Better man, Playing with fire, High-risk robbery: What's new at the cinema this week

Better man, Playing with fire, High-risk robbery: What’s new at the cinema this week

What to see in theaters

THE EVENT
BETTER MAN ★★★☆☆

By Michael Gracey

The essentials

Robbie Williams plays the monkey in an authorized autobiopic that is sometimes a little exhausting but very funny.

Is a filmed hagiography less painful when the hero is played by a monkey? This is the question posed Better Man : the biopic of Robbie Williams, produced, written and supervised by the person concerned. The story has already been seen a thousand times: a working-class kid who dreams of being Sinatra to please his absent dad, early glory in a boy band, drugs and ambition, glory and downfall, rehab… The The film’s trick is that the star has the face of a very humanized monkey, designed in performance capture with Robbie’s voice. Something which indicates the distance taken between the film and its subject – and, ultimately, the passion of Michael Gracey, who directed The Greatest Showman with Hugh Jackman as Barnum, for show business hustlers. No discourse on true and false, on legend and reality, but just an authorized autobiography which works, in the same way as Rocketman worked. Especially thanks to sympathy capital working class of the star and his hits sung with enthusiasm.

Sylvestre Picard

Read the full review

FIRST TO LIKE

RED CASTLE ★★★☆☆

By Hélène Milano

After Black Roses And The burning coalsHélène Milano continues to tell the story of today’s youth with this new documentary where she followed a third grade class at a middle school in the popular Parisian district of Goutte d’Or during a decisive year in the choice of orientations. Itself scenes taken on the spot, moments of workshops with volunteer students and testimonies – often very strong and extremely profound on their vision of the School and their own education – from 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, or turning away her gaze when tension rises and subtly tells how enthusiasm coexists in permanent a real disenchantment. A great success.

Thierry Cheze

JANE AUSTEN WASTED MY LIFE ★★★☆☆

By Laura Piani

Agathe dreams of loving and being loved. But not at any cost. A bookseller, she also dreams of writing but struggles to get started. But now this unconditional Jane Austen fan finds herself selected – thanks to a colleague who has a crush on her – in a writers’ residency in England where she finds herself face to face with a distant descendant… of the author of Persuasion ! In a few lines, everything is said! For her first feature, Laura Piana plunges heartily into the world of romantic comedy through the procrastination of a heroine entangled in too many feelings. And signs a film of great clarity, embracing all the obligatory passages of the genre but with the right amount of burlesque, mischief and contagious happiness to immerse yourself in it that the charm operates. And all the more so since she could not dream of a better performer than Camille Rutherford, irresistible as a young woman crippled by complexes but determined to heal from them.

Thierry Cheze

THE TRAVELER ★★★☆☆

By 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 where the South Korean filmmaker takes pleasure in constantly simplifying his narration (his previous film In Water was in this a peak of minimalism). Huppert plays here a French woman recently arrived in Seoul who improvises as a French teacher in order to overcome her financial difficulties and the feeling of spontaneity will logically be at the heart of this work which seems to construct each sequence and dialogue according to the mood. But the miracle is that the resulting gallery of characters, full of solitude and dissatisfaction, proves thrilling. By showing, for example, the crisis of jealousy of a mother towards her son who dared to shelter the mysterious French woman, Hong Sang-soo reminds us that the most unpredictable emotions are sometimes also the most vivid.

Damien Leblanc

BURN BLOOD ★★★☆☆

By Akaki Popkhadze

Following the brutal assassination of their father, dean of the Georgian community, two brothers on bad terms meet again: one vengeful and sanguine played by Nicolas Duvauchelle, the other religious and reasoned played by the revelation Florent Hill. By articulating Burn the blood around their common decline in the heart of the Nice neighborhoods, Akaki Popkhadze signs a gangster film full of excess: dizzying wide-angle, agitated camera, saturated colors, hysterical performances (oldfield cocaine in the lead), Georgian colossi tattooed to the ears… Radical artistic biases which could have caused a headache if they were not a means of making fun of male violence, of exposing it the harmfulness, to bring it out into the open. Or maybe Burn the blood is quite simply successful because it screams, it hits, it bleeds, all with great panache.

Lucie Chiquer

RETURN TO ALEXANDRIA ★★★☆☆

By Tamer Ruggli

After twenty years in Switzerland, Sue returns to her Egyptian roots at the bedside of her dying mother. Difficult at times to find your 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 works. And through them, Tamer Ruggli shares with us childhood memories of his native Egypt through killer phrases, pink convertibles and songs, from Warda to Dalida.

Lou Hupel

SHIMONI ★★★☆☆

By Angela Wanjiku Wamai

Geoffrey committed the unthinkable: femicide. Upon his release from prison, while he tries to reintegrate into civilian life, his own traumas, long hidden in the shadows, resurface. But in a culture where silence is king, Geoffrey’s inner tumult is heard a little too much… Beyond a remarkable work of sound and a disturbing performance, all the power of Shimoni comes from the ambivalence of its protagonist, both victim and culprit of his own story.

Lucie Chiquer

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FIRST TO MODERATELY LIKED

PLAY WITH FIRE ★★☆☆☆

By Delphine and Muriel Coulin

Adapted from What you need at night by Laurent Petitmangin, the film by the Coulin sisters (17 Girls) portrays a catenary worker working on the railways (Vincent Lindon, still as credible in his favorite job as a man in the street), a widowed father whose two sons are on the cusp of middle age adults, are preparing to take different paths: one (Stefan Crepon) will soon leave to study literature in Paris, while the other (Benjamin Voisin) is getting closer to groups far-right, even though he grew up in a home where humanist values ​​were always professed. Rather than the causes of the seduction of extremism, the film is interested in the intimate consequences, observing the bonds that become distended, the way in which love can bend. Until breaking up? The question is asked in the last act, which offers Lindon – winner at Venice – the opportunity for a long monologue, certainly powerful and moving, but which unbalances and cannibalizes the film. And Play with fire, somewhat petrified by the civic mission he has set for himself, risks preaching only to those who are convinced.

Frédéric Foubert

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HIGH RISK THEFT ★★☆☆☆

By Mel Gibson

When, even in the most B of B series, an author manages to inject his obsessions and make them identifiable, that’s when we recognize him, it seems. In this case: the portrait of the killer played by Mark Wahlberg, a sadomasochistic and grimacing sex addict who spends his time describing the abuse he dreams of inflicting on Topher Grace and Michelle Dockery, while suffering himself terrible pain. This is how Mel Gibson appropriates, and hacks in his own way, this funny but still quite banal project, the script of which could have been found in the junk mail of Jaume Collet-Serra (a US marshal, his prisoner and a hitman are stuck on a plane over Alaska). It’s just that the gulf between its previous and very beautiful You will not kill (2016, and yes) and this microphone Wings of Hell is still abysmal. It seems that he is still preparing the sequel to The Passion of Christ

Sylvestre Picard

FIRST DID NOT LIKE

ALL FOR ONE ★☆☆☆☆

By Houda Benyamina

Although she has since directed episodes of the series The Eddy or co-directed the documentary Salam on Diam’s, we obviously expected a lot from the return to the big screen of Houda Benyamina, after the success of Divine (Caméra d’Or in Cannes and three Césars). An expectation fueled by curiosity around the project All for one : and if the famous Three musketeers of Dumas had been women? Either the promise, on paper, of a new powerful feminist gesture outside of archetypes, in line with Divine. Even if its absence from any selection in a major festival could be worrying. A concern unfortunately quickly confirmed from the first images. Because the mayonnaise doesn’t set. Is this a writing or editing problem? In any case the director gets lost in the different films that she intends to include only one here. From feminist advocacy to spaghetti western, from political message to farce. Confusion reigns supreme here. With in addition enormous problems with over-meaningful dialogue and rhythm. Sequences that are overly edited and others that are endless throughout a story where three young women in search of freedom take under their wing a young Muslim woman who was forcibly converted to Catholicism. This undeniably ambitious gesture which clashes with the reality of what we see. And this despite a quartet of impeccable actresses: Oulaya Amamra, Déborah Lukumuena, Sabrina Ouazani and Daphne Patakia.

Thierry Cheze

And also

God’s Spy, by Todd Komarnicki

On the go, by Julia de Castro and Maria Gisèle Royo

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