The cinema releases of the week with Thierry Fiorile and Matteu Maestracci: “Towards a radiant future” by Nanni Moretti and “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny” by James Mangold.
With Towards a bright future, Italian filmmaker Nanni Moretti returns to the self-portrait, which is recurrent in his work, and clearly assumed here, with an alter ego, Giovanni, of which Nanni is the diminutive, also a filmmaker, and who is shooting a film in Rome set in the 1950s, when the PCI did not have the courage to turn its back on the Soviet big brother, when the Russian troops bloodily repressed the Hungarian spring.
This sentimental, egocentric man, who listens to himself speak, falls from his pedestal when his wife, who is also his producer, leaves him, and his filming stops after the bankruptcy of his French producer. In Personal diary in 1994, Nanni Moretti was wandering around Rome on a Vespa, he was talking about cinema and politics, this time he is on an electric scooter. Netflix does not want his film and a kid from his team discovers, terrified, that there were communists in Italy. This filmmaker in distress is very much him, even if Nanni Moretti does not like all the comparisons.
Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny by James Mangold
Directed by James Mangold, 15 years after a fourth chapter, which certainly made a lot of money, but which many remember as the weakest of the saga Indiana Jones, even as a failure, no Spielberg this time, nor George Lucas writing. For the first time, James Mangold known for Le Mans 66, Logan Or Walk the line, among other things, is behind the camera, and after a remarkable epic introduction in the 1940s, with a digitally rejuvenated Harrison Ford, for a stunning result, we find our hero aged, worn, tired, in 1969, in an America in full upheaval , who must leave in search of a time dial imagined by Archimedes, which an evil Nazi wants to recover to change the outcome of the Second World War.
Coming to terms with the age of his star actor and character was one of James Mangold’s struggles. It’s not easy for the 59-year-old director to get behind Steven Spielberg, with the pressure of both making a good film and a profitable project, and a generous set of specifications, but James Mangold is doing well.
It’s virtuoso, funny, rather successful visually so, we find both emblematic and endearing characters from the saga like Salah or Marion, but also a little newcomer, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, creator of the series. flea baga brilliant casting choice, and whose character, both charming and devious, brings real freshness to the Indiana Jones universe.