Better man, play with fire, high risk flight: new features in the movies this week
What to see in theaters
The event
Better man ★★★ ☆☆
By Michael Gracey
Essential
Robbie Williams plays the monkey in an autobiopic sometimes authorized a little exhausting but very fun.
Is a filmed hagiography less painful when the hero is played by a monkey? This is the question posed Better man : Robbie Williams’ biopic, product, writes and supervised by the person concerned. The story is already seen a thousand times: a prolo kid who dreams of being Sinatra to please his absent dad, early glory in a boys band, drugs and ambition, glory and fall, detox … The Film thing is that the star has the face of a very humanized monkey, designed in performance captures with Robbie’s voice. Something that indicates the distance taken between the film and its subject -and basically the passion of Michael Gracey, who made The Greatest Showman With Hugh Jackman in Barnum, for the scammers of the show business. No discourse on true and false, on legend and reality, but just an authorized autobiography that works, in the same way as Rocketman worked. Especially thanks to sympathy capital working class from the star and his hits sung with enthusiasm.
Sylvestre Picard
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First a love
Red Castle ★★★ ☆☆
From Hélène Milano
After Black roses And The ardent coalsHélène Milano continues to tell today’s youth with this new documentary where she followed a third class of a college in the popular Parisian district of Goutte d’Or for a decisive year in the choice of orientations. She herself scenes taken on the spot, moments of workshops with students volunteers and testimonies-often very strong and extremely deep on their vision of the School and their own schooling-of these same children in front of the camera. Always at a good distance from those she films (students, teachers, parents, etc.), she shows very intimate things without being intrusive, nor to look away when the tension goes up and subtly tells how enthusiasm rubs into it in permanence a real disenchantment. A great success.
Thierry Cheze
Jane Austen spoiled my life ★★★ ☆☆
Laura Piani
Agathe dreams of loving and being loved. But not at any cost. Bookseller, she also dreams of writing but struggling to get started. But now this fans of Jane Austen finds herself selected – thanks to a colleague who pliers for her – in a writers’ residence in England where she finds herself in front of a distant descendant … from the author of Persuasion ! In a few lines, everything is said! For her first long, Laura Piana plunges to the heart lost in the world of romantic comedy over the procrastination of a heroine entangled in too many feelings. And signs a film of great limpidity, kissing all the obligatory passages of the genre but with what is necessary of burlesque, malice and contagious happiness to immerse yourself in it that the charm operates. And all the more so that she could not dream of a better interpreter than Camille Rutherford, irresistible as a young perclusy woman of complex but determined to cure them.
Thierry Cheze
The traveler ★★★ ☆☆
Of Hong Sang-Soo
This third collaboration between Hong Sang-Soo and Isabelle Huppert, after In Another Country And Claire’s camera,, is part of a creative period when the South Korean filmmaker takes pleasure in constantly simplifying his narration (his previous film In Water was in this a summit of minimalism). Huppert embodies here a Frenchwoman freshly arrived in Seoul who improvises himself professor of French in order to fill his financial difficulties and the feeling of spontaneity will logically be at the heart of this work which seems to build each sequence and dialogue according to mood. But the miracle is that the gallery of characters that follows from it, full of solitudes and dissatisfactions, turns out to be exciting. By showing, for example, the crisis of jealousy of a mother towards her son who dared to host the mysterious French, Hong Sang-Soo recalls that the most unpredictable emotions are sometimes also the most alive.
Damien Leblanc
Burns blood ★★★ ☆☆
By Akaki Popkhadze
Following the brutal assassination of their father, dean of the Georgian community, two brothers on bad terms are found: one avenger and blood played by Nicolas Duvauchelle, the other religious and reasoned embodied by the revelation Florent Hill. By articulating Burns blood Around their common decline in the heart of the Nice districts, Akaki Popkhadze signs a gangster film filled with excess: vertiginous great angle, agitated camera, saturated colors, hysterical performances (cocaine oldfield at the head), georgian colossi tattooed until the ears … radical artistic biases that could have hurt the skull if they were not a way to derision male violence, to expose its harmfulness, to burst it in the open. Or maybe Burns blood It is simply successful because it runs, it bangs, it bleeds, all that with a hell of a plume.
Lucie CHIQUE
Back to Alexandria ★★★ ☆☆
To tamer ruggli
After twenty years spent in Switzerland, Sue returns to his Egyptian roots at the bedside of his dying mother. Difficult at times to find his bearings in this introspective journey between past and present, naturalism and supernatural. But thanks to Fanny Ardant and Nadine Labaki in an explosive mother/daughter duo, the charm operates. And through them, Tamer Ruggli shares with us the childhood memories of his native Egypt with murderous sentences, convertible pink and songs, from Warda to Dalida.
Lou hupel
Shimoni ★★★ ☆☆
By Angela Wanjiku Wamai
Geoffrey committed the unthinkable: the feminicide. When he leaves prison, while he tries to reintegrate civil life, his own trauma long carpets in the shadows are surfaced. But in a culture where silence is king, the inner tumult of Geoffrey is a little too much heard … Beyond a remarkable work of the sound and a disturbing performance, all the power of Shimoni lies from the ambivalence of its protagonist, both a victim and guilty of his own story.
Lucie CHIQUE
Find these films near you thanks to First Go
First a moderately love
PLAY WITH FIRE ★★ ☆ From
De Delphine and Muriel Coulin
Adapted from What is needed at night by Laurent Petitmangin, the film of the Sisters Coulin (17 girls) Port the portrait of a catalist working on railways (Vincent Lindon, still as credible in his favorite job as a man in the street), a widowed father whose two sons, at the age of age Adult, are preparing to take different paths: one (Stefan Crepon) will soon go to do literary studies in Paris, when the other (neighboring Benjamin) is getting closer to far-right groups, even though He grew up in a home where humanist values have always been professed. Rather than in the causes of the seduction of extremism, the film is interested in intimate consequences, observes the links that are distended, the way in which love can bend. Until breaking? The question is asked in the last act, which offers Lindon – awarded in Venice – the occasion of a long monologue, certainly powerful and moving, but which unbalances and cannibalizes the film. And Play with fire, somewhat Petrified by the civic mission that he set for himself, risks preaching only the convinced.
Frédéric Foubert
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High -risk flight ★★ ☆ From
By Mel Gibson
When, even in the more B series B, an author manages to inject his obsessions and make them identifiable, this is where he is recognized, it seems. In this case here: the portrait of the killer played by Mark Wahlberg, obsessed sexual sado-maso and grimacing who spends his time describing the abuse he dreams of inflicting Topher Grace and Michelle Dockery, while undergoing himself Terrible pain. This is how Mel Gibson appropriates, and pirate in his own way, this funny but still banal project, whose script could have been found in the unwanted mailbox of Jaume Collet-Serra (a US Marshal, His prisoner and a hitman are stuck on an aircraft above Alaska). It’s just that the abyss between his previous and very beautiful You won’t kill (2016, and yes) and this microphone Wings of hell is still abyssal. It seems that he is still preparing the rest of The passion of Christ…
Sylvestre Picard
First did not like
All for a ★ ☆☆☆
By Houda Benyamina
Even if she has since staged episodes of the series The Eddy or co- produced the documentary Salam On Diam’s, we necessarily expected a lot from the return to the big screen of Houda Benyamina, after the box of Divine (Golden Camera in Cannes and three César). A expectation boosted by curiosity around the All for one : and if the famous Three musketeers of Dumas had been women? Or the promise, on paper, of a new powerful feminist gesture and outside the archetypes, in the right of Divine. Even if his absence of any selection in a major festival could worry. Unlasted concern quickly confirmed from the first images. Because mayonnaise does not take. Is this a writing or editing problem? In any case, the director gets lost in the various films that she intends to get a single one here. From feminist advocacy to Western Spaghetti, from political message to farce. Confusion reigns here as master. With in addition to enormous concerns of signifying dialogues and rhythm. Sequences that are too mounted with an ax and other endless on a story where three young women in search of freedom take under their wing a young Muslim forcibly converted to Catholicism. This undeniably ambitious gesture which is smashed over the reality of what we see. And this despite an impeccable quartet of actresses: Oulaya Amamra, Déborah Lukumuena, Sabrina Ouazani and Daphne Patakia.
Thierry Cheze
And also
God’s spy, of Todd Komarnicki
On the go, of Julia de Castro and Maria Gisèle Royo
