The Maid, The Kabuki Master, SpongeBob SquarePants, The Movie: One for All, All Pirates! : what’s new at the cinema this week
What to see in theaters
THE EVENT
THE MAID ★★★☆☆
By Paul Feig
The essentials
The film adaptation of the novel-phenomenon navigates between soft eroticism, algorithmic efficiency and degenerate Hitchockism. A little guilty pleasure?
Freida McFadden’s bestseller seemed made for the cinema. Not only because of its massive success, but also for its plot that fits into a genealogy that goes from Rebecca to Gone Girl. A lineage that could have pushed director Paul Feig towards a form of post-Hitchcockian mannerism, like Joe Wright in The Woman in the Window. But no: the aesthetic is that of a decoration catalog, the narration allows no gray areas, as if the film had first been designed for consumption on a platform. The first act gently teases, with its soft-porn bursts à la Fifty Shades of Grey, its camera lingering on Sydney Sweeney’s breasts or Brandon Sklenar’s posterior. Everything here is so stated, highlighted, that when Amanda Seyfried takes over the voiceover halfway through, the images seem almost superfluous. It’s the third part that saves the furniture, when the whole thing turns into a filthy horror thriller and assumes its nature as a by-product. It’s too long, damn, the story is incredible… But we’d be lying if we said we didn’t have a good time.
Frédéric Foubert
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PREMIERE LIKED A LOT
THE MASTER OF KABUKI ★★★★☆
By Lee Sang-il
At first glance, The Master of Kabuki might seem like a somewhat dusty fresco on frozen art. But behind the precise gestures and ritual of kabuki, Lee Sang-il unfolds a vibrant drama where the rise of the son of a yakuza adopted by a theater master transforms into a silent struggle against the established order. The staging combines visual sophistication and dazzling energy. The sequences on stage, flashes of color and choreographed precision, offer a literally hypnotic spectacle. Conversely, behind the scenes, sometimes violent, reveal the mechanics of a world where beauty and cruelty coexist. This is where the film finds its true dynamic: in the tensions between sacred heritage, frustrated ambitions and crumbling fraternities. By questioning both the price of grace and the sacrifice necessary to become an artist, Lee Sang-il creates a great, sensitive show but also a deeply touching fable.
Gaël Golhen
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HARVEST TIME ★★★★☆
By Huo Meng
Everything here is a question of time. A long time that Huo Meng manages to never rhyme with boredom throughout the year that sees his story pass. The year 1991, when the collectivist agricultural social system would give way to massive industrialization and autonomous management by each of its plots. We follow this upheaval through the eyes of a 10-year-old boy whose parents, who left to look for work in the city, entrusted to their family who remained in the village. And Harvest Time is based on two contradictory movements. On the one hand, the elders who, worried about the impending shift, would like to stop time. On the other, young people, impatient for this future to arrive, certain that it will not be worse than their present. These contradictory movements follow the way in which fiction is constantly tinged with documentary, the beauty of the composition of each shot contrasting with the violence of what is happening there. Never overwhelming in scale and awarded an award for its production in Berlin, Harvest Time was received coldly by the Chinese regime. Further proof that he hit it hard and true.
Thierry Cheze
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FIRST TO LIKE
THE WORST MOTHER IN THE WORLD ★★★☆☆
By Pierre Mazingarbe
In her forties, a brilliant magistrate is forced to deal with the matriarch she has not seen for fifteen years after her transfer to Nogent-le-Creux. Between canine autopsies, drug trafficking and skeletons in the closet, this transfer is not the walk in the park she imagined. There is something of Dupontel’s 9 Months Farm (2013) in Pierre Mazingarbe’s first feature film: judicial sphere, female character struggling with her own contradictions, difficult relationship with motherhood, frantic, almost comic-esque pace. Here, everything is conducive to the absurd, from the surnames – Beyoncé, the lawyer’s assistant, and Captain Kitten in the lead – to the verbal jousts in which the sharp tongues of Louise Bourgoin and Muriel Robin flourish, imperious, cutting. A nice first attempt, in short, whose few weaknesses we accept to ignore.
Chloé Delos-Eray
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ACCORDING TO JOY ★★★☆☆
By Camille Lugan
Joy (Sonia Bonny) has faith. The church seems to be his home. We are in poorly identified suburbs. We will say that the era is surely ours but no space-time compass assures us of this. In the 80s, filmmakers like Enki Bilal, Luc Besson and even Jean-Jacques Beineix had invested in underground spaces, probable vestiges of an apocalypse. In these peripheral places, humanity often finds itself reduced to almost nothing, only lost souls remain here who have reconstituted a family around a little “dolorosa” “mate” (Asia Argento). Joy soon leaves the doors of her parish anxious to save Andriy (Volodymyr Zhdanov), a young man attacked before her eyes. A leap into the void as much as an intimate breakup. Screenwriter Camille Lugan (Ibrahim, The Beautiful Role) here signs his first feature as a filmmaker and is betting on a lurch in the image of his (super)heroine, wild and graceful.
Thomas Baura
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FIRST TO MODERATELY LIKED
THE SPONGEBOB MOVIE: ONE FOR ALL, ALL PIRATES! ★★☆☆☆
By Drek Drymon
Since the death of its creator Stephen Hillenburg in 2018, the SpongeBob saga has lost a little of its soul. But the success is still there and the machine continues to run at full speed. In this fourth feature film, Bob and his friend Patrick the Starfish go on an adventure in the company of the Flying Dutchman, dubbed in original version by Mark Hamill (in French, it’s Eric Antoine). The plot, very generic, is worthy of a DTV but, for a few moments, Bob’s good old “nonsensical” spirit blows again. It’s not always easy to maintain the splits that make up the saga: making the kids laugh as much as their elders who love absurd and stoner movies. The latter will undoubtedly be enchanted by the finale of the film, a stone’s throw from the psychotronic hallu, where Hamill appears in the flesh, under a pirate disguise that he seems to have found at the local jokes and jokes store.
Frédéric Foubert
A GERMAN CHILDHOOD, ISLAND OF AMRUM, 1945 ★★☆☆☆
By Fatih Akin
By bringing to the screen the screenplay by Hark Bohm (actor seen at Fassbinder, who died in November at the age of 86), inspired by his childhood, Fatih Akin addresses the final days of the Nazi regime seen from the German side. And more precisely through the eyes of a 12-year-old child, a member of the Hitler Youth whose mother is a fierce supporter of the Reich but totally unaware of the horror of the time. Akin is eyeing this initiatory story of a kid forced to grow up at a forced pace in both The Bicycle Thief and Stand by Me. The photo by Karl Walter Lindenlaub (Black Book) and his way of making the changing sky a character in its own right reflecting the emotional temperature of the story is remarkable. But there is something somewhat devitalized and totally contrary to the cinema of the man of Head on and In the fade which creates a distance with the story. As if the subject had pushed him to put on hold what constitutes his specificity.
Thierry Cheze
FIRST DID NOT LIKE
THE WORLD ★☆☆☆☆
By Louise Hémon
In 1899, in an alpine village perched too high, life took place sheltered from the vast world. Gazes stop at the borders of a horizon without perspectives. Therefore, spiritual beliefs make it possible to broaden the framework. Although, the young teacher (Galatea Bellugi) from the city will quickly understand that everyone lives withdrawn into themselves and that intimacy is impossible. Louise Hémon sculpts a film that is initially intriguing around the traps of desire before ending up stifled by the limits of a wild, overly decorative universe.
Thomas Baura
The covers
Royal Wedding, by Stanley Donen
Metropolis, by Rintaro
The Pink Panther, by Blake Edwards
