There is nothing anemic about this amazing cuvée of very, very high quality. An overview of François Lévesque, Sonia Sarfati and Odile Tremblay.
The Fabelmans
Between a portrait of the artist as an enlightening young man and a moving family chronicle, the filmmaker ventures into much more sensitive emotional zones than usual. Spielberg also deconstructs his love of cinema by offering, implicitly, new reading keys to decode his films. Featuring uniformly powerful renditions, especially Michelle Williams as a loving but stifling mother and wife, The Fabelmans is already an indispensable film. (FL)
Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio (Pinocchio by Guillermo del Toro)
The version of the venerable tale (re)imagined by Guillermo del Toro is closer to Frankenstein than the universe of Collodi. Long live obedience, long live disobedience: with Del Toro, disobedient children, witnesses of horror and wonder, are a recurring motif. Set in Mussolini’s fascist Italy, the film completes the “Childhood and War” trilogy, after The Devil’s Spine and Pan’s Labyrinth, set in Franco’s Spain, and also reminding them that true monstrosity is an entirely human characteristic. (FL)
Everything Everywhere All at Once
The Daniels’ film, surprise hit of the year, is the antithesis of traditional superhero movies. A woman, immigrant and almost sexagenarian as a superheroine: who says better? Michelle Yeoh amazes in this role, or rather these roles, sewn (s) hand. Shopkeeper, mother, wife and exhausted daughter, here she is immersed in a multiverse that only she can save. Equally fabulous are Ke Huy Quan and Jamie Lee Curtis. A film full of subversive findings, audacity, heart, humor and imagination. (FL)
Decision to leave
An insomniac investigator falls in love with a widow whom he suspects of having killed her husband: such a summary could oversee a banal B series. However, with Park Chan-wook at the controls, the narrative unpredictability has no equal than formal virtuosity. Price of the direction in Cannes, this romantic detective story captivates. Equal to himself, the author ofold boy and of Miss succeeds, in the middle, a dazzling narrative bluff that comes to reconfigure the whole story. Dazzling. (FL)
“X”
In 1979, aspiring pornographers come to shoot on the farm of an elderly couple who, upon discovering the pot of roses, take revenge with gore and dark humour. Apart from the fact that he reverses the diktats dear to the genre, Ti West offers with X a very intelligent film about cinema. Here, the scenes showing the filming of the butt film refer to West and his team turning, beyond the mise en abyme, and with more brilliance, their horror film (genre almost as despised as porn). Mia Goth, who returns in the brilliant prequel Pearl, is unforgettable. (FL)
The Banshees of Inisherin
” I do not love you anymore. The theme was declined in all tones, in all the arts. But rarely has it served as a springboard at the end of a story of friendship between two men. Suddenly and unilaterally. Reforming, with Brendan Gleeson and Colin Farrell, the grandiose trio of In BruggeMartin McDonagh (Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri) offer, with The Banshees of Inisherin, a poignant, painful and magnificent tragicomedy, which fills the eyes, the ears and the heart. (SS)
Little mom
Next to his unforgettable Portrait of the girl on fireCéline Sciamma can hang this enchanted portrait that is Little mom. In the foreground, Nelly, 8, whose grandmother has just died. There, in the woods surrounding her grandmother’s house, she meets a little girl. Who is 8 years old too. And who bears the first name of his mother. Marion. The past and the present caress and merge in this dream/tale which explores with finesse, beauty and accuracy the themes of filiation and sorority. (SS)
viking
Eight years later You sleep Nicolethe too rare Stéphane Lafleur is back with viking, a film without a longship. An existential comedy that follows the “mirror” crew trained in Quebec to anticipate and resolve conflicts between members of the American mission en route to Mars before they arise. The result is an offbeat, enjoyable and brilliant work that says a lot about human nature. On Quebec. On our dreams, personal and as a nation. And on our cinema. (SS)
Falcon Lake
Bastien is 13-years-almost-14. Chloe is 16. And she doesn’t appreciate the intrusion of her parents’ friends into “her” vacation. We guess it, a waltz-hesitation made up of rebuffs and rapprochements will begin between the two young people. What we cannot predict is the way Charlotte Le Bon choreographed their dance. Falcon Lake is a nostalgic and poetic film set at the height of teenagers “caught” as they step into adulthood as they dive into the lake. (SS)
She Said
Adapted from the journalists’ book New York Times Megan Twohey and Jodi Kantor, She Said looks back at the investigation that brought Harvey Weinstein’s actions to light. There were all the ingredients here for sensationalism. Director Maria Schrader, screenwriter Rebecca Lenkiewicz and the formidable Carey Mulligan and Zoe Kazan instead deliver a powerful drama of sobriety and dignity, to be classified with All the President’s Men and of spotlight. (SS)
EO
Magnificent and melancholic fable on flouted innocence, EO stars a donkey in a mighty hat trick to the movie A coincidence Balthazar of Bresson. Veteran Polish filmmaker Skolimowski moves and entertains with the setbacks and blunders of his four-legged hero in dazzling images and admirable framing. The beauty of certain scenes dazzles us, and the scenario bounces over the successive masters of the animal without losing its rhythm. (OT)
pacification
With its breadth and depth of field, the great performance of Benoît Magimel as an ambiguous diplomat and that of a striking local transgender beauty, pacification makes Tahiti the setting for burning issues of colonization. A real epic with long static shots, this film takes us into the abyss of the exploitation of a people, a bit like Apocalypse Now by Coppola. This twilight work by the Catalan Albert Serra of implacable lucidity is a piece of bravery. (OT)
Drive my Car
This ultra-sensitive film with an admirable stylistic rigor weaves astonishing links and releases secrets in this encounter between a director from Tokyo who came to edit Uncle Vanya in Hiroshima and the young woman driving his car. Work of culture, humanity and hope, brilliantly woven (screenplay prize at Cannes) with its pitfalls and its sublime camera, Drive my Car is a masterstroke by Nippon Ryüsuke Hamaguchi. (OT)
The Olympiads
Tour in the multi-ethnic XIIIe arrondissement of Paris in black and white, this fine and humorous contemporary chronicle paints striking intertwined portraits of a youth in search of meaning. The great Jacques Audiard, with his existential questions and his visual sophistication, erases the borders of ethnic origins on a map of the tender postromantic where new technologies reign supreme. Its modernity is a multicolored landscape. (OT)
ART
This dizzying film earned Cate Blanchett the interpretation prize at the Venice Film Festival for her role as a conductor between shadows and lights at the Berlin Philharmonic. The descent into hell of this arrogant headliner following allegations of sexual misconduct and harassment brings to the carpet the slippages of the ego and those of the culture of cancellation. This beautiful and austere work, sometimes traversed by magnificent dreamlike scenes, is a brilliant dive by Todd Field into the human psyche. (OT)