Suddenly, The End of Oak Street, Just for One Night: what’s new at the cinema this week
What to see in theaters
THE EVENT
SUDDENLY ★★★★☆
By Ryusuke Hamaguchi
The essentials
The Japanese filmmaker of Drive My Car installs Virginie Efira at the head of a Parisian nursing home and signs an anti-capitalist pamphlet mixed with senior hedonism. A surprising gesture.
In front of the camera of Rysuke Hamaguchi (Drive my car), Virginie Efira plays the director of an establishment for the elderly with experimental methods. It sets up the “Humanitude” program around the philosophical concept advocating “the capacity of a human being to become aware of their belonging to the human species as a full member. » Faced with the skepticism of her management, she praises the four pillars of this wisdom: gaze, speech, touch and verticality. Through the gentleness of its ultra-precise staging without being overbearing, Hamaguchi appropriates the space without falling into blissful exoticism. The filmmaker is riveted to his performers, follows their rhythms, listens to their thoughts against the test of their own speeches. Virginie Efira, who shared her Cannes Best Actress Prize with her partner Tao Okamoto, switches from French to Japanese with disconcerting ease in this film straddling Lelouch and Bourdieu where good feelings are coiled in an acute political awareness of the world. Surprising from start to finish.
Thomas Baura
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PREMIERE LIKED A LOT
SAD CHICAS ★★★★☆
By Fernanda Tovar
There are subjects that are sometimes sufficiently explicit to avoid succumbing to voyeurism. That of sexual violence is one of them, and Fernanda Tovar knows that well: with this first feature film, the director takes a delicate look at the female friendship shared by Paula and La Maestra with, in the background, the story of the rape suffered by the former. If the viewer quickly understands the nature of her discomfort, the young woman will take time to name her aggression. The narrative uppercut that such an announcement usually provokes never happens, and that’s a good thing. We will have to be content with a pernicious trauma which brilliantly infests the staging: the most trying moments will always be hidden from us, sometimes behind glass, sometimes under the water of the swimming pool. And by paying attention, it is possible to see the moving reflection of the female experience.
Lucie Chiquer
FIRST TO LIKE
THE END OF OAK STREET ★★★☆☆
By David Robert Mitchell
David Robert Mitchell (It Follows) ventures for the first time into the territory of a big budget film. The action takes place in 1982 in the neighborhood where the Platt family lives, Oak Street, victim of a mysterious cosmic event which transports them millennia back, to the age of the dinosaurs. The End of Oak Street does not seek to revolutionize the genre. David Robert Mitchell fully embraces his homage to Spielberg’s cinema, in this feature film influenced by Jurassic Park and The Fourth Dimension. But The End of Oak Stret is the polar opposite of a race for efficiency. There is obviously action and suspense. But what sets the pace is first and foremost the characters – and the inner crises they go through – and the staging which gives the sensation of a film shot in the early 80s, with a search for naturalism in perfect contrast with the supernatural aspect of the whole. An old-fashioned film that is neither old-fashioned nor outdated and with a certain charm but uneven in its more than hazardous management of the twists and turns and the explanations of both the phenomenon and the way out of it.
Thierry Cheze
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UNDERTONE ★★★☆☆
By Ian Tuason
A horror film where fear comes first and foremost through sound? It is on this promise that the interesting Undertone, directed by Ian Tuason, is sold, and which can be seen as a horrific variation on thrillers like The Secret Conversation, by Coppola, and Kimi, by Soderbergh, where the protagonists solved mysteries by opening their ears wide. Here, the investigator, Evy, is the host of a podcast specializing in the paranormal while caring for her dying, bedridden mother. Mysterious audio files that she broadcasts in her podcast will soon intrude into her daily life, and impact her ruminations on motherhood, faith and guilt… If Undertone’s sound design is, as promised, particularly elaborate, the jitters here nevertheless come mainly from the anxiety-inducing framings imagined by Ian Tuason. The atmosphere is therefore ideally gloomy, and allows us to excuse the somewhat too tortuous way in which the suspense is carried out.
Frédéric Foubert
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A GREAT SHORTCUT ★★★☆☆
By Clément Devilliers and Armand Foëx
In a Breton village, two cousins act as rat exterminators – and are quickly forced, in order to win contracts, to throw rats into the places they target! – cross paths with two young women who are trying to tamper with a Miss competition to sell their jewelry. Friends since middle school and aged 22, Armand Foëx and Clément Devilliers make the region where they grew up their playground. Produced for 200,000 euros, this first feature seduces with the way they look at their characters, amused but never mocking, playing on the imagination that one must have to find one’s way in these increasingly deserted corners of France. This writing, anything but formatted, reminiscent of Martin Jauvat’s Grand Paris, this perfect casting mixing a new face (François Le Bris) and already identified hopefuls (Jules Porier, Louise Labêque, Sarah Montpetit) brings a breath of fresh air to the summer outings. This duo should not stop there.
Thierry Cheze
ARCOBALENO ★★★☆☆
By Pablo Cirès
For his first feature-length documentary, Pablo Cirès chose to explore a family story: L’Arcobaleno, a legendary dance hall located south of Rome, created by his grandmother half a century ago and whose economic future seems increasingly uncertain. Cirès recounts the fight of the designer’s two sons to keep this unique place alive as best they can and the desire of her granddaughter to reinvent it – therefore to shake it up, with the reluctance that this implies – to save it. A family story for which the director finds the right tone, with a connivance that is never exclusive, a talent for leaving plenty of room for what is left unsaid, a refusal of any picturesque ease and a constant modesty which allows us to avoid the trap of sentimentalism when life brings its share of tragedies. A portrait of a unique place and a tribe that, deep down, resembles all families in the world, Arcobaleno is worth the detour.
Thierry Cheze
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FIRST TO MODERATELY LIKED
JUST FOR ONE NIGHT ★★☆☆☆
By Will Gluck
The American government passed a law prohibiting all sexual relations before marriage… except for one night! The one in which the action of the new Will Gluck (Everything But You) takes place, a dystopia in which Owen and Allie will cross paths, falling madly in love with each other in the blink of an eye before obstacles of all kinds accumulate to keep them apart, while, like two magnets, they can only end up finding each other. We know the program well. Just for One Night seduces with its charm born from the very irresistible dog-cat alchemy between its excellent comedy duo Monica Barbaro-Callum Turner. And yet we remain hungry. Because Gluck really should have gone further in what his opening pitch to The Purge implies. Dare to venture into societal and political terrain that is anything but far-fetched instead of constantly hitting on that ground, even giving rise to a strange sensation of puritanism, going against what he seems to want to say. Damage.
Thierry Cheze
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A TURKISH AFFAIR ★★☆☆☆
By Aydin Gürsoy
Born Mustafa, this son of Turkish parents who came to settle in France, is now called Mathieu, a more general name and therefore effective in his quest for social advancement to escape his community. An exemplary journey which led him to become a brilliant lawyer on the verge of gaining further ground in the business firm where he works before a helping hand that he agreed to give – at the request of his sister – to a young Turkish taxi driver in a precarious situation who was the victim of a racist act, came to undermine the edifice he had spent so many years building. The starting point for a political-social thriller whose all-too-readable twists and turns undermine the tension and strength. And take up too much space compared to what constitutes the singularity of this first feature film. A dive into the Turkish community living in France, conducted without caricature or picturesque ease. As soon as the story focuses on her – particularly through the complexity of the father-son relationship – A Turkish Affair hits the mark. But unfortunately he doesn’t do it enough.
Thierry Cheze
A NEW DAWN ★★☆☆☆
By Yoshitoshi Shinomiya
After collaborating on films as prestigious as Your Name and In a Corner of This World, Japanese director Yoshitoshi Shinomiya directs his first feature film, which revolves around a young man’s obsession with a mythical fireworks display, developed by his deceased father, and supposed to represent the universe. Not trivial, is it? The whole scenario is agreeable, both incomprehensible and vaguely poetic. But if we agree to turn a blind eye to hysterical characters (what a scream!) and dialogues no more brilliant than those of an average anime, A New Dawn stands out thanks to the crazy charm of its settings (Shinomiya is a painter by training, it shows) and its visual ruptures (brilliant idea of injecting stop-motion sequences in the middle of 2D). An atmosphere more than a film, but which has the courtesy to be completed in less than an hour and twenty minutes.
François Leger
LYDIA AND THE STORMSHIP ★★☆☆☆
By Nancy Florence Savard, Philippe Arseneau Bussieres and Émilie Rosas
There is a very beautiful idea at the heart of Lydia and the Ship of Storms, which redefines the imagination of the sea by transforming water into cottony mist. A source of fascination for young Lydia, who has dreamed of sailing there since her parents disappeared there years ago. When her brother goes too far into this fog because of a strange evil force, she finds herself by magic on board the Dauphin, a boat in search of missing children and populated by sailors themselves attracted by the mysterious Mesmer… The story ticks off the expected stages (initiation, doubt, confrontation) but manages to establish a universe with a singular atmosphere, especially in its settings. But the animation, uneven and a little rigid, slows down the momentum and the sense of adventure that the film would like to deploy. What remains is a nice attempt to make the big difference between the amplitude of his imagination and more than limited financial means.
François Leger
ENTRY ★★☆☆☆
By Pedro Cabaleira
This is a portrait of Portuguese youth at its most raw. The one who struggles and gets bogged down in crimes, who knows nothing other than violence and who is given no chance. There’s Laura, whose lazy cousin hangs out with the neighborhood drug dealers, Matreno and Fama. A few streets away, Nadia, mother of a little girl, meets her companion Virgilio, a boss who has just been released from prison. All these beautiful people participate in the plurality of representations, each being totally dispensable. The characters cross paths and cross paths again, sometimes without impact on the narrative. Only the setting – the neighborhood ecosystem – will constitute the anchor point of this choral film (and will not only be used as a backdrop). If we can recognize in it a naturalism freed from the usual apology for delinquency, we regret the lack of cohesion of the whole.
Lucie Chiquer
And also
Fallen from the sky, by Mohamed Hamidi
The covers
Kim Ki-duk Island
The Quiet family by Kim Jee-woon
