Phew Love, Mercy, Smile 2: new releases at the cinema this week
What to see in theaters.
THE EVENT
WOW LOVE ★★★★☆
By Gilles Lellouche
The essentials
Gilles Lellouche signs a film whose generosity sometimes plays tricks on him but ends up winning the day. A romantic kamikaze fresco
The plot runs from the 80’s to the 2000s. A studious high school girl and an intrepid little thug fall madly in love before life separates them but without ever, despite all the obstacles put in their way, completely achieving their goals. Love phew starts off with a bang and, to the rhythm of an insane soundtrack, Lellouche never presses the brake pedal. His staging, rich in camera movements, reflects an overflowing enthusiasm for staging this story, these characters, these actors. There is a kamikaze panache in this gesture which often takes away everything in its path. But for this thunderous journey to work without the more intimate moments seeming irrelevant, we needed actors in tune. Intense but capable of nuances. Malik Frikah and Mallory Wanecque, on the one hand, François Civil and Adèle Exarchopoulos on the other, are made of this wood. They are one and the same with a filmmaker who here combines love at first sight and punches.
Thierry Cheze
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PREMIERE LIKED A LOT
MERCY ★★★★☆
By Alain Guiraudie
It starts off like a western. A young man returns to his village of Aveyron. If he moved, the former best friend, not really. Although, feelings do not necessarily need to see the country to flourish. But Guiraudie’s feelings are old dreams that move to paraphrase the title of one of his medium-length films. All the tensions of the story have as their point of support the dining room of Martine (Catherine Frot brilliant), recently widowed and who will soon see her son mysteriously disappear. There is also and above all a priest adept at mushroom picking and not necessarily solitary pleasures who could mediate passions. Mercy is a spiritual farce as much as a psychological thriller where the supernatural is all the crazier as it nestles in a disturbing realism.
Thomas Baura
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WILD ★★★☆☆
By Claude Barras
Claude Barras takes us to Borneo, into a tropical forest threatened with destruction by greedy companies. And recounts the fight of a little city girl to prevent it by reconnecting with the nomadic part of her family, that of her mother who died too soon, living in the heart of this forest. A double initiatory story where she will learn political-ecological commitment while discovering the family secrets buried by her father to protect her. There is here in Barras the desire to deliver a message aimed at the youngest, in a cleverly orchestrated mixture between the realism of the situations and the poetry of their treatment. Without ever infantilizing things. And in line with My life as a Zucchiniits stop-motion animation and all the expressiveness of its puppets with huge eyes would melt the driest hearts.
Thierry Cheze
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BEARDS LITTLE ALGERIA ★★★☆☆
By Hassan Guerrar
Press officer for years, Hassan Guerrar signs his first achievement by heading to the Parisian district of Barbès where a single forty-something moves in and welcomes his nephew who has recently arrived from Algeria. The starting point for a delicate chronicle, a portrait of the Algerian community which lives and brings to life this place in the north of the capital where the greatest of fraternities and the most trivial of violence coexist. With colorful characters, Barbès, Little Algeria constantly evolves between these extremes, over the course of a story told with real storytelling talent. At Guerrar, emotion is written with a capital E, thanks also to its main actor Sofiane Zermani who here takes a new step
Thierry Cheze
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BAMBI, THE STORY OF A LIFE IN THE WOODS ★★★☆☆
By Michel Fessler
Bambi in live action : while waiting for Disney to do it, one day or another inevitably (but with 100% digital animals like its remake of Lion King), here is the French version. And this through the prism of a documentary on the youth of a fawn dressed in a light dramaturgy – and above all a voice-over (that of Mylène Farmer) to remind us that the hero is called Bambi. Basically, this questions us a little about the porosity between fiction and documentary, and about the mixture that cinema makes between the true and the false. We can reflect on all this while marveling at the charming imagery that the film displays: the meeting between Bambi and a hedgehog or a rabbit, the antics of a raccoon, the recurring presence of a crow in the branches… We are therefore not so far from the True-Life Adventuresthe cult Disney docus from the 40s and 60s which mythologized American nature for young children. We always come back to Disney, in short.
Sylvestre Picard
NORAH ★★★☆☆
By Tawfik Alzaidi
Set in 1996, at a time when all forms of art were banned in public places in Saudi Arabia, this first feature film tells how a schoolteacher newly arrived in an isolated village forms an artistic relationship with a young woman through a secret portrait. that she asks him to draw. From this refined story, Tawfik Alzaidi draws an admirable tension, where the silences sublimate the faces and where the rocky landscapes wonderfully embody the universal need to free oneself from constraints..
Damien Leblanc
CROQUETTE, THE WONDERFUL CAT ★★★☆☆
By Christopher Jenkins
With the help of an angel, a cat keeps reincarnating into various animals (raccoon, fish, horse, etc.) to try to save his mistress from a plot orchestrated by a mad scientist, since she is a scientist who seeks to save bees from extinction… And yes, Croquette the wonderful cat is a much more complex film than it appears, while fulfilling its specifications as a family comedy (the word is awful, but you get the idea) well thought out, correctly written, full of good characters, and smarter than average. It therefore speaks of ecology, family, even religion – rest assured, it does not force the line too much on the reaction side, since the mythology of Croquette is based more on funny narrative clichés (Paradise is a luminous bureaucracy) than on traditional propaganda. Brief, Croquette should be placed in the category of good back-to-school surprises.
Sylvestre Picard
THE ABSENT TRAIL ★★★☆☆
By Eugénie Zvonkine
Few documentaries pay attention to “childless mothers”, these women forced to navigate the void left by a perinatal death. However, Eugénie Zvonkine made it her mission: following an IMG, she decided in a cathartic impulse to collect the testimonies of three women she met in a support group, without ever turning off her camera. Thus, it gives them time to exhale the pain, accompanying the silence that comes with tears, much more evocative than words. By filming three mourning paths – one retracing the journey towards the hospital where she gave birth, the other towards the grave of her child in Morocco, and the last towards the only village in France which bears the first name of her daughter – the director engages in an intimate exercise, as painful as it is liberating, which will undoubtedly allow other damaged women to venture onto their own path.
Lucie Chiquer
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FIRST TO MODERATELY LIKED
SMILE 2 ★★☆☆☆
By Parker Finn
In 2022, we found that, in the style of “very low budget horror inspired by a short film”, smile was worth a look, without revolutionizing the genre. Smile 2 begins a few days after the first, and always follows the course of a curse taking the form of a horrible smile on the face of the wearer. And although objectively better than the first, it suffers from real shortcomings. So, at the moment when the very generous Terrify 3 ravages the theaters, the efforts made here to freak out its audience seem far too classic. And while everything here relies on the jumpscare Parker Finn has an unfortunate tendency to cut crazy scenes with a straight cut when they finally become interesting. The ending scene, however, turns out to be very funny, and leaves a very good impression: the one that Smile 3 could finally be a great scare film.
Sylvestre Picard
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TOUCH THE EARTH ★★☆☆☆
By Jérémie Basset
Passionate about raw earth construction will be delighted: a documentary dissects this niche subject thanks to the expertise of archaeologists and architects as well as immersion within a participatory construction site. Others, on the other hand, will have a little more difficulty in becoming passionate about these charming earthen buildings: the testimonies will seem scattered to them, the common thread fragile, and the historical context too quickly touched upon to really grasp the eco-responsible virtues of this material…
Lucie Chiquer
CROSSED VOICES ★★☆☆☆
By Raphaël Grisey and Bouba Touré
Arriving in France around 1960 and dying in 2022, the Malian Bouba Touré signs, for what will remain his final feature film (in a duo with Raphaël Grisey), an ambitious documentary around the struggle of African workers who came to France. The damage of colonialism, the development of agriculture in Mali and ecological issues are on the program of this kaleidoscope mixing places and times, which is a little complicated to follow and which would have benefited, given the quantity of subjects and the years covered, from being treated in series.
Thierry Cheze
FIRST DID NOT LIKE
IT’S THE WORLD REVERSED UP ★☆☆☆☆
By Nicolas Vannier
And suddenly everything changed. No more electricity, no more running water, no more network to communicate. And here is the hero of the new Nicolas Vannier (Give me wings), trader obsessed with money forced to leave Paris with wife and child to take refuge in the countryside on a farm acquired for purely speculative purposes but which those who live there and support it have no intention of leaving. No one will be able to question the sincerity of Vannier in this plea to save the planet. But the ultra-caricatural writing of the trader character drives the film into a wall from the start, making all the twists and turns that follow artificial and leading to a forced happy ending. The whole thing would have deserved less Manichaeism, more ambiguity and a direction of actors which does not push for permanent overdrive so that the message that Vannier intends to deliver gets across.
Thierry Cheze
And also
The Song of Jerome, by Olivier Bosson
Cool, child’s play, short film program
Harold and the Magic Pencil, by Carlos Saldanha
Macpat and the singing cat, short film program
Resumption
Fragile heroes, by Emilio Pacull
The Violins of the Ball, by Michel Drach
