Kaamelott- Second part (part 1), The Little One, The Shrinking Man: what’s new at the cinema this week

Four years later after Kaamelott’s first appearance on the big screen, here is the start of the central part of the trilogy. It involves the Knights of the Round Table going on a quest to prove their bravery while Arthur is depressed and the rare times he leaves his bed is to hang out in his pajamas and grumble. But before Alexandre Astier really shows what he’s doing, it’s a matter of beating around the bush, as is often the case in Kaamelott. Then, once Arthur is re-motivated, the film takes the form of a choral epic, subject to the laws of parallel editing. The desire to finally confront Kaamelott with his “epic” DNA (generally left off-screen in the series) is laudable, but only half-convincing. We never fully feel the thrill of peril, of suspense, that the film would like to communicate to us. Even if, as always in Kaamelott, the actors brush aside many of these reluctances in a burst of contagious pleasure. They are happy, you can see it, you can hear it. And we will only be able to reasonably judge this film when we have seen the second half of the puzzle. A year and a month of waiting is a long time. But we will be there.

Peter Lunn

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PREMIERE WAS MUCH LIKED
THE LAST LITTLE ★★★★☆

By Hafsia Herzi

Director Hafsia Herzi’s The Little One extends by going up several notches what made her previous films so special. This staging which magnifies faces, looks and bodies. His virtuosity in the art of dialogue. This same mastery in orchestrating agitated choral scenes as well as intimate moments. All in the service of its very first exercise of adapting the autobiographical novel by Fatima Daas, a story of personal construction of a young Muslim woman, who loves women. Hafsia Herzi disrupts all the obligatory passages – the confrontation with her mother as with an Imam – by taking them, always far from what one might have anticipated. And we experience this film with Fatima, through her, her shames, her doubts, her racing heart, her fears… A heroine played by Nadia Melliti whose intensity and charisma light up the screen. More than a revelation, an emergence crowned with the Cannes interpretation prize

Thierry Cheze

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THE MAN WHO SHRINKS ★★★★☆

By Jan Kounen

We could stop at the techno challenge: the giant sets reworked, these materials reinvented so that a drop of water or a match finds a credible scale. But behind the revolution lies a great poetic and spiritual film: a strange and moving attempt to tell the story of how a man withdraws from the world to better accept his disappearance. Kounen takes the radical step of never leaving the hero’s point of view. And he draws the story towards his illuminated, ultra-sensory cinema: long, muffled shots, lived-in silences, amplified gestures. Faced with this device, Dujardin delivers one of his greatest recent performances. Almost mute, he transforms survival into physical prowess and an existential melodrama: husband, father, ordinary man, he learns to detach himself. There is some Buster Keaton in this character who runs towards his loss and his rebirth.

Gaël Golhen

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ARCO ★★★★☆

By Ugo Welcome

The action begins in 2932 when Arco, an intrepid kid, refuses to wait until the regulatory age to travel in time. But he, who dreams of finding himself in the age of dinosaurs, ends up in 2075, where he is taken in by a little girl who, like Elliott with ET, will do everything for him to find his home. And this first feature film by Ugo Bienvenu is a marvel. A marvel of digital 2D animation on hand-made matte paintings, stunningly beautiful, under the digested influence of Miyazaki. A marvelous storyline that will delight Amblin fans and Wall-E lovers alike, for its ability to speak to all audiences. Interspersed with moments of humor, Arco tells the story that technology is neither a threat nor a blessing but always what humans do with it. All without being a lesson giver. A tour de force.

Thierry Cheze

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FIRST TO LIKE

THE NEON PEOPLE ★★★☆☆

By Jean-Baptiste Thoret

Like any good self-respecting film buff, Frenchman Jean-Baptiste Thoret only listens to himself. In his directorial films, on the other hand, we hear him less, if at all. He listens to others with patience. America and its demons remain the basis of his travels. After We Blew It (2017) and Michael Cimino, an American mirage (2021), here is this Neon people who set out to meet these homeless people living in water evacuation tunnels in the bowels of Las Vegas. On the surface, the Strip and its mirages, below, the invisible hell of reality. Thoret is interested in a handful of men and women tossed between hope and resignation, courage and despair…. The staging, always at a good distance and adept at long duration, captures more than a word but a voice. That of an America fractured everywhere, of which the recent films of Ari Aster and PTA have been a hallucinatory echo. Exciting.

Thomas Baura

IMAGO ★★★☆☆

By Denial Umar Pitsaev

When Déni inherits a piece of land in a valley in Georgia, near Chechnya from which he has been exiled for many years, he sets out to document the discoveries that will accompany his return to the country. This motif seen and used excessively in all the arts (from Return to Reims by Didier Eribon in literature to Journey to the End of Hell by Michael Cimino) finds here the path of a certain singularity: this heritage becomes the pretext for a liberation of speech between the director and his family. But beyond the intimate confessions, these exchanges relate the multiplicity of world views that can coexist within the same family. The real estate project that Déni plans to carry out on his land is widely mocked and misunderstood by others, who share a much more traditional vision of things. Back to Georgia, but never back.

Nicholas Moreno

THE SECRET OF THE MESANGES ★★★☆☆

By Antoine Lanciaux

Co-screenwriter of the wonderful The Prophecy of the Frogs and Mia and the Migou, Antoine Lanciaux directs for his first feature film the adventures of Lucie, aged 9, joining her mother during the summer vacation in the native village where she grew up and carrying out archaeological excavations. A stay full of surprises where the little girl will strive to discover a buried family secret throughout a scenario with excellently orchestrated twists and turns. But what is striking here is above all the beauty and elegance of the cut-out paper animation which brings poetry and mystery to the story.

Thierry Cheze

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FIRST TO MODERATELY LIKED

SPRINGSTEEN: DELIVER ME FROM NOWHERE ★★☆☆☆

By Scott Cooper

To tell the story of Bruce Springsteen, Scott Cooper chose to focus on the recording of Nebraska, his most iconoclastic album. A very personal, haunted work, made despite the expectations of the public and the record company. The director of Crazy seemed the ideal man to translate this poetic austerity. The casting also had something to seduce: Jeremy Allen White as a silent Springsteen, Jeremy Strong as a benevolent manager. Except nothing to do. Despite its sincere declaration of love for the original work, Deliver Me From Nowhere rarely succeeds in going beyond the clichés of contemporary prestige drama: banal romance, scenes of emotion punctuated by insipid music and black and white flashbacks on traumatic childhood… This gives at best a sympathetic work, but which never finds the fever or grace of the record.

Thomas E. Florin

THE RIDERS OF THE WILDLANDS ★★☆☆☆

By Michael Dweck and Gregory Kershaw

In the heart of the Argentinian mountains, Michael Dweck and Gregory Kershaw (Truffle Hunters) film a community of “gauchos”, traditional herd guardians. We regret that the political gaze placed on these families is too discreet, reduced to a little sermon on wearing a uniform at school. And the heavy work of aestheticizing the shot (elegant black and white, pure frame) tends towards the imagery of a perfume ad. But the duration of the sequences saves the documentary and nevertheless invites immersion in the pampas of the gauchos.

Nicholas Moreno

KLARA MOVES ★★☆☆☆

By Zsofia Szilagyi

The story has one sentence: Agie helps move her friend Klára who has just left her husband. And in one day, where the back and forth between Klára’s old home and the new one will multiply, each distilling trouble in Agie in relation to her relationship. Zsofia Szilagyi 100% assumes a bias towards repetitive narration and naturalism which captivates at first but struggles to go the distance over 90 minutes. Because what we see there and what we imagine happening in the heads of the protagonists ends up becoming too readable.

Thierry Cheze

FIRST DID NOT LIKE

THE DISAPPEARANCE OF JOSEF MENGELE ★☆☆☆☆

By Kirill Serebrennikov

After Limonov, the ballad, according to Emmanuel Carrère, Kirill Serebrennikov adapts The Disappearance of Josef Mengele, a best-seller by Olivier Guez which recounted the South American wandering of the Nazi “angel of death”, torturer of Auschwitz who managed to escape his judgment for more than thirty years. We could draw several parallels between the two films (two stories of headlong escapes, as much geographical as political), but their real point in common is the impression of confusion they leave, aggravated by a formal virtuosity which runs empty (have-you-seen-me sequence shot, vintage spy film aesthetic flirting with pastiche). An 8mm color flashback punctures the black and white film in the middle, showing Mengele and his men humiliating, torturing and killing their victims, all smiles in front of an amateur Nazi camera. The scene, terribly inconsequential, is enough to discredit the entire film.

Frédéric Foubert

PET SHOP DAYS ★☆☆☆☆

By Olmo Schnabel

An Olmo Schnabel film? Yes, he is indeed the son of the painter and filmmaker Julian Schnabel. We don’t say that to lock Olmo into the infamous box of nepo babies, but to explain why so many good fairies looked at the cradle of his first feature film: Martin Scorsese and Michel Franco produce, Willem Dafoe, Peter Sarsgaard and Emmanuelle Seigner are in front of the camera. However, it is a question of killing the father, and not of borrowing his address book, in this story of the meeting between a young Mexican who has broken his ban and a handsome New Yorker who is revolting against his family. The film explores their nights of debauchery, then their criminal drift, at an anemic pace and in a stale Abel Ferrera aesthetic. Note to those who are intrigued: a pet shop and a mention of the song “West End Girls” are there to justify the title, a nod to Pet Shop Boys.

Frédéric Foubert

And also

Chainsaw man – The film: Reze’s Arc, by Tatsuya Yoshihara