These are the movie premieres that hit the screens starting this December 21:
By Luís Bonet Mojica
Another French immersion in period cinema. Eugénie Grandet tells a rich story in social and political situations that reveal the prevailing rigidity in the high social class with respect to those who try to survive an agonizing poverty that threatens their lives. New adaptation of one of the most versioned novels by the prolific French writer Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850), within his literary series The Human Comedy, the book was published with great success in 1833 and has been the subject of numerous reviews over the years. film versions. The writer and director Marc Dugain, who in his previous film, Changing Queens (2017), starring Lambert Wilson and the always notable Olivier Gourmet, who repeats his presence here, already offered the adaptation of a historical-themed plot.
Eugénie Grandet begins with a group of women of the time saying the rosary in the local church. They are obligatorily devoted women in a society where the dictatorial male (but a womanizer, of course) reigns, although in them he also shows his rebellion against devouring masculinity. The scathing dialogues contained in the script clearly reveal the complicated relationship established between men and women. One of these dialogues is as clear as this allusion to marriage: "Love in marriage is pure chimera."
The character recreated by Olivier Gourmet has a huge fortune that he hides from everyone, living modestly. His stinginess is extreme and he fears that the suitors of his beautiful daughter Eugénie (Joséphine Japy) want to seize the enormous and camouflaged family heritage. But she is very much in love with a nephew living in Paris, a young dandy, orphaned, broke and aspiring to waste more money. They explain it to her daughter without subterfuge: "All men have vices and your father has chosen the cheapest, greed, and this greed devours his mind." Filmed with great visual care, the leading trio highlights the beauty and emotional capacity of the young actress Joséphine Japy.
By Jordi Batlle Caminal
The first images of Broker are shocking: we see a kind of ATM but it is not a bank, money is not withdrawn from it but unwanted babies are deposited. Behind the box, an organization is in charge of caring for the abandoned creatures and giving them up for adoption. But there's also a couple of criminals there dedicated to baby trafficking. It will be these two characters, along with the baby they are trying to sell, its biological mother and a boy who escaped from an orphanage, the protagonists of this adventure woven in the form of a "road movie". There will be other characters and subplots (the two police officers trying to hunt down the traffickers), but they lack substance, they could have been left out of the script. Because what counts here is the observation of this unnatural family, which the Japanese Kore-eda, this time operating from South Korea, performs with his usual sensitivity, registering relationships, gestures and behaviors with soft lyricism and demonstrating that, in Deep down and despite everything, they are all good people: the mother who abandoned her son and the criminals who try to sell him really only want the best for him, the happiness that life denied them. Kore-eda films characters and x-rays hearts.
By J. Batlle Caminal
We say around here that cats have seven lives, but in the Anglo-Saxon world pussycats are more fortunate, because they have nine lives (and nine tails had Argento's cat). At the beginning of this new Dreamworks production, Puss in Boots makes a public display of his infinite cockiness in a tavern (reminiscent of a famous scene from Cyrano), and right there he realizes that he has already died eight times and there will be no more. more extensions. The count of his eight deaths constitutes the brilliant moment of the show: a shower of eight short gags and a new demonstration of the ability of animated cinema to, when it wants or can, celebrate synthesis as an infallible narrative method. The rest of the feature film is discreet, although not entirely negligible. His energy is constant and keeps boredom at bay. And Antonio Banderas continues to be very salty putting the voice of the hero, both in the original version and in the dubbed one; he and he put her in three Shrek titles, in the preceding spin-off, in a television series, and in a handful of shorts and Christmas specials. His partner in Desperado, Salma Hayek, is Kitty the kitten in the original version; both star in a very tender romantic comedy scene on the top of a tree.
The young professor begins his classes by giving the example of the power of rap in the youth revolts in the Maghreb of 2011. We are in Sidi Moumen, a neighborhood in Casablanca, in an art school and in the classroom where a group of young people carry out rap and hip hop in their blood, they know that it is a tool to access a certain freedom, express intimate feelings, expel all the contained rage, open unexplored horizons. The latest feature film from the author of Los caballos de Dios y Razzia exalts rap forcefully. When it focuses on a specific problem of a student (the student whose fundamentalist parents forbid her from going to rap class, the unsociable student, etc.), the film falters considerably in its simplicity, but it is in the moments of interaction between teacher and students, in the passionate debates on the matter that makes them feel alive (or on religion or terrorism), where Say It Loud and Loud acquires an appreciable dialectical impetus and that frank and natural tone, so close to documentary, which endowed it with charm to The Class, by Laurent Cantet. It is a pity that, in the final stretch, Ayouch leans towards easy uplifting speech and excess tears.
