Joker: Folie à deux, All we imagine as light, When autumn comes: What’s new at the cinema this week
What to see in theaters
THE EVENT
JOKER: FOLIE A DEUX ★☆☆☆☆
By Todd Phillips
The essentials
This sequence of Jokerin the form of a depressive musical, is so dreary and ineffective that it almost seems like a complete sabotage on the part of Todd Phillips and Joaquin Phoenix.
The fact that five years after his triumph, the continuation of Joker was announced as a musical comedy that could raise hopes for a flamboyant proposal, something a little crazy and unique, from a director and an actor who respectively won a Golden Lion and an Oscar for the previous shutter, Failed: Joker: Folie à deux feels like a freezing shower. The result is so monotonous, so empty of ideas, desire and energy, that one almost comes to wonder if this departure from the road is not the consequence of a self-destructive impulse, as if Todd Philips and Joaquin Phoenix had suddenly decided to break their toy, to sabotage their lucrative association rather than capitalize on their success.
Frédéric Foubert
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FIRST TO LIKE
ALL WE IMAGINE AS LIGHT ★★★☆☆
By Payal Kapadia
Grand Prix of the Cannes Film Festival, All we imagine as light follows the journey of two nurses at a Mumbai hospital who share a small apartment. One, married, has not seen her partner for a long time and is, in fact, forbidding herself from a new love affair. The other, younger, tries to live her passion with her fiancé of Muslim origin, which condemns them to a form of clandestinity. Payal Kapadia was spotted in 2021 with her documentary, All night without knowing. And All We Imagine As Light connects directly with his previous film in this way of capturing views of Mumbai on the spot. The result is a sensitive and intimate approach to space. Where some filmmakers impose their characters, their stories and their emotions on the spectators, Payal Kapadia chooses the path of gentleness and quiet revelation. Which doesn’t stop you from hitting hard.
Thomas Baura
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THE DEVIL’S BATH: A CHILD FOR THE DEVIL ★★★☆☆
By Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala
Its title is that of a horror film but The Devil’s Bath does not quite fall into the horror genre, even if the film is haunted, immersed in a lugubrious atmosphere which evokes The Witch by Robert Eggers. Here too, it is about working to make people feel the reality of a distant and vanished universe, where traditions and superstitions gave everyday life an unreal and threatening tone. This world is Upper Austria in the middle of the 18th century, where young Alice, shortly after her marriage, sinks into the throes of depression and melancholy. The film is carried by a kind of ethnological suspense, slowly revealing the rules which governed the cultural and social universe of the time. Confusing, original, quite haunting, crossed by a heady impression of desolation, The Devil’s Bath confirms that when we say of an Austrian film that it is “chilling”, it is indeed a pleonasm.
Frédéric Foubert
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THE OUTRUN ★★★☆☆
By Nora Fingscheidt
Everything starts from an autobiographical story. That of Amy Liptrot, a Scottish woman who, having become addicted to alcohol, undertook a harsh, chaotic detoxification treatment on the archipelago of the Orkney islands. Eight years later, here it is brought to the screen at the initiative of Saoirse Ronan who is making her debut as co-producer and has therefore chosen the one who directs it, Nora Fingscheidt (Benni). An inspired choice because the director seizes this story by exploding its programmatic side with two complementary movements. A game with the chronology of events, through the memories that go back to the memory of its heroine and a way of representing the evolution of her distorted vision of the world by mixing archive images and animated sequences. But nothing would work without a genius actress, as impressive in excess as in the expression of intimate pain. Saoirse Ronan is made of this wood.
Thierry Cheze
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DRONE ★★★☆☆
By Simon Bouisson
After the series StalkSimon Bouisson chose to explore the theme of voyeurism doubly for his debut on the big screen with the heroine, an architecture student (Marion Barbeau, impeccable), secretly working as a camgirl to earn a living, who discovers one day when returning home , that a drone regularly arrives to scrutinize each of these acts. Who is behind his orders? A stranger who wishes him well? A pervert who wants to make her his prey? Bouisson has a real talent in the art of increasing tension and a never fussy elegance in the way he integrates the panoramic views offered by the drone into his staging. Certainly this thriller suffers from less convincing writing of certain secondary roles (the teacher played by Cédric Kahn, too loaded with toxic masculinity) and its resolution – although anything but basic – is a little disappointing. But this first feature is worth the detour.
Thierry Cheze
SUPER SENIORS ★★★☆☆
By Dan Lobb
Leonid, a 95-year-old Ukrainian, has a dream: to win an international tennis competition. And he has every chance since in his category the opponents can be counted on the fingers of one hand. Super Seniors follows four snowshoe enthusiasts for whom age is not a brake but an engine. Romanticized by a touching setting, they make us smile and give us the kind of hope that we expect from a sports story. More than one desire: forget your osteoarthritis and put on your sneakers.
Bastien Assie
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FIRST TO MODERATELY LIKED
WHEN AUTUMN COMES ★★☆☆☆
By François Ozon
After the funny and playful tone of My Crime, Ozon returns to a criminal intrigue, this time favoring gray areas. The story of a grandmother who leads a seemingly peaceful retirement in Burgundy. Until, during the All Saints’ Day holidays, a mushroom poisoning set off a whole spiral that led to a police investigation. With this question: did the octogenarian want to kill her own daughter, with whom she has a complex relationship? If the screenplay takes pleasure in leaving things unsaid, the rhythm suffers precisely from this indecision which fits rather poorly with the ambition of a poisonous thriller. What remains is an honorable cast, carried by the ambivalent Hélène Vincent and the frail Pierre Lottin, who form a dysfunctional blended family in the face of which we would have loved to be even more troubled.
Damien Leblanc
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FIRST DID NOT LIKE
MAYA, GIVE ME A TITLE ★☆☆☆☆
By Michel Gondry
The artistic crisis of Michel Gondry – detailed in his previous film, The Book of Solutions – is it finished? Unfortunately no, judging by Maya, give me a titlecompilation of short films made with cut-out paper and animated in stop-motion, mini home movies that the filmmaker used to make at home for his daughter Maya. The little one gives her dad a title (like “Maya Mermaid” or “Maya Policewoman and the Three Cats”) and he works to invent a pretty wacky story for her. It’s very cute, but was it necessary to show them to us? The self-indulgence that was sometimes already weighing down The Book of Solutions embarrasses again here, and the film ends up boring as much as these parents raving about the adorable childish words of their offspring. Endless (despite its one hour duration) and very excluding for people who are not members of the Gondry family.
Frédéric Foubert
THE DAMNED ★☆☆☆☆
By Abel Danan
When it comes to domestic paranoia, Roman Polanski killed the game a long time ago with Repulsion (1965) or Rosemary’s Baby (1968) making confinement the very issue of reflection on staging. We’re obviously not going to have fun judging films based on these overwhelming references. However, this Damned plays on a note so heard and expected that we scrutinize the way in which a young filmmaker can reappropriate these figures. Unfortunately Abel Danan stumbles on the very object of his intentions: to film a young woman trapped in her anxieties. She lives as a recluse in her small Parisian furnished apartment (the outside frightens her) convinced that an evil presence wants to harm her. The suddenly threatening interior is oppressive. That said, the film stretches this starting point to the limit, very quickly exhausts the possibilities of tension and finds itself condemned to repeat itself. The heroine is tired. Us too.
Thomas Baura
And also
Free, by Santos Blanco
What do we do now? by Lucien Jean-Baptiste
Resumption
Dad is on a business trip, by Emir Kusturica
