Avatar: From Fire and Ashes, The Secret Agent, Rebuilding: what’s new at the cinema this week

What to see in theaters

THE EVENT
AVATAR: OF FIRE AND ASHES ★★★☆☆

By James Cameron

The essentials

James Cameron revives the saga of Pandora with an anticipated third opus, ample, sometimes repetitive, which questions less through its visual prowess than through the world he persists in building.

Here is the third movement of a saga now established, filmed in advance and thought of as a giant narrative arch. If the filmmaker continues to sculpt images with incredible precision, the technological “wow effect”, the one we reflexively expected, is no longer there. No explosion comparable to the shock of 3D in 2009 nor any feat equivalent to the free-diving filming of 2022; only the quiet demonstration of a filmmaker who masters a language that he himself invented. Avatar 3 replays here, almost identically, the structure of the second film – flight, learning, intertribal tensions, human threat, final confrontation – as if Cameron were revisiting his score without daring to modify its motives. However, there remains, in Cameron, a storyteller’s instinct which prevents the whole thing from sinking into pure self-repetition. And even if the technological flesh is less surprising, the film unfolds a succession of powerful scenes: landscapes that seem to breathe, escapes into the jungle, nocturnal ceremonies of fragile beauty, confrontations with choreographic fluidity. Cameron no longer invents the form; he perfects it. As if, in the still hot embers of De Feu et de Cendres, the promise of a myth that has not said everything still burns.

Gaël Golhen

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PREMIERE LIKED A LOT

THE SECRET AGENT ★★★★☆

De Kleber Mendonça Filho

In 1977, during the Recife carnival. Armando, a former teacher on the run, takes refuge alongside other hunted activists in a pension run by Dona Sebastiana. Around them, the city decays into a chaos of drunkenness and corruption while the local police make their crimes disappear under the festivities of the carnival. Armando prepares his escape, tries to save a few papers, a few scraps of memory. And in parallel, Mendonça interweaves other lines – a son, a country, an era which will later reawaken under other faces. The Secret Agent is at once a thriller, a dream book and a declaration of love for the seventh art with a very clear project: to weave the fragile fabric of a country between traces and amnesia. For this, Mendonça can count on Wagner Moura, fascinating, who plays a tired hero, consumed by doubt. His presence is enough to electrify every silence, every glance stolen in a mirror of which constitutes the most virulent and most intimate work of its author. Long, dense, sometimes deliberately disordered, The Secret Agent imposes its own breathing: a sensory stroll through the memory of a country, a meditation on what cinema can save from shipwreck.

Gaël Golhen

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REBBUILDING ★★★★☆

By Max Walker-Silverman

In a corner of Colorado devastated by a fire, a man tries to rebuild what he lost – his house, his past – and, why not, give meaning to his life. This is the starting point of this post-disaster chronicle. No thunderous drama here: only the patience of everyday life, the slow stitching of wounds and the rebirth that comes through the community. Max Walker-Silverman films the reconstruction as a silent act of faith, on the edge of documentary, refusing pathos in favor of a naked truth. And in the center, in his restraint, in the slowness of his gaze, Josh O’Connor joins the lineage of Western loners: stoic, modest, almost spectral. His presence gives the film a magnificent density, as if America is reflected through his tired silhouette. Each shot here seems carved out of wood, each sound breathes dust. Rebuilding joins this family of films that still believe in the beauty of reality – an Americana of rubble, tender and without emphasis. Few things happen there, and yet everything is at stake: the dignity of existing despite the loss.

Gaël Golhen

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FIRST TO LIKE

THE SONG OF THE FORESTS ★★★☆☆

By Vincent Munier

Although Cesarized in 2022, Première had little taste for Vincent Munier’s previous documentary (co-signed with Marie Amiguet), The Snow Panther where, in this cinematic variation of his Renaudot Prize, Sylvain Tesson’s inability to fade behind the beauty of the images created a wall that was impossible to overcome. Quite the opposite of what is at work here in his first solo production. This way of capturing nature in action – the trees bending under the snow, the grunting of a deer, the clicking of cranes… – while leaving plenty of room for silence. And his ability to weave a link between this nature and his own history. He, the son of a naturalist who gave him his first camera at 12, and the father of a boy, impatient in turn to make these woods his playground. The Song of the Forests brings together these three generations on the screen and celebrates transmission with a sensitivity devoid of any sentimentality.

Thierry Cheze

JONE SOMETIMES ★★★☆☆

By Sara Fantova

It’s the story of a 20-year-old Basque woman, Jone, shaken by two contradictory impulses in this famous, in itself destabilizing, moment of the famous transition to adulthood. On the one hand, a surge of death with her father’s Parkinson’s disease getting worse, sending her back to the premature death of her mother who, as a child, made her grow up too quickly, too early and transformed her into a surrogate mother for her little sister. On the other, a powerful desire for life with his first love story with a Madrilenian, met during the Semana Grande in Bilbao. Limited to one summer, this first feature by Sara Fontava does not revolutionize the coming of story genre. But he offers an endearing and bittersweet variation playing on the paradox that it is at night that Jone’s life lights up when his days vary between light gray and dark gray. All carried by the disarming naturalness of the irresistible Olaia Aguayo who recalls Adèle Exarchopoulos from La Vie d’Adèle.

Thierry Cheze

HEIDI AND THE MOUNTAIN LYNX ★★★☆☆

By Tobias Schwarz and Aisea Roca

Always barefoot, frolicking in the Swiss mountain pastures or exhausting her old grandfather: the character of Heidi continues to delight. If the looks are almost identical to that of Japanese anime, the animation moves away from it to set its sights on 3D. The little girl from the mountains loses a little of her charm, but emerges more militant than ever: her hobbies boil down to saving the fauna (a family of lynx) and protecting the flora (against a crooked entrepreneur), for a rather amusing result.

Lucie Chiquer

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FIRST TO MODERATELY LIKED

THE IDEAL SOUL ★★☆☆☆

By Alice Vial

Seven years after her short César for Les Bigorneaux, Alice Vial moves to the long format with the ambition of bringing romance and fantasy together. Its heroine, who works in a palliative service, has given up all love life, undermined by a secret that she cannot share with anyone on a daily basis: her ability to see and speak to the dead. Until the day she meets Oscar, as funny as he is charming, who encourages her to split the armor. Before she discovers… that he has just died in an accident! There is Ghost in this ideal Soul where we enjoy seeing Jonathan Cohen in a more tender register than usual and finding Magalie Lépine-Blondeau, the heroine of Simple like Sylvain. But in its way of embracing the question of the transition to the other world, the film also navigates too much between two waters, lacks fluidity in its twists and turns and its management of supporting roles that are not deep enough. Damage.

Thierry Cheze

THE LOVE WE HAVE LEFT ★★☆☆☆

By Hlynur Palmason

A square and grainy image like a family film whose film would have captured beautiful and joyful moments. Each and everyone plays the part of a life where accidents are only domestic. In the surroundings, there is nature, the sea, the wind, the wild grass… But something is slowly fading away, but the docile image of the memory shared in Super 8 cannot capture that. However, the surface is cracking. As we plant arrows in the armor of the knight who serves as a scarecrow, the secret wounds are no longer really hidden. She is an artist who seeks to sculpt space, he is a fisherman. There are children including twins. The couple breaks up. The landscape retains its sovereign power but the beauty suddenly has something tragic. The Icelandic Hlynur Pálmason, whose Godland (2022) we loved, does not completely convince, his deadpan humor puts us too far away from the emotions.

Thomas Baura

STORIES OF THE GOOD VALLEY ★★☆☆☆

By José Luis Guerin

It’s hard to imagine that the Vallbona district depends on Barcelona: surrounded by a highway, a river and railway tracks, this enclave is like a village out of time. In this documentary, José Luis Guerín sets out to meet his local residents, to the rhythm of swimming, Catalan songs, and rumors that spread faster than children. But by wanting to wander around too much, he struggles to make sense of these endless testimonies and only succeeds in one thing: stripping this singular place of all its vitality.

Lucie Chiquer

And also

Children of the Sea, by Virginia Tangvald

Monster Factory, by Steve Hudson and Toby Genkel

Kogis, together to heal the Earth, by Alexandre Bouchet

The covers

Jacob’s Ladder, by Adrian Lyne

The Quay of Mists, by Marcel Carné