a vehicle. Something went under the wheels. Its driver comes out, the red of the headlights give him the appearance of a disturbing spectrum. Here it is through the sound that the transplant of drama will take place. Soon the modest employee of a garage believes that he reverses the noises of a particular approach, that of his executioner who tortured him a few years ago. But it is advisable to bring together his former suffering partners to be clear. Because all had their eyes blindfolded during their ordeal. The probable executioner’s body was placed in a box while waiting to decide on its fate. Panahi is deploying here a small theater of the absurd capable of overthrowing everything in a fraction of a second. We also think of the new monsters in this ability to show all the administrative absurdity of a prisoner system of clean logic. The word, a true muscle of the film and the omnipotence of the framework question both the violence of power and the way in which the latter obliges those who are victims to find the right answer. In this the last plan, a wonder of expressive tension, leaves us speechless.
Thomas Baurez
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First like a lot
Honeymoon ★★★★ ☆
From Zhanna Ozirna
The first minutes of Honeymoon have everything of a honeymoon: carefree and lovers, Taras and Olya move in their new apartment. But fairy tales last only a time, especially when they begin in kyiv in February 2022. While boxes are still lying around in the living room, the first explosions of the Russian offensive resound in the night. By deciphering the war in Ukraine on the scale of these civilians who watch it from their windows, the film questions: how is the conflict live in the intimacy of a home? Of a kitchen? Of a bathroom? In this apartment, which turns falling as the couple gets there, fear spreads with remarkable sound work while a feeling of asphyxiation invades the frame. Reflecting the news, this remarkably orchestrated horrifying camera takes the guts as its use of the medium testifies to an eminently reckless political act.
Lucie CHIQUE
First a love
Walking or shrimp ★★★ ☆☆
By Francis Lawrence
Francis Lawrence transposes one of Stephen King on the screen on the screen. Written at 18, this dystopian novel, deeply marked by the Vietnam War, described a youth sacrificed in an absurd ritual: a hundred adolescents, drawn, find themselves condemned to walk endlessly through the American plains under the eye of a fascinated audience. If they stop, slow down or try to flee, the soldiers who supervise them give them a warning. Three warnings and it is death. At the end, a survivor is rewarded by the “Prize for his dreams”.
The very effective film keeps the narrative drought of the novel: no hidden plot, no miracle, just an exhausting “long step” where each step brings the grave closer. Visually, we can see that Lawrence claims the Hunger Games inheritance: immersive camera, sensory intensity, young and charismatic casting. But where this saga opened on hope and rebellion, walking or dowdy chooses the abyss. A film where the anxiety of the present is superimposed on the ghosts of the past, and where victory has the bitter taste of naked survival.
Gaël Golhen
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Stupies ★★★ ☆☆
Alice Odiot and Jean-Robert Viallet
Five years after men, fascinating plunged into the daily life of the Baumettes prison, Alice Diot and Jean-Robert Viallet continue their exploration of the world of justice by going back to the source and posing their camera at the Marseille court, from her jails to her courtroom. We necessarily think of the depression of flagrant crimes. But without this shadow being overwhelming. Because by focusing on Stups’ affairs – which has become central – the duo fully registers their documentary in our time. And while justice is increasingly accused of laxity, Stups shows, always at a good distance and without voyeurism (when one of the judges asks them to cut, they run) the reality of the facts. The phlegm or even the humor which must be used to make your way in the faras of lies of the accused. And the fact that no case looks like another, over the audiences, unlike what one could spontaneously believe. A beautiful slap with received ideas.
Thierry Cheze
Soundtrack to coup d’etat ★★★ ☆☆
By Johan Grimonprez
1961. Patrice Lumumba, Prime Minister of the Democratic Republic of Congo, is murdered. From this event, Johan Grimonprez’s documentary has expanded to a wide range of subjects: Cold War, Decolonization in Africa, Role of the UN … and impact of jazz in the country’s geopolitics. Between games of influences and music, would there be just a step? This is demonstrated by the director, stressing that Louis Armstrong was sent on tour to the country in order to divert attention from the coup supported by the CIA. Although the very sharp rendering is difficult to access for those who ignore this part of history, the experience of this documentary patchwork is worth the detour. Hyperactive, stimulating, intuitive, dense: Soundtrack to a coup operating an amalgam of sounds and archives illustrating the fight against colonialism, a sort of mixtape that works by association.
Lucie CHIQUE
Happyend ★★★ ☆☆
Of Neo Sora
In July, we discovered Neo Sora a documentaryist with Ryuichi Sakamoto Opus, his beautiful film devoted to his disappeared father composer. And here he is in charge of his first fiction located in the near future in Japan under the threat of a devastating earthquake that rhymes with deprivations of freedom to protect citizens even despite themselves. And the action of this dystopia is concentrated in a high school with a multitude of characters (which Sora takes the time to dig) which will for some accommodate the situation and for others rebel. Staged elegantly, Happynd seduces by the way in which the prism of anticipation allows him to tell him about the excesses of Japanese society, especially the tensions that his leaders voluntarily put under the carpet (Orwellian drifts, latent racism experienced by certain students …) and whose young generations are often the first victims. A more than promising first opus.
Thierry Cheze
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First a moderately love
I who loved you ★★ ☆ From
Of Diane KURYS
It is the story of an “old” couple of cabots who – Supreme injustice – sees Madame carry the burden of the weight of years – cigarettes in the beak and glass of alcohol in hand – when sir, eternal hopping child, seduces everything that moves while inevitably returning to the fold. KURYS films these incessant back and forth like so many blows to the chest of the abandoned. Simone Signoret (Impeccable Foïs) extra-lucid and suicidal is a dolorosa mater supposed to return the stigma of its resignation to the face of a heartbreaking and invasive Montand (Zem affected the accent) of this face-to-face between two desecrated monsters could arise a disorder where the pantomime of life would prevent the sustainable truth of feelings. For this, it would have been necessary to exhibit in the big day Montand and Signoret without locking them up of the sets- which prevent the air from entering. But the film struggles to reveal something other than its deceptive mask. Damage.
Thomas Baurez
Cervantes before Don Quixote ★★ ☆ From
Of Alejandro Amenabar
Others in Mar Addentro, from Agora to regression, difficult to find a conductive line in the career of Alejandro Amenabar except in the way he has to make his societal concerns of the moment with some of his films. Tesis (1996) around the treatment of violence in the media. Letter to Franco in 2019 when Spain was politically polarized like never before … His idea of seizing cervantes in 2025 is part of this same logic. By showing how the future author of Don Quixote, taken prisoner in the jails of the Sultan of Algiers, was able to meet in this hostile universe other cultures which inspired his major work and changed it forever, Amenabar signs a parable against the period of current identity. The gesture is noble, the reconstruction of Algiers, impressive. But the length of the narrative pushes to stutters and hammer things instead of suggesting them. And the film ends up exhausting
Thierry Cheze
Mindfulness of happiness- a journey with the Dalai- Lama ★★ ☆ From
By Barbara Miller and Philip Delaquis
At 90, the Dalai Lama and his destiny at any other deserves a documentary where he would look at his life. But everything in the veneration of their subject, Barbara Miller and Philip Delaquis forget an essential element: the contradictory. To give relief to his words and to break the too monocorded aspect of a film which has for him a great quality: his archives the way in which the Dalai Lama plunges back and comments them.
Thierry Cheze
First did not like
A BIG BOLD Beautiful Journey ★ ☆☆☆
From Kogonoda
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind never stops making little ones and influencing pop culture. This Kogonada film (After Yang), is the latest offspring: a romance based on wacky SF and memory trips, where a man and a woman meeting at a wedding (Margot Robbie and Colin Farrell), revisit key moments in their lives by opening magic doors scattered on the road, thanks to the Magic GPS Of a mysterious car rental agency … The film does not even make the effort to “sell” its concept, to give it the slightest poetic logic, starting from the principle that it is pretty enough for us to want to follow the characters in these sketches who all reveal themselves at the finish quite banal and tearful. Small advertising bubbles with prefabricated emotion, full of vibrant colors, overplayed cute and forced smiles.
Frédéric Foubert
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Death does not exist ★ ☆☆☆
By Félix Dufour- Laperrière
A group of young people decides to make the skin of rich owners to overthrow the system, but one of the terrorists abandoned its companions and fled into the forest. The Quebecer Félix Dufour-Laperrière signs a very graphic but very painful animated film, never very sure of his existentialist gloubi-boulga and his ethereal anti-capitalism, which would consist in killing the rich (and the old), but not too much, in any case each action will end lost in the limbo of time. Good.
François Léger
And also
Invention, by Courtney Stephens
Sacred Heart, from Sabrina Gunnell
Timioche, short films program
The covers
Avatar: the waterway, from James Cameron
Punch- Drunk Love, by Paul Thomas Anderson
Queen Margot, by Patrice Chéreau
