What are we watching this weekend? Emma Stone vs Jesse Plemons, Elle Fanning in a brilliant series, a James Gray classic…

Cinema, streaming, VOD, TV… Find the Première selection every Friday.

The film in theaters: The Rope Around the Neck by Gus Van Sant

In February 1977 in Indianapolis, Tony Kristis, victim of a fraud, kidnapped the son of the manager responsible and transformed his action into a media event. Entrenched, gun in hand, he captivated America for a few hours. Gus Van Sant films this news story with tension and a dominant of bland colors, the better to place his protagonists in a dormant setting. The film captures the birth of a media fascination where individual despair becomes a collective spectacle, already announcing our contemporary relationship with images and information.

What’s new at the cinema this week

The series: Margo has money problems

Apple mini-series in eight episodes by David E. Kelley (Ally McBeal, Big Little Lies…), Margo Has Money Problems follows a broke student, pregnant by her teacher, who tries to survive without support. Led by Elle Fanning, intense and without filter, the series oscillates between humor and chaos. Around her, Michelle Pfeiffer and Nick Offerman make up a crazy family. An acid drama about precariousness, parenthood and a raw America. Amoral, dense and tense.

Watch Margo Has Money Problems on Apple TV

The film on TV: A difficult year by Eric Toledano and Olivier Nakache

While Just an Illusion is a hit at the cinema, Toledano and Nakache’s previous film is coming to free-to-air television. The film experienced a small commercial failure (less than 1 million admissions, the duo’s lowest score since So Close), perhaps because of its slightly confused political content. If we put that aside, A Difficult Year remains an effective social comedy, in particular thanks to the duo Jonathan Cohen and Pio Marmaï, but also for the performance of Noémie Merlant, who reveals all her comic potential here, and some brilliant ideas for staging such as the use of La Valse à mille temps by Jacques Brel.

Watch A Difficult Year Sunday evening on TF1

The film on VOD: Bugonia by Yórgos Lánthimos

A year after Kinds of Kindness, Yórgos Lánthimos reunited with Emma Stone and Jesse Plemons for this dramatic-horrific-comic thriller, inspired by the South Korean Save the Green Planet!. A beekeeper kidnaps the CEO of a pharmaceutical company, convinced that she is an alien coming to destroy the Earth. In addition to a formidable number of actors, this political fable about conspiracy, culture wars and the misdeeds of Big Pharma is extraordinarily effective and entertaining.

Watch Bugonia on VOD on Première Max

UFO streaming: Endless Cookie by Seth Scriver and Pete Scriver

Be careful, big madness. This award-winning film last year in the Contrechamp section of Annecy is the strangest thing we’ve seen in a long time. In this Canadian documentary which took almost 10 years of work, two half-brothers, one indigenous and the other white, recount the difficulties of their relationship, marked by the physical difference but also the age difference (they are 16 years apart). Their discussions are animated in a style that is both childish and dreamlike, which could be vaguely compared to South Park. The result creates a dissonance that is as confusing as it is captivating. We’re not sure what we watched, but it was cool.

Watch Endless Cookie streaming on MUBI

The classic: The Yards by James Gray

Watching The Yards again, 26 years after its release, is an interesting experience. First of all, it’s quite a makeover. Mark Wahlberg, Joaquin Phoenix and Charlize Theron were still in their twenties, surrounded by Hollywood legends (James Caan, Ellen Burstyn and Faye Dunaway). It’s also a nostalgic trip in the atmosphere of the 1990s, with the chiaroscuro photography of Harris Savides and its small family mafia plot which evokes The Sopranos or the arc of the docks in The Wire. And above all, it increases our desire that the new James Gray, Paper Tiger, be selected at the Cannes Film Festival.

Watch The Yards streaming on Arte.TV