What are we watching this weekend? The masterpiece of Marjane Satrapi, Javier Bardem alive, the Landing seen by Hollywood…
Cinema, streaming, VOD, TV… Find the Première selection every Friday.
The film in theaters: The Plague by Charlie Polinger
A mystery of the industry, we had to wait more than a year and the 2025 Cannes Film Festival where it was unveiled, to finally discover The Plague in our theaters. In the meantime, the young American director Charlie Polinger has become a small indie phenomenon picked up by A24. Léa Seydoux and Mikey Madison – the heroine of Anora by Sean Baker – will star in his second feature film inspired by Edgar Allan Poe. The Plague takes place in 2003 in San Diego during a summer camp where teenagers are playing water polo… One of them has plaques on his body. What if it was a form of plague? There is only one certainty: the unfortunate man is ostracized by his comrades. Charlie Polinger maintains here a strangeness which places the spectator in permanent expectation of an explosion. Will this be embodied in pure and simple horror, symbolic fantasy or depressive melodrama? The film also focuses on the mysterious excitement of its young hero stuck in his inability to express himself and a very controlled direction which installs an agonizing tension from start to finish.
What’s new at the cinema this week
The film on TV: Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi
Nearly 20 years after its release, Persepolis still animates debates. At the time of its presentation in Cannes, in 2007, it aroused indignation in Tehran. Today, accused of Islamophobia, he annoys part of the left. To the point of polluting tributes on social networks to its author, Marjane Satrapi, whose disappearance we learned this week. Disgusting reactions, but which also illustrate the intact strength of this film (and of the comic strip from which it is based), a biting autobiographical story about the shift of Iran from one dictatorship to another, when the Islamic revolution overthrew the Shah, through her eyes as a child and then as an adolescent exiled in Europe. A work that is still as essential and which resonates more than ever with current events.
Watch Persepolis Friday evening on France 5 and streaming the next day on France.TV
The series: Cape Fear
After 17 years in prison, he returns to take revenge on the lawyer he considers responsible for his fate. Max Cady is back. And after Robert Mitchum and Robert De Niro, it is Javier Bardem who takes on the mythical sociopathic criminal of Nerves on the Edge. This television version – produced by Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg – revisits Cady, giving it new depth. More than a simple remake, the series transforms the predator into a tragic and disturbing figure, while maintaining a delightful tension. An ambitious reinvention, carried by a totally inhabited Bardem.
Watch Cape Fear streaming on Apple TV
The film on VOD: The Mastermind by Kelly Reichardt
Before finding the brilliant Josh O’Connor at the cinema next week as a Spielbergian whistleblower in Disclosure Day, we can admire him in The Mastermind, by Kelly Reichardt, where he portrays an amateur robber in Massachusetts in the 1970s. The film is a sort of ironic rereading of the portraits of men on the run typical of New Hollywood (like Five Easy Pieces), half-heartedly revealing egocentrism, vanity and the machismo of these fake seventies rebels who, despite their non-conformist poses, were in reality not very interested in the women doing the dishes next to them, nor in the latest news from the Vietnam War. It is therefore an entire mythology of US cinema that Reichardt and O’Connor deconstruct in this little masterpiece of deadpan laconicism.
Watch The Mastermind on VOD on Première Max
The classic: The Longest Day by Ken Annakin, Andrew Marton and Bernhard Wicki (1962)
Like a blockbuster like Gone With the Wind, The Longest Day remains above all a producer’s film. The mogul Darryl F. Zanuck did everything possible to revive the Allied Landings in extra wide and brought three directors into line: the American Ken Annakin, the British Andrew Marton and the Swiss Bernhard Wicki. The film was shot in black and white to accommodate the newsreels of the time. Casting-wise, John Wayne rubs shoulders with Bourvil, Robert Mitchum, Fernand Ledoux… We also meet Robert Ryan, Henry Fonda and Rod Steiger. The film, whose stated ambition was ultra-realism, aims to be a total immersive experience. There is no doubt that the unveiling of the fresco on De Gaulle by Antonin Baudry currently in theaters, associated with the anniversary of D-Day, encouraged public service programmers to offer this great memorial spectacle.
Watch The Longest Day streaming on France.TV (until June 8)
