These are the releases that hit movie screens this December 1:
By Jordi Batlle Caminal
John Woo returns to American cinema twenty years after Paycheck. He was still active, in China and Hong Kong, but, in these two decades, only the period film (and epic) Red Cliff had been released in our cinemas. It is, therefore, cause for celebration for the entire parish addicted to his cinema the arrival of Silent Night, which contains the best of John Woo without becoming, by any means, one of his masterpieces. Let's see.
What's wrong with Silent Night? First of all, the plot, a classic story of insignificant personal revenge, without substance, in which the viewer has to do a lot to swallow that the hero, an ordinary guy (and, furthermore, an actor without charisma), He becomes, just by training a few weeks in his garage, an infallible killing machine, capable of confronting and eliminating a hundred criminals. Secondly, a flaccid, oleaginous sentimentality. That a sentimental person lives in Woo's hurricane film universe was already known, but here he abuses the feeling, for example in the repeated images of the father remembering his son through the tiny musical artifact. The third handicap can be reversed in virtue: the obvious lack of resources (this is not Face of, it is not Windtalker) gives the product a good B-series effluvia.
But where Silent Night shines in all its glory is in its execution. The advertising emphasizes that the film is the work of the producer of the John Wick saga. Red herring: in the magnificent tetralogy starring Keanu Reeves, almost every shot had digital effects, while, here, the action is tremendously physical, without additives. Action that roars in the prologue (ten minutes of great cinema) and, after an unexpected pause of three-quarters of an hour, explodes again in an exciting climax, planned and staged with mastery. Woo's greatest challenge, however, is having told us the entire film almost without dialogue, supported by the visual force of the images, with devilish kinetic power. Truffaut once said that, if cinema suddenly became silent again, all filmmakers would have to find a new job, except Hitchcock. The phrase is still valid, only changing Hitchcock to Woo.
Por Philipp Engel
Despite the perilous circumstances that threaten its brilliant future, Argentine auteur cinema continues at the top: if a few months ago we were seduced by Laura Citarella's Trenque Lauquen, a 250-minute film divided into twelve chapters that branched into endless of stories, The Delinquents, a candidate for the Foreign Language Oscar, is both similar and totally different. The two share the already iconic actress Laura Paredes and an unusual duration, they travel through a great variety of genres for the mere pleasure of fable, and they use a similar humor, between absurd and playful, that deactivates any hint of the pomp that the viewer unsuspecting person could attribute, a priori, to cinematographic works of such long duration. Both are mutant films, joyful narrative labyrinths, in which there is no choice but to let yourself go.
The Criminals, the eighth feature from the director of The Custodio, begins as a timeless heist film, which may recall American classics from the 70s, such as Silent Witness, in which Elliott Gould was also a bank employee who planned to loot his own office – although in reality the director was inspired by Hardly a Criminal (Hugo Fregonese, 1949) -, and evolved, via the road movie, towards a bucolic-pastoral comedy that only a lover of Renoir's A Game in the Country could film. (1946). Bresson and Godard are explicitly mentioned in a memorable cinema scene within the cinema (and a filming also appears), to vindicate not only the glorious cinephile past, but the possibility of continuing to reinvent it, over and over again. An extraordinary film with wonderful actors (Esteban Bigliardi in particular), and ingenious staging solutions, such as a fun romp, which also seems unconsciously stolen from another American film from the 70s: this time Midnight Cowboy. Cinema always feeds itself.
By Salvador Llopart
You have to enter this film like you enter a museum: looking for the experience. In this case, the fusion of the subjective view of the plastic arts with the dynamism of the audiovisual story. The technical data of this film - practically made by hand - are overwhelming, as it was in Loving Vincent, the directors' previous one. It was that contemplation commanded. In the Name of the Land is, on the other hand, a disheveled and cruel rural drama, like the same land that the peasants inhabit.
Por P. Engel
Our cinema never stops renewing itself with films like the brilliant debut of the versatile Victor Iriarte, produced by Isa Campo and Isaki Lacuesta. Based on a topic as serious as the stolen babies of the Franco regime, the film, chaired by Ana Torrent and Lola Dueñas, escapes from the leaden social cinema and becomes a carousel of cinephile references linked with the grace of a musical, including an unforgettable dance scene in which the boy with two mothers (Manuel Egozkue) expresses his feelings.
By J. Batlle
Without any link with the two comedies suggested by the title, this is a crude, ordinary farce that laughs, with didactic pretensions, at xenophobia, Spanish fachas, Moors, pateras, etc. His carpetovetonic mentality refers to the times of Paco Martínez Soria, as if nothing had changed in the last sixty years. It contains some acceptable gags (the wedding scene) and a Julián López capable of extracting good doses of genuine comedy from idiocy.
By S. Llopart
A scientist, marked by tragedy, arrives at a mysterious place - in this case a desert island - and begins to see things that are not there. Is it his tortured mind or the influence of the place? He could be talking about Solaris, really, but I'm talking about Quest, Antonina Obrador's directorial debut. An austere, visually contained proposal, which rests on the interpretation of Enric Auquer and Laia Manzanares. Where the mystery fails to capture the imagination. Slow cinema. Slow ideas.
Por P. Engel
Arthur Miller's daughter found herself with Maggie's Plan (2015), a curious deconstruction of the rom-com for which she had the freshness of Greta Gerwig. Here she tries to repeat the play, in an eccentric plan, by placing Peter Dinklage between a stuffy Anne Hathaway and the always irresistible Marisa Tomei. But, although it includes a century-old Romeo and Juliet, the proposal is still an uneven, soft and very outdated amalgamation of indie tropes with famous actors. In 2001, she would have crashed.
