Ballerina, the answering machine, Freud, the last confession: new features in the cinema this week

What to see in theaters

The event
From the universe of John Wick: Ballerina ★★ ☆ From

By Len Wiseman

Essential

Carried by an ana of armas less charismatic than hoped, this derivative of the universe John Wick is one more “John-Wickerie” in a world saturated by the clones of John Wick.

Second spin- off of the franchise John Wick, Ballerina is devoted to the character of Eve Maccaro, which was entangled in the third episode, Parabellum. A super-killer camped by Ana de Armas, doubled with a hard ballerina to trouble the film recounts her bruised childhood, then, once she became tall, her avenging crusade against those who massacred her family. Between the story of revenge Passe-Partout and the rehashing of recurring patterns of the saga, Ballerina Do not try to reinvent anything, while showing a lot of invention when it comes to boosting yet another fight scene. But if the film disappoints, it is precisely in terms of the incarnation. We expected a lot of Ana de Armas as a super-assassin brittle gules to the chain. The actress also provides here in the fight scenes. But his character, not helped by his backstory Too banal, seems very dull. And it never manages to solve the equation that made the success of the character of John Wick: this balance combining melodramatic interiority, mythological grandiloquence and the graphic purity of a comic book box.

Frédéric Foubert

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First like a lot

Fragments of a romantic journey ★★★★ ☆

Of Chloé Barreau

Since his 16th birthday, Chloé Barreau has filmed those who shared her life and her bed for a night, a week, months and more so affinities … Images of which she had never thought of making the material of a film until a painful break in their forties, pushes her to ask herself as simple as vertiginous: how would the people with whom she was telling their common story? The starting point of this documentary where she interferes with her archives with the testimonies facing the camera of the people concerned (interviewed by Astrid Desmousseaux) to tell the counterchamp through their memories. A breaking project where this admirer of Sophie Calle could have been lost by too much self-centeredness but where intimate speech is very virgin by the universal by placing at the same level all the forms that the passion can take. The journey offered by Chloé Barreau ends up dialogue in one way or another with our views. All with a playful playwright that makes it all the more powerful the testimonies of poorly closed scars.

Thierry Cheze

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Summer garden ★★★★ ☆

By Shinji Somai

Died in 2001 at 53, Shinji Somai is a director adored by many of his Japanese peers (Kore-Eda, etc.), of which only one of his fifteen films had experienced an release in our rooms. The Distributor Survival has been undertaking a substantive work to be welcomed to make his work known for several years. Like this Summer gardenproduced in 1994. This one features three children, one of whom comes back from a burial and, evoking with the other two experience, disseminates what he feels in the face of death: fascination and blue-tap. An exchange that pushes this trio to spy on an eccentric old man living in an isolated house that they foresee on the verge of spending from life to death. A children’s game born from a morbid fascination but which goes, for an unforgettable summer, see this trio becoming an inseparable quartet, breaking the barriers of a priori and generations. This results in an initiatory account of a luminous, poignant but never tearful poetry, around the acceptance of the death of these kids who will never forget this enchanted summer parenthesis.

Thierry Cheze

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First a love

The answer ★★★ ☆☆

Fabienne GODET

Baptiste (Salif Cissé), imitator with certain talents but who struggles to fill the rooms, finds himself embedded in an improbable combination: Pierre Chozene (Denis Podalydès), a writer constantly disturbed by the calls of his entourage, the hiring to become – literally – his voice. By pretending to be on the phone, Baptiste earns a little money, and above all a huge place in a life that is not his. But the more time passes, the more it allows itself to improvise … Idea of ​​a brilliant scenario but eminently snack: how to settle the question of the voice of Podalydès when the character of Cissé takes the phone calls in his place? Fabienne Godet has decided to trust her actor, who manages to perfectly imitate the Podalydès stamp. A few skillful sound mixers complete the illusion, and the result is fluid enough for it to be effortless. A major asset that does not prevent the film from shooting slightly in length and not always fully exploiting its potential. But the duo of actors compensates for regime drops and their alchemy, unexpected on paper, becomes obvious.

François Léger

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Cloud ★★★ ☆☆

By Kiyoshi Kurosawa

For his second film in 3 months after Chime and before The snake track In July, Kiyoshi Kurosawa adapts a news item and stages Ryosuke, a little grass trader (and online!), Who buys products by observing their cost to resell them at a high price. But as he takes his independence, sees his daily life disturbed by other Internet users and the police. The more the film advances, the headlines it takes the appearance of a thriller, a turn that subtly accompanies the passage from a virtual threat to real. Any element of the decor can become a source of danger: a shadow in the bus, an empty space purged of all hope … Juggling as best they can between various registers, the film loses a little of its intensity in the length. There remains a charge against the precarious work and its current conditions, which the Japanese filmmaker never touches more finely when he links it to the question of separation between virtual and real, private and public life.

Nicolas Moreno

The land of virtues ★★★ ☆☆

By Vincent Lapize

Militant documentary in the form of an impressionist chronicle, The land of virtues tells the fight of users of the shared gardens of Aubervilliers against the concrete plans of Greater Paris. Faced with the threat of the leaflets, the gardeners-resistant transform their JAD (defending gardens) into a democratic laboratory. We advise you to visit this hidden island in the middle of the HLM, it’s open (and all green), it grows there a lot of things and, who knows?, Maybe even a happy end.

Frédéric Foubert

In the skin ★★★ ☆☆

Of Pascal Tessaud

By Pascal Tessaud we remember his first feature film, Brooklynsensitive itinerary of a young Swiss rapper, around the difficulty of finding her place in an uncertain world but saved by human vibrations. In the skin almost like him like a brother. We follow the Marseille romance between a dancer of Krump and a young architect. The filmmaker seizes with finesse the way in which love must know how to be stronger than conventions (social, cultural …) which govern our lives.

Thomas Baurez

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First a moderately love

Save that can ★★ ☆ From

Of Alex Pukine

The angle is as original as it is relevant. Alex Poukine films workshops where caregivers train with actors to announce the most tragic diagnoses to future close patients. And goes through this prism to tell the structural crisis of the hospital world. But, in addition to passing after the recent powerful works of Philibert, Lifshitz or Claire Simon on this same field, his documentary suffers above all from a format not necessarily adapted. A 52 ‘would have worked better to avoid some unnecessary repetitions.

Thierry Cheze

Horizonte ★★ ☆ From

From Cesar Augusto Acevedo

Travel between life and death, the souls of a mother and a son roam a landscape of desolation ravaged by the Colombian armed conflict. In search of expiation, they meet in turn the victims of this young man too early enlisted in the militia. If the film opens over twenty minutes of masterful staging where the camera turns into the fog according to an offender awaiting our imagination, the sequences that follow are lost – and we lose – in a maelström of surreal metaphors.

Lucie CHIQUE

First did not like

Freud, the last confession ★ ☆☆☆

Matt Brown

Freud on the big screen, we remember in particular the fragile and anxious composition of Monthy Cliff who exhausted both John Huston (Freud, secret passions) or the one, more straight from Viggo Mortensen for David Cronenberg (A DANGOUOUS METHOD). Here and there, the nevertheless romantic figure of the inventor of psychoanalysis seemed to face his intellectual authority ultimately not very cinematographic. Matt Brown enlives an anthony hopkins here so used to the embodiment of great men that he invariably ends up phagocyter from the inside the personality he is supposed to serve. The scenario adapted to a piece itself derived from a book is interested in the supposedly fictitious meeting between Freud and C. S Lewis, author of Narnia World. Verbal jousting that we hurry enjoyable before the face-to-face turns into dialogue far too polished constantly parasitized by sub-stars revealing the filmmaker’s panic fear of being alone with his glorious protagonists.

Thomas Baurez

And also 3rd eye, from Tatiana Becquet Genel

The last large transhumances, by René Manne

The Summer of Joe, Liz and Richard, of Sergio Naitza