These are the movie premieres that hit the screens starting this March 3.
Por Philipp Engel
"Know that if I am invisible, it is only because people refuse to see me," the anonymous narrator cried in 1948 at the beginning of that summit of African-American literature that is The Invisible Man, by Ralph Ellison. In the same way, the protagonist of Saint-Omer, of Senegalese origin, has also been completely invisible, before her white couple and before the rest of French post-colonial society. This is what ends up transcending in the multi-award-winning film by Alice Diop, who already enjoyed an excellent reputation in the documentary field.
The feat here has been starting from a gruesome filicide, which left our neighboring country shocked, and managing to transcend it by reproducing the testimony of the defendant on the stand.
It is not surprising that Alice Diop decided to dedicate herself to the cinema after seeing 35 rhums, the homage to Yasujiro Ozu by Claire Denis. This film also brings her closer to the statuary and declamatory style of Robert Bresson, that is, two of the masters claimed by Paul Schrader in his seminal and discussed essay The transcendental cinema.
The idea is to bet on a rigorous ascetic minimalism, with long fixed planes, which rejects any hint of spectacularity, in view of a kind of elevation, which here is produced thanks to the prodigious interpretation, and the perfect diction, of an impenetrable Guslagie Malanda , which makes us forget why we came here, to judge an inexcusable crime as spectators, to take us to another dimension that goes through its condition as a mirror of the other protagonist: Rama (Kayije Kagame), perhaps a mixture of the director, who attended the trial, and Marie Ndiaye, who has written about other homicides in the recent Mía es la venganza and participates in the script of this magnificent film, as complex, demanding and disturbing as it is ultimately exciting. It is by looking into the eyes of the abyss embodied by the accused, that Rama overcomes her own reluctance to be her mother, and manages to reconcile with hers.
The film explains itself when Rama talks about Marguerite Duras, the perfect novelist and extraordinary filmmaker, to her students: "The author puts her narration power at the service of a sublimation of reality. The woman, object of opprobrium, becomes thanks to the words of the writer, not only in a heroine, but in a subject in a state of grace".
By Jordi Batlle Caminal
This film begins with the tender and homely images of a happy family: a man, his second wife and the baby that has just arrived in the world. Suddenly, a knock on the door interrupts the happiness.
She is the protagonist's first wife, who arrives desperately looking for help: their teenage son, who now lives with her, hasn't shown up at the institute for a month and his behavior is strange, worrying. Her father decides to go see him and, yes, he immediately notices a profound imbalance in the young man, who begs her to go live with him, to have a change of scenery, since he does not get along with his mother. He won't get along with his father either, nor with his stepmother.
After the success of The Father, the playwright Florian Zeller signs his second feature film adapting another of his plays, now focused on youthful mental illnesses, difficult to diagnose, complex, and with which relatives, teachers and psychiatrists face without finding solution or find the source of the disorder.
Zeller, however, bets on one in The Son, and we are somewhat self-righteous: the divorce of the parents (or, what is the same, the abandonment of the father's home to start a new life with another woman) is the cause of the adolescent's psychological imbalance, including suicidal tendencies, a hot topic today that deserves to be addressed more tactfully. To underscore his thesis, Zeller includes disturbing flashbacks to the family's idyllic vacation at sea long before the breakup.
The Son is an obvious and superficial film, well below The Father, whose Oscar-winning interpreter, Anthony Hopkins, has a brief role here and continues to be the tenor that gives the best note: it barely lasts two minutes, but it leaves a trail; furthermore, with refined cruelty worthy of Hannibal Lecter, he spits out a venom-laden phrase that impacts the recipient (his own son of his) with the forcefulness of a nuclear torpedo.
By Salvador Llopart
Scott Fitzgerald said there are no second chances in American lives: To Leslie refutes it. History of a delayed redemption; trip to the hells of a woman abandoned of herself.
The journey - hard, emotional, with no guaranteed happy ending - falls on the apparently fragile shoulders of Andrea Riseborough, who embodies this Leslie on the edge of the precipice. The more she approaches a bottle and the more fragile she appears, the more powerful her performance becomes. From Oscar.
Por Philipp Engel
In an introspective way, Toni Servillo shares the leading role with the Sicilian comedy duo Ficarra e Picone in this likeable comedy, more subdued than crazy, which reminds us that, yesterday as today, the great revolutionary works tend to cause scandal and build walls of incomprehension . This is what happened with Six Characters in Search of an Author, Luigi Pirandello's magnum opus, booed at its premiere.
Andò fantasizes about the genesis of the piece that broke down the fourth wall of the stage, and places it in Sicily, inspired by Leonardo Siascia.
By Salvador Llopart
Magnificent new installment of that branch of fantasy that is the boxing movies inspired by Stallone. With six of Rocky behind him and two more chapters, Creed III does not leave at all that bitter aftertaste that we can call "franchise fatigue."
When the fights come, they are epic. Like you just invented. The plot also has a melodramatic thriller point that comes in the form of the betrayed friend. The actor who plays Creed is, at the same time, the director of the film: good! And in front of him, Jonathan Majors, an actor who is knocking on the doors of heaven.
Por Philipp Engel
Antonio García, one of Bruguera's great cartoonists, lived with his brothers Rosita and Juanito isolated from the world in the family mansion in Vallcarca. That was the Kingdom of the Imagination: in addition to comics, the brothers produced impressive westerns or black films in fotonovela format.
They sang, played jazz, recorded jokes, and thus accumulated tons of material that would have been buried in the saddest of oblivions if Ione Athena, the daring director of this captivating documentary, had not occupied the place, to stay and live, to unravel her mysteries and appease their ghosts.
By Salvador Llopart
Shame on you for using the name Bruce Willis in vain, shame on you. Willis is there, but he is not. Now we know that he is sick. His presence is reduced to a few scenes that leave a bittersweet taste behind. Third installment of a series of unfortunate memory. However, this detective Knight has the moments of him.
The best one stars a young paramedic who goes to the dark side of nonsense and runs into the shadow of Willis. How big is that shadow, even if it is just that: a shadow of what it was.
