Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, The Wire, The Trial of the Dog: what’s new in theaters this week
What to see in theaters
THE EVENT
BEETLEJUICE BEETLEJUICE ★★★★☆
From Tim Burton
The essentials
Funny and fast-paced, the sequel to the 1988 classic sees Tim Burton return to his mischief and bad wit.
Since the end of his golden age, at the turn of the century, Tim Burton has been desperately trying to rediscover the energy and fever of his beginnings. And, miracle of miracles, he has found himself again! We rediscover him as inventive, funny, light, happy and relaxed in the midst of his monsters and some of his favorite actors. So that was the secret: all you had to do was confront Beetlejuice imagining a sequel, 34 years later. A Beetlejuice revived by Wednesday (the dialogues written by the two showrunners of the Netflix series are often funny) and a Burton at the height of his self-referential art, with a big smile on his lips and tapping his foot because the film does not disappoint in terms of wild musical sequences, which is not nothing. What is also striking, finally, is the absolute love given here to the actors, tenderly watched over, filmed with attention: Keaton, of course, who seems to have come straight from 1988, but also Winona Ryder, very touching as an eternal borderline goth, Jenna Ortega, worthy heir to Winona or Monica Bellucci, new muse and lover of the director, very well served as a vengeful and soul-devouring wife
Frederic Foubert
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FIRST LIKED MUCH
ONCE UPON A TIME THERE WAS AMERICA ★★★★☆
By Frederick Wiseman
Law and order, Hospital And Juvenile short. Three documentaries shot in 1969, 1970 and 1973, previously unreleased in French cinemas and offered in magnificently restored copies. In the midst of years of high social tension across the Atlantic, Wiseman recounts the daily life of the Kansas City police, the emergency department of a Manhattan hospital and a juvenile court in Tennessee. Three masterful works, without voice-over, which impress with the filmmaker’s ability to always be at a good distance from what he is filming, to capture powerful, violent and poignant moments without ever placing the viewer in the position of a voyeur. It is not for nothing that Wiseman is one of the world’s greatest documentarians in activity!
Thierry Cheze
DAHOMEY ★★★★☆
By Mati Diop
The strength of Mati Diop’s new film (Atlantic…), Golden Bear at the last Berlinale, is based on its subject around the restitution by France of a handful of works of Beninese art and on the language used to spark the reflections provoked by such an event. Their souls are personified here by the spectral and magical voice of lot 26, an imposing statue of King Ghézo, ninth king of the kingdom of Dahomey (Benin) whose journey the filmmaker films from the Quai Branly museum in Paris to the Presidential Palace in Cotonou. This voice haunts the depths of a film that carries with it the crashes and wounds of the colonization of Africa and the return to the sources that officials boast of being “historical” thus becomes an intimate and philosophical epic.
Thomas Baurez
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KILL ★★★★☆
By Nikhil Nagesh Bhat
In the carriages of a night train, there are not a thousand and one ways to break people’s faces, once you put face to face two buddies who are members of an elite police commando and thirty robbers ready to do anything to rob the passengers. In fact, the violence of the film is quite mind-blowing and Kill easily places itself as the most effective contender for the title of best actioner of the year. But when we take the time to breathe between two blows of schlass, we appreciate the performance of Raghav Juyal, astonishing as a villainous bandit with cruel and devastating charm and we also realize that there is something to grasp on the self-destructive confrontation that the film composes between the representatives of the law and the proletarian robbers… Much more than a midnight movie stroking the crowd in the right direction, then.
Sylvestre Picard
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FIRST LIKED
THE THREAD ★★★☆☆
By Daniel Auteuil
For Daniel Auteuil, it all started with the discovery of a blog run by the lawyer Jean-Yves Moyart, in which he recounted his relationship with the accused, whom he often had to defend alone against everyone. The Thread is the adaptation of one of these stories. That of Nicolas Milik, a father accused of the murder of his wife, whose certainty of his innocence brings Jean Monier out of his “retirement” decided after having wrongly exonerated a repeat murderer. The Thread is experienced as a suspense on the guilt or not of Milik, through cleverly orchestrated twists and turns. Forgotten The Well-Digger’s Daughter, Marius, Fanny… Auteuil signs here his first real film as a director. The first where we feel in each shot a desire for cinema. The first where the power of his direction of all crazy actors is deployed to this point. His joy of playing with them joins that of filming them. Because in a complex and tortuous role, the actor Auteuil succeeds once again in astonishing us.
Thierry Cheze
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THE DOG’S TRIAL ★★★☆☆
By Laetitia Dosch
An actress with a fanciful style and a varied filmography, Laetitia Dosch has also distinguished herself in a live show (HASTE) where she shared the stage with a horse. It is therefore quite consistent that her first film as a director explores the animal condition in a very personal and inspired way. The story takes place in Lausanne, where the lawyer Avril (played by Laetitia Dosch herself) is so used to lost causes that she accepts the offer made by a visually impaired client to defend his dog during a trial, suspected of having bitten a woman and being guilty of misogyny. The strength of this seemingly offbeat legal fable – but nevertheless inspired by a true story – lies in the seriousness with which the social behavior of the dog is dissected while a colorful human gallery shows individuals who are traumatized, misunderstood or abandoned by society. A work as endearing as it is disconcerting.
Damien Leblanc
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ANAÏS, 2 CHAPTERS ★★★☆☆
By Marion Gervais
Crouching in her field, Anaïs carefully tends to her plants under the watchful eye of Marion Gervais, the director of this documentary. This very talkative young woman has been constantly criticizing the system in which she has been operating since she finally decided to set up as a herbalist. Ten years later — this feature film is a compilation of two films, made a decade apart — Anaïs has become an established farmer. Her new concern is to bring her Senegalese husband to France, despite increasingly strict immigration laws, so that they can live together on the farm. It doesn’t matter that these two films were not conceived as a diptych! Anaïs’s cheekiness and her fervor to wage battle against much greater enemies spontaneously create a bond between them.
Emma Poesy
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FOREIGN LANGUAGE ★★★☆☆
By Claire Burger
Fanny (Lilith Grasmug), a high school student who is uncomfortable in her own skin and sent by her parents to stay with a German correspondent who also doesn’t really want her. At her side, she discovers another culture, detached from all the prejudices that seemed to stick to her in France, an angry and politicized youth but also desire too, and loss of control. Because if we guess that she hides part of her game and arranges reality to her advantage, Claire Burger’s staging rather approaches lying as a space of reinvention in which we bend reality to idealized projections of ourselves, of the world. The political inclination of the film and the construction of the young girls acts as a magnifying glass of reality, contributing to an excessive societal fascination for far-left groups, distant and fictitious, like this “sister” they seek in demonstrations. A chimera squared then… which ends up making lying the true “foreign language” of this film.
Nicolas Moreno
THE SNOW LEOPARD ★★★☆☆
By Pema Tseden
A team of Chinese journalists, a young monk and a family of shepherds gather in the middle of the snowy Tibetan mountains. The origin of this singular gathering: a snow leopard that entered an enclosure to devour nine sheep. While the authorities prohibit its execution, the breeders seek to avenge their flock before the animal does more damage. Ethical, ecological and even spiritual considerations quickly mix to overcome the cultural barriers between city dwellers and rural dwellers. Oscillating between the long handheld camera sequences of the journalists and the experimental scenes from the point of view of the leopard, the film rises well beyond its minimalism to question the profound relationship between humans and nature. To the rhythm of the feline and the landscapes it inhabits, The Snow Leopard is a poetic journey to the heart of Tibet.
Bastien Assie
THE BAHAMAS EFFECT ★★★☆☆
By Hélène Crouzillat
The unemployed, as is well known, take advantage of their benefits to go under the coconut trees. In the big world of unemployment insurance, professionals call this the Bahamas effect and calculate the loss of earnings very seriously. Documentary filmmaker Hélène Crouzillat has been working for nearly ten years to untangle the threads of this received idea and especially very convenient to justify the abysmal debts linked to this allowance. Her Bahamas are in Dunkirk, where like an FBI agent she fixes the clues and evidence on a white wall. She thus dismantles the cogs of this machine. The challenge, as one might expect, is to make digestible what is not a priori digestible (figures, political issues, financial arbitrations, etc.) Helped by speakers with clear speeches, her public utility film is exemplary.
Thomas Baurez
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FIRST DIDN’T LIKE
SILEX AND THE CITY- THE MOVIE ★☆☆☆☆
By Jul and Jean-Paul Guigue
A successful comic strip that became an animated series on Arte, the comic creation of Jul (Julien Berjeaut by his real name) now has its adaptation to the cinema. To the concept of short format transposing contemporary references into a prehistoric universe is added a broader narrative where a back and forth of the characters in the future will trigger a vast revolution in the small world of Prehistory. If the inspiration is here as much to be sought on the side of Back to the future than Monty Python, the cinematic breath is lacking as the heaviness of the dialogues and the multiplication of famous voices (between Stéphane Bern, Léa Salamé or… François Hollande) short-circuit the attempt to reflect on our modern societies. And it is not the sudden switch to live action shots (during a segment of the film aimed at mixing aesthetics) that saves this sluggish adaptation.
Damien Leblanc
And also
Lost hearts, short film program
Tahiti, the days of return, by Benjamin Delattre
Reprises
Johnny got his gun, by Dalton Trumbo
