'The kings of the world' (★★★), uncertain horizons and other releases of the week

These are the movie premieres that hit the screens starting this March 17.

Oliver Thansan
Oliver Thansan
16 March 2023 Thursday 22:44
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'The kings of the world' (★★★), uncertain horizons and other releases of the week

These are the movie premieres that hit the screens starting this March 17.

By Jordi Battle

There are five boys, still minors, with no family, no money, no other home than the poorest streets of Medellín. It is noticeable that violence and crime are part of their existence. The first minutes give an account of this daily life with clean, nervous, realistic images.

But it didn't take us long to leave the urban environment to enter rural settings and the jungle, since one of the protagonists, the one who has the material of a leader, has inherited, thanks to the government law for the restitution of seized land, the land that belonged to to his grandmother, who now wants to share with his friends (his family, as he says), hoping for a better life.

Without abandoning the marked trace of social and political cinema of denunciation, Kings of the World thus takes the codified paths of the road movie and adventure cinema. Laura Mora, revealed five years ago with the film Matar a Jesús, records her story in a very varied way.

Sometimes he overemphasizes metaphors or moods: bicycles speeding down the road to express a sense of freedom, perhaps for the first time in their lives; the epic magnification of the low-angle view that exalts the boys, mounted on the truck brandishing machetes, as if defying fate, or the waiter who does not serve the protagonist at the bar, notation of contempt or invisibility. But there are passages of enormous sensitivity and tenderness: the embrace of the good-hearted prostitutes, the hospitality of the old and laconic hermit...

And there is also an extraordinary capture of nature: the rain, the moss, the fog, the mud, the sound of a stream, all filmed in a very physical way and, at the same time, with a poetic-mystical touch similar to from Apichatpong Weerasethakul's cinema. And it is that sometimes the story collides with fantastic cinema: the camera walking alone through the house where two old people supposedly live, full of ruins, garbage and ashes, a terrifyingly beautiful almost Lynchian shot.

But where The Kings of the World reaches its greatness is in the portrait of the protagonists, full of life and hot blood, of rage and contained pain, of hopes in a perhaps unattainable tomorrow.

By Salvador Llopart

The second installment of Shazam's adventures leaves the dark areas of the previous chapter –the search for the mother, for the roots, for the origin– to settle in an adventure for the whole family, as was already the case before. But now more luminous and linear, also less complex and more bland. Where gods (goddesses, rather), heroes and monsters clash relentlessly. So much, that it exhausts.

That new Shazam! It has no more flight than the flight of the magnificent dragon that the recovered Lucy Liu (one of Charlie's angels) rides with style for the big-budget cinema. Liu is accompanied, in the special collaborations section, by Helen Mirren, who fulfills the role of her goddess; something that, in reality, Mirren already is: a goddess without the need for lightning to come out of her hands.

Both, along with the young Rachel Zegler (West Side story), are the daughters of Atlas, goddesses by birthright who come to earth to, well, what the gods do when they get angry: destroy everything and in a big way.

The pleasure of leaving everything shattered, indeed. Yet another of the childish characteristics of this unmistakably innocent look at the superheroic world that is Shazam!. Let's not forget that the same protagonist (Zachary Levi, perfect for communicating that kind of innocence and immaturity with his character's powers) is an abandoned kid, turned into an adult with superpowers: a kind of super hero Big, that unforgettable eighties movie where Tom Hanks He exercised as an adult in spite of himself.

In this sense, a little more history is missing below the story, as in all good superhero movies; especially now that everyone involved in the adventure begins to face the turbulent adolescence. But maturity seems to have been reserved for the next installment of this Shazam that goes from child to superhero. Superb in special effects, although in need of emotional affection.

By Salvador Llopart

Three couples in a single space, and among them three a succession of emblematic situations of what we call life in common. "Under therapy" does not deny its theatrical origin. The challenge of the unique space is solved by the director with close-ups and a constantly moving camera.

The great success of Gerardo Herrero has been the cast, magnificent in its entirety. Although given the choice, one is left with the superb and quiet interpretation of Malena Alterio. The ending leaves the aftertaste of (theatrical) excess.

By Salvador Llopart

You can make (romantic) comedy out of everything. Even the unpleasant matter -for our sensitivity- of arranged marriages, so common in Pakistan. Behind the typical boy-seeks-girl (and he has her next to him), we glimpse the clash of cultures and the rigidity of the family.

Humor and sentimentality, however, prevail over the critical gaze. She eyed the unleashed histrionics of Emma Thompson and the precise, steely presence of the grande dame of Indian theatre, Shabana Azmi.

Por Philipp Engel

If The Swallows of Kabul, based on the novel by Yasmina Khadra, put us under the burka of the Taliban reign, this new animated adaptation, now based on a book by correspondent Petra Procházková, addresses more complex gender issues during the period that continued, under the tutelage of the Americans.

Beyond its humanitarian values, the narrative captivates by showing the contradictory drives of characters hooked on traditions, between the desire for freedom and secular resignation. A third animated film would be missing to inform us of the current situation, an ominous reversal.

Por Philipp Engel

Although still far from the record set by John Paul II, Bergoglio is also a truly mobile Pope who, in his white vehicle, travels spreading a message against the permanent war economy that bleeds the planet. Cases of sexual abuse are not lacking in this magnificent mosaic of archive images.

The director of Sacro GRA makes the pontiff a magnifying glass to review the problems of the world, favoring a delicious minimalist humor, worthy of Jacques Tati, who smiles at us from details such as a skullcap torn off by the wind or the ridiculous pomp of military parades. Masterpiece.

By Jordi Batlle

Unusually set in Bucharest, an inhospitable planet for the long-suffering main heroine, this modest but remarkable exercise in a “psycho thriller” displays a restlessness from the very first minutes that will never recede.

It is based, something rare nowadays, on the staging, elegant and inspired, on the treatment of spaces and the absence of bombast, easy scares or strong impacts. It's like a De Palma without the formal virtuosity of it. Recommendable.