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The Wall Street Journal, 2 juin
‘Ghost Trail’ Review: A Haunted Syrian Hunts His Captor
French filmmaker Jonathan Millet directs a tense drama about a refugee searching for the man who tortured him in prison in their home country.
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Late last year, following the overthrow of President Bashar al-Assad, citizens of Syria streamed into Saydnaya prison, where for years the regime had confined, tortured and killed its ostensible enemies. It was a scene of triumph overshadowed by tragedy. A fortress of evil became overrun by the people, who were forced in turn to face the unaccountable losses it had been home to. Parties roved its grounds and probed its deepest chambers, hoping for signs of life, but most could expect only the worst kind of reward, be it a body or a sheet of paper bearing names and abrupt fates. “Executed, executed, dead from sickness,” ran one list reported by the Journal in December.
Hamid (Adam Bessa), the protagonist of director Jonathan Millet’s “Ghost Trail,” survived this hell. Whether he will ever truly escape it is an overarching question of the film, a muted thriller whose taut surface stretches across tragedies of violence and displacement. It opens in 2014, as we slowly discern through the dark of the image the quivering motion of bodies in the back of a truck, sunlight occasionally breaking through the canvas flap at the rear, until the vehicle stops and the bark of soldiers summons the men out into the brightness of empty desert. “Get lost,” they’re told, and so they run, some of them collapsing after a few steps.
Cut to two years later and Hamid is in Strasbourg, France, working construction in what seems like a refugee success story, provided you don’t look too closely. His real pursuit is more covert, and we later witness him and a blond woman in a park-bench handoff as she leaves him a book scrawled, on one page, with a name: Sami Hanna. This is the identity, or perhaps merely an identity, of the man whom Hamid has committed his life to finding, the man who, though Hamid never saw his face, tortured him week after week within the walls of Saydnaya.
It’s a potent idea for a revenge plot, rendered by Mr. Millet (and his co-screenwriter, Florence Rochat) in a doggedly unspectacular style, reminiscent at times of John le Carré but infused with contemporary alienation and ambiguities. Hamid speaks regularly via video chat to his mother, who lives in a refugee camp in Lebanon, where she consoles herself with dreams of her son’s life in Europe. He also keeps in frequent contact with the members of a secret group dedicated to tracking down Syrian war criminals, the conversations again mediated by a computer screen: Their meetings are held via a multiplayer videogame, and Hamid, with no shortage of grim irony, wages a virtual war as he reckons with the fallout of a very real one.
The group is methodical, but Hamid is instinctive. Acting on a tip from a fellow refugee, Yara (Hala Rajab, bringing welcome warmth), that Hanna may be studying chemistry, he goes to the local university and fixes on a man he sees vanishing down a hallway. He follows him, not sure what he’s looking for, with only a blurry photo of his target for comparison. It’s an agonizing, disturbing uncertainty: Is this a humble student, trying to make good as a refugee? Or merely the shapeshifted form of a sadist? And how can it be so hard to tell?
Mr. Bessa’s performance is a pained and bitter thing, his character committed to some form of justice even if the attempt to get it keeps him submerged in a traumatic past, as he spends his time listening to taped statements from other survivors of Saydnaya. Hamid lost not only parts of himself in Syria, but his wife and daughter, too—they were killed in a bombing—so outside of finding his torturer he feels bereft of anything to live for. When Yara, flirting, asks him to come by the laundromat where she works sometime, his response is an uncomprehending “Why?”
The other great performance of the film belongs to Tawfeek Barhom, as Hamid’s suspect. When Hamid follows him into a crowded Lebanese restaurant in Strasbourg, the two of them end up sitting across from each other at a table, and the conversation that follows is a study in deftly handled tension. Mr. Barhom casts an unsettling allure as he blends the friendliness of a fellow countryman with notes of menace and resentment. “Syria, that’s over for us,” he says at one point. But for neither of these characters does that ring true. The ghosts of “Ghost Trail” won’t go so gently.
Le Point, 28 mai
Quels films voir au cinéma ce mercredi 28 mai ?
Peu de nouveautés pour cette semaine post-Festival de Cannes, sinon la nouvelle fantaisie de Wes Anderson, un drame de science-fiction et la chronique troublante d’une relation mère-fille.
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Après Partir un jour, la comédie (musicale) d’Amélie Bonnin, qui a ouvert le Festival de Cannes 2025 le jour de sa sortie en salle il y a deux semaines, puis le nouveau Cédric Klapisch, La Venue de l’avenir, mercredi dernier, c’est une autre grosse sortie qui tente sa chance (et profite d’une semaine peu chargée en nouveautés) : The Phoenician Scheme, de Wes Anderson, issu de la compétition cannoise.
Autre sortie, pour les amateurs de science-fiction : le réalisateur Piero Messina convie Gael Garcia Bernal, Renate Reinsve et Bérénice Bejo dans Another End, où il est question d’amour, de mort et de résurrection. Enfin, Emma Mackey, découverte dans la série britannique Sex Education sur Netflix, et qui sera à l’affiche de trois films cette année, interprète, dans Hot Milk, une vingtenaire en quête d’émancipation, face à une mère étouffante.
The Phoenician Scheme ✭✭✭✭
Fantaisie colorée
Tout commence par un crash d’avion – privé bien sûr, car chez Wes Anderson, tout est luxe et volupté… mais jamais calme ! Le merveilleusement nommé Zsa-Zsa Korda (Benicio Del Toro), richissime trafiquant d’armes et magnat de l’aviation, sort miraculeusement indemne de cette tentative de meurtre, comme des cinq précédentes. Le voici pressé de retrouver sa fille, Liesl (Mia Threapleton), une religieuse cloîtrée dans un couvent, et de lui communiquer les secrets de son grand projet – le « plan phénicien » du titre – contenu dans une série de valises débordant de cartes et d’objets.
Avec un sens consommé du récit, Wes Anderson déploie à chaque ouverture de valise une parade de stars – Benedict Cumberbatch, Scarlett Johansson, Willem Dafoe, Tom Hanks, Mathieu Amalric… on en passe. Comme toujours chez le réalisateur de La Famille Tenenbaum (2001), l’enjeu n’est pas de dégoter un trésor (même si le chapelet de pierres précieuses de Liesl fait rêver), mais de renouer des liens familiaux distendus. La performance pleine de panache de Benicio Del Toro et la fausse ingénuité de la nouvelle venue Mia Threapleton (fille de Kate Winslet) font merveille dans cette fantaisie colorée, plus mélancolique qu’il n’y paraît.
Another End ✭✭✭
Envoûtant
Dans un futur indéterminé, une technologie révolutionnaire, baptisée Another End, permet de transférer la conscience d’un défunt dans le corps d’un vivant en ranimant brièvement sa conscience. Ce que fait Sal sur les conseils de sa sœur, Ebe, après avoir perdu sa compagne Zoe dans un accident de voiture. Il la retrouve alors au travers d’une autre femme et prolonge son amour disparu…
À partir de cette intrigue de science-fiction, le cinéaste Piero Messina signe à la fois un mélodrame existentiel sur l’amour et le deuil et une élégie SF qui flirte avec le transhumanisme. S’il se perd parfois dans son scénario, il maintient la tension dramatique grâce à ses trois acteurs principaux, Gael Garcia Bernal, Bérénice Bejo et Renate Reinsve. Cette dernière, à la fois « hôte » de la défunte et gogo girl tarifée dans un club, sème le trouble et attire la lumière, malgré une série de scènes érotiques qui font un peu pièces rapportées. Finalement, Another End, filmé dans les couleurs sombres, dégage un charme envoûtant, étrange comme un rêve éveillé.
Hot Milk ✭✭
Mère étouffante
Sous le soleil d’Almeria en Espagne, Sofia (Emma Mackey) accompagne sa mère Rose (Fiona Shaw) chez un médecin-guérisseur de luxe (Vincent Perez). Paralysée depuis des années, Rose espère un miracle ; Sofia, elle, rêve d’échappée. Le charme trouble d’une cavalière croisée sur la plage (Vicky Krieps) réveille en elle un désir enfoui, et la tension monte.
Dans ce premier long-métrage de Rebecca Lenkiewicz, le décor écrasé de lumière contraste avec la froideur des liens mère-fille dans lesquels Rose se révèle aussi tyrannique que souffrante. Aride, ambigu, parfois trop retenu, Hot Milk frôle la sensualité comme la violence sans jamais s’y abandonner tout à fait. Derrière cette retenue affleure peu à peu une colère sourde, jusqu’à un final aussi sec que saisissant. Une belle chronique de l’étouffement maternel, mais bancale dans son approche
Le Point, 28 mai
« The Revenant » : le film pour lequel Leonardo DiCaprio dut manger du foie de bison cru
LE FILM DU DIMANCHE SOIR. On vous conseille de (re)voir sur Arte « The Revenant », le film choc d’Alejandro Gonzalez Iñarritu, dans lequel Leonardo DiCaprio repousse ses limites à l’extrême.
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La scène a fait frissonner la planète. Et pas uniquement la planète cinéma. Un trappeur, seul face à une nature plus qu’hostile, se fait déchiqueter par un grizzly face caméra. Une séquence interminable, si réaliste que l’on croirait sentir l’haleine de la bête, les lacérations de ses griffes, la terreur gémissante de Leonardo DiCaprio, alias Hugh Glass. The Revenant d’Alejandro Gonzalez Iñarritu, sorti en 2015, est avant tout un choc, une expérience de cinéma comme on n’en avait pas eu depuis longtemps.
Le film est partiellement adapté du roman Le Revenant de Michael Punke, paru en 2002, qui s’appuie sur l’histoire, vraie, du trappeur Hugh Glass. En 1823, laissé pour mort dans le Dakota du Sud, après avoir été attaqué par un grizzly, il parvint, sans arme, à regagner le Fort Kiowa, à 300 kilomètres, en à peine six semaines.
L’ours numérique de The Revenant
À sa sortie, les articles de presse et les reportages se multiplient pour décrypter la scène horrifique, point de départ de ce récit épique. Mais non, nous ne sommes pas ici face à un ours (particulièrement bien) dressé, quitte à décevoir ceux qui imaginaient déjà Leonardo DiCaprio risquant sa peau à la façon du bravache Tom Cruise dans ses plus dangereuses cascades pour la franchise des Mission : Impossible.
Mais le Mexicain Alejandro Gonzalez Iñarritu, soucieux de faire monter la mayonnaise, entretient longtemps le mystère – excellent argument marketing –, s’amusant à brouiller les pistes. Jusqu’à ce que Dennis Muren, pape des effets spéciaux et neuf oscars en poche (qui dit mieux ?), lève à l’époque le voile sur ses secrets de fabrication : « Ce n’est pas un vrai ours, c’est une pure création numérique », confesse-t-il dans Le Point Pop. Et quelle création !
« Essayer de rendre un ours réaliste, ça n’a jamais été fait auparavant », confie-t-il. Pour y parvenir, les équipes de sa société ILM ont visionné des heures de vidéos, disséqué chaque mouvement de l’animal pour mieux en maîtriser l’envergure. Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu ne laisse rien passer : « Mettez plus de boue sur ses lèvres », « On dirait qu’il réfléchit, il ne devrait pas réfléchir », lance-t-il aux animateurs, toujours à l’affût de la moindre fausse note.
Mais The Revenant ne constitue pas seulement une prouesse technique. C’est aussi, et surtout, un tournage dantesque. Alejandro Iñarritu, déjà auréolé du succès de Birdman, veut tout miser sur l’authenticité. Il souhaite donc tourner le film dans l’ordre chronologique, en dépit des 7 millions de dollars de surcoût – le long-métrage en coûtera finalement 135 millions et en rapportera 532. Pas question non plus de filmer en studio, direction les forêts glacées du Canada et de l’Argentine, pour communier avec les éléments. À la clé : des heures de labeur pour quelques secondes à l’écran, pour capter ici un crépuscule sublime, là des feuilles d’arbre captives de la glace.
Leonardo DiCaprio, lui-même, ne ménage pas sa peine pour ce film de survie (le survival est en vogue à Hollywood), entretenant ainsi la légende de l’acteur jusqu’au-boutiste. Pour incarner Hugh Glass, nous jure-t-on, il a mangé du foie de bison cru, dormi dans des carcasses d’animaux, luttant contre des températures frisant les – 30 °C.
Tensions et renvois du plateau
Il se murmure que plusieurs membres de l’équipe ont jeté l’éponge, éreintés par la rudesse des conditions de tournage et l’intransigeance inflexible du réalisateur. « Je n’ai rien à cacher. Il y a eu des problèmes, mais aucun dont j’ai honte. En tant que réalisateur, si je constate qu’un violon joue faux, je dois le retirer de l’orchestre », se contente de répondre le principal intéressé.
Pourtant, quelques critiques s’élèvent lorsqu’il est monté au pinacle, rappelant que cette histoire a déjà donné lieu à un film, Le Convoi sauvage (Man in the Wilderness) de Richard C. Sarafian, en 1971, avec Richard Harris, et que The Revenant marche sur les plates-bandes déjà arpentées par un Sydney Pollack qui, en 1972, avait offert un rôle du trappeur solitaire, Jeremiah Johnson, à Robert Redford, star incontestée de l’époque.
Mais The Revenant, âpre et extrêmement violent,impose de nouveaux standards en confiant à Dame Nature le premier rôle pendant 156 minutes, qui prennent le temps de savourer les longs silences et de nous souper le souffle. Le tout sous le contrôle du chef opérateur de génie Emmanuel Lubezki (Gravity, Birdman).
Le film, qui bénéficie d’un casting toujours à la hauteur (n’oublions pas la performance de Tom Hardy) sera applaudi sur la scène internationale et remportera trois oscars majeurs, meilleur réalisateur, meilleure photographie et surtout meilleur acteur pour Leonardo DiCaprio, enfin couronné après avoir été trois fois boudé par l’Académie.
The Revenant, d’Alejandro Gonzalez Iñarritu (États-Unis, 2015). 2 h 36. Avec Leonardo DiCaprio, Tom Hardy, Will Poulter, Domhnall Gleeson, Forrest Goodluck, Paul Anderson, Lukas Haas. Diffusion le dimanche 25 mai, à 21 heures, sur Arte.
The Wall Street Journal, 27 mai
‘Patton’: George C. Scott in an Epic of Potent Patriotism
The 1970 film about the American general, directed by Franklin J. Schaffner, sought to understand one of the nation’s greatest military men at a time of political cynicism and antiwar fervor.
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Although it is among the most elaborately mounted World War II epics ever filmed, Franklin J. Schaffner’s “Patton” begins with an image of abstract simplicity: an American flag that fills the screen from top to bottom. The audience scarcely has time to note it before suddenly being made aware of its scale: From the bottom of the screen, a uniformed figure calmly emerges as he ascends a platform, then stops and holds a salute. Seen against the backdrop of the flag, the figure is minuscule. Then the camera moves in for a series of close-ups: the side of his ring-bedecked hand in mid-salute, framing his focused eyes; the ribbons hanging from his chest; and then the decisive confirmation of his identity—a holstered pistol bearing the initials “G.S.P.”
Such is the startling, riveting, wholly unexpected opening of “Patton.” Played by George C. Scott, who won an Oscar for his performance, Gen. George S. Patton Jr. proceeds to give an address adapted from a rousingly robust speech the general delivered in real life in 1944. “Americans traditionally love to fight,” Patton says in this bravura opening. “All real Americans love the sting of battle.” Schaffner films Patton from a variety of angles—in wide shots, in close-ups—but no matter the vantage point, our eyes remained fixed on the infinite-seeming flag.
To open a film in such a manner in April 1970 was a bold affront to the cultural mood of the time: continuing opposition to the Vietnam War and a cynical attitude toward displays of patriotism. That, surely, was the point. In the antiwar, antiestablishment environment of 55 years ago, “Patton” dared to remind audiences of the virtue of the Allies’ fight in World War II and the personal attributes of one of its chief warriors.
The film begins in 1943 amid the Allies’ defeat in the Battle of Kasserine Pass in Tunisia, the Americans’ first serious engagement against the Germans. Arriving to take over the American command and tasked with improving the fighting ability of the troops, Patton institutes small but significant measures: He insists that breakfast service be cut off early; that everyone wear a helmet, even if it means the doctors drilling holes for their stethoscopes; and that soldiers suffering from PTSD be denied care—orders barked by Scott with rhetorical relish. The film validates most of Patton’s measures by showcasing, in meticulously staged re-creations of combat, his victories on the battlefield, nowhere more so than in the film’s climactic scenes of the Battle of the Bulge in 1944, when his by now well-trained, well-disciplined forces pivot from an engagement in France and drive north to relieve Americans besieged at Bastogne, Belgium.
Schaffner, himself a World War II veteran whose actors, even on other films, referred to him as “the general,” presents battle scenes with compositional clarity and editorial precision. When Patton’s men fight advancing German troops and tanks, the viewer is never in doubt as to the position and strength of either party.
Yet “Patton” is not a study of campaigns but a portrait of a man. Screenwriters Francis Ford Coppola and Edmund H. North collapse the story of World War II into a character study of one of its most gifted and grandiose practitioners. In this, the filmmakers follow their subject, who is heard boiling down battles to the specific men against whom he is fighting. “Rommel is out there somewhere, waiting for me,” Patton says at one point, referring to German Field Marshal Erwin Rommel.
The film stresses the idiosyncrasies and conceits of Patton, who is shown sleeping in his clothes, reciting original poetry, summoning a chaplain to concoct a “weather prayer” for more favorable battle conditions, and at the site of the siege of Carthage expressing his conviction that he had been a participant in that ancient battle. His knowledge of the exploits of armies of centuries gone by is equaled by his sureness in his own ambition. “All my life,” he says, regarding himself in a mirror, “I’ve wanted to lead a lot of men in a desperate battle.”
The film expertly attends to Patton’s plans, effectuated and overruled, to defeat the Nazis, but mainly to the extent that they reveal his character: This Patton esteems virtue, loathes slovenliness and spoils for a fight. The episode in which Patton slaps a soldier suffering from PTSD whom he judges to be merely cowardly brings about a reprimand and temporary suspension from active participation in the war. But because the film is biography, not history, we accept such excesses as a feature of his nature.
With his pursed lips, protruding chest and, when not concealed by a helmet, receding white hair, Scott takes control of the film from the opening shot onward. The actor has no shortage of bellicosity, but his performance endures for its quieter moments, such as when Patton strokes the head of a fallen soldier or kneels in prayer to steel himself for a public apology for the slapping episode.
Schaffner was bold to open his movie with the flag, but his most daring gambit was to elicit sympathy for a figure of such unapologetic martial values. “Patton” comes neither to celebrate nor to condemn war, but to understand a man who waged it well.
Mr. Tonguette is a contributing writer at the Washington Examiner.
The New York Times, 26 mai
Scarlett Johansson Unveils Her Newest Role at Cannes: Filmmaker
The star came across the script for “Eleanor the Great,” already starring June Squibb, and instantly realized, “I know how to make it.” Now she wants to direct again.
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Few movie stars today win over critics and convey Old Hollywood glamour as effortlessly as Scarlett Johansson does, all while seemingly impervious to the industry’s convulsions.
Now 40, she has been famous most of her life. She turned 10 the year her first movie, “North,” opened in 1994; four years later, she was upstaging Robert Redford in “The Horse Whisperer.” In the decades since, she starred in cult films and blockbusters, made a record with Pete Yorn and earned a couple of Oscar nominations. In between hits and misses, she also married three times (most recently to Colin Jost) and had two children.
The kind of diverse professional portfolio that Johansson has cultivated can make life more interesting, of course, but it’s also evidence of shrewd, career-sustaining choices. In 2010, she made her critically celebrated Broadway debut in a revival of Arthur Miller’s tragedy “A View From the Bridge.” (She went on to win a Tony.) That same year, she slipped on a bodysuit to play the lethal Russian superspy Black Widow in Marvel’s “Iron Man 2,” a role that propelled her into global celebrity.
On Tuesday, Johansson publicly took on another role when she presented her feature directing debut, “Eleanor the Great,” at the Cannes Film Festival. Playing outside the main lineup, it is the kind of intimately scaled, performance-driven movie that’s ideal for a novice director.
June Squibb stars as the 94-year-old Eleanor, who, soon after the story opens, moves into her daughter’s New York apartment. Life gets complicated when Eleanor inadvertently ends up in a support group for Holocaust survivors. It gets even trickier when a journalism student insists on writing about Eleanor. A friendship is born, salted with laughter and tears.
I met with Johansson the day after the premiere of “Eleanor the Great.” She first walked the festival red carpet in 2005 for “Match Point,” returning last year with “Asteroid City.” (She’s also in “The Phoenician Scheme,” which is here, too.) It had rained hard the day of her premiere, but the sky was blue when she stepped onto a hotel terrace overlooking the Mediterranean. Seated in a quiet corner shaded by a large umbrella, Johansson was friendly, pleasant and a touch reserved. Wearing the largest diamond that I’ve seen outside of a Tiffany window, she kept her sunglasses on as we talked, the consummate picture of movie stardom.
Here are edited excerpts from our conversation.
Tell me about the genesis of the project.
I have a production company called These Pictures, and we get all kinds of submissions. I wasn’t looking for something to direct at that moment. I read it because I was fascinated to see what June Squibb was starring in because I love her, and I was so surprised by the story. It had a lot of elements of films that I love, independent films from the ’90s and early aughts. It was New York-based, very character driven. And the plot device was so surprising. It made me cry. I immediately called my producing partner and was, like, I can direct this. I know how to make it.
Not everyone just thinks they can direct.
When I was much younger, I thought I would end up doing that eventually. In my early 20s, I became focused on understanding my job as an actor better. I was creatively engaged with the directors I was working with, taking on different roles that were challenging, and I veered off that path. The timing was right when the script found me. It felt like an extension of the work that I’ve been doing as opposed to this big unknown. And June was ready to make the film. She had energy and was committed to doing it.
Did this story speak specifically to you because of your family experience?
I could identify with the character’s story and, of course, I identify as Jewish. I had a very formidable grandmother who I was incredibly close with. She lives inside me and I think of her very often. She was, you know, a character and not unlike Eleanor. She could be kind of impossible. [Laughs]
How did it start to come together for you as a movie?
I look at New York in a cinematic way. I’ve spent so much time strolling around as one does and just spending time observing. I’m a people watcher, it’s one of my great pleasures. And when I read a script, I can see it as a film in my mind. I already had ideas, so it was more about having a dialogue with the cinematographer where we could have a conversation and get to the same conclusion. I knew I wanted beautiful portraits of June, to show her in this very pure way. The actors were so committed and had such dramatic stamina. I just needed to photograph them in a way that was uncomplicated.
When you were younger, at one point did you realize, ‘Oh, women make movies too’?
It was fortunately a given because I worked with so many female directors when I was a kid. So, I guess I just never really thought about it as this gendered thing. Maybe I’m spoiled in a way or I take it for granted because I did work with so many female directors and continue to. Actually, the other day I was reading an interview with Natalie Portman and she grew up in film working with female directors. It was kind of the same thing for her. Maybe we both got lucky that when we started working there was more opportunity for female directors. It’s kind of balanced out in that way, um, I don’t know if it’s totally balanced. [Laughs]
Do you want to keep directing?
I do. It felt very fulfilling. We had such an amazing shooting experience. The feeling on set was so familial and creative and positive. It was really, really joyful. You don’t always have a joyful experience on every movie that you make, but as I’ve gotten older, I have a lesser tolerance for the unpleasant experience. [Laughs]
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Your mom was your manager. Did you talk about the kinds of things that you wanted to do?
She became my manager out of necessity and, I think, at first it was on a protective level. As I grew up and became more of a person, I had my own desire and ideas. I was fortunate that my mom was very supportive of my artistic desire, integrity, all of that. She loves filmmakers and actors and performance, and she respected me as an actor.
Did your mother talk to you about how to avoid being exploited?
My mom and I are very close. Because I was born and raised in New York, I already had a sense of my own street smarts, in a way, and I don’t think she was so worried that I was going to be taken advantage of by people in the industry.
I read a profile of you from 10 years ago by a female journalist in which she describes you as a sexy child —
Ew!
I know! It made me think about how media representations can be complicit in that exploitation.
That’s hard to control because you’re giving an interview and sitting with somebody for an hour or two, and whatever the takeaway is, it’s out of your control. I did an interview with Barbara Walters and she asked me what the sexiest part of my body was or my favorite part or something like that. You can see that I was mortified, but still feel obligated to answer it.
As an industry veteran, do you feel optimistic about American movies?
I think it’ll balance itself out, and some of the players will change. It’s just going to take a lot of time. The strike was really damaging, I think, more damaging than Covid; that has proved very, very challenging. There’ll be a lot of big movies this summer and I think even smaller movies like this film, when you see it in the theater, it’s amazing because everybody’s crying and together. When you can see something moving with an audience, you’re kind of buzzing afterward. I think it’s about offering variety, and studios that are committed to the theatrical experience. I think that we can climb our way back up — I think so.
Manohla Dargis is the chief film critic for The Times.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/22/movies/scarlett-johansson-cannes-eleanor-the-great.html
Le Point, 26 mai
Jafar Panahi (Palme d’or) : « Je rentrerai en Iran dès le lendemain de mon travail à Cannes »
Avant qu’il ne remporte la Palme d’or, nous avions dit le plus grand bien d’« Un simple accident », film extraordinaire et nouvelle charge courageuse contre le régime des mollahs.
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Premier constat scandaleux : ce mercredi 21 mai, la salle de la conférence de presse de Jafar Panahi, futur lauréat de la Palme d’or pour « Un simple accident », était à peine remplie à moitié. Les journalistes ont visiblement mieux à faire que d’écouter et soutenir ce cinéaste iranien, emprisonné à plusieurs reprises par le régime de Téhéran, et dont la liberté reste plus que jamais menacée.
La fiction comme miroir de la terreur iranienne
Heureusement, durant ce sacro-saint débriefing post-projection entre les artistes et les médias accrédités, les âmes présentes martèleront à plusieurs reprises leur enthousiasme et leur solidarité par d’émouvantes salves crépitantes d’applaudissements adressées au réalisateur ainsi qu’à ses comédiens – lesquels prennent double dose de risque en s’exposant à l’écran.
Dans Un simple accident, la première scène, nocturne, montre un couple et sa fillette en voiture, de retour vers leur domicile sur une route de campagne. Crac… Dans l’obscurité, un chien errant se fait rouler dessus involontairement par monsieur, qui sollicite un peu plus loin l’aide d’un garagiste prénommé Vahid. Ce dernier croit reconnaître « la guibole » ou « l’éclopé » : un agent des renseignements, surnommé ainsi en raison de sa jambe droite artificielle, qui l’a torturé longuement en prison ainsi que plusieurs autres membres de son entourage.
Plus tard, Vahid retrouve et kidnappe le père de famille, persuadé qu’il s’agit bien de son tortionnaire, maintenant séquestré dans son van. Un ami l’aiguille alors vers Shiva (Mariam Afshari), une photographe de mariage, jadis contestataire du pouvoir, qui pourra l’aider à identifier avec certitude son prisonnier. Une tâche ardue pour une bonne raison : les détenus maltraités par l’éclopé portaient tous un bandeau obstruant leur vue. Mais les galères vont s’accumuler…
Flirtant avec la tragi-comédie, Un simple accident agglomère autour du personnage de Vahid (incarné par l’acteur Vahid Mobasseri) un petit groupe d’individus mêlés, d’abord sans le vouloir puis activement, à son entreprise de rapt : Shiva, ses clients (la jeune Goli et son époux), ainsi qu’un autre ex-détenu, Hamid, marqué au fer rouge lui aussi par les sévices de « la Guibole ». Alors que rien ne se déroule comme prévu, l’affaire prend une tournure presque rocambolesque, Jafar Panahi tisse une véritable leçon d’humanité qui, lors d’un dernier plan digne d’un coup de théâtre final avant le baisser de rideau, trace une frontière définitive entre le peuple iranien et les actuels bourreaux qui le martyrisent.
Grand retour de Panahi en compétition à Cannes, sept ans après Trois visages en 2018, Un simple accident sortira le 1er octobre dans les salles françaises après une date initialement fixée au 10 septembre, aux bons soins du distributeur Memento. Le film a été tourné, une fois encore, dans la clandestinité même si Jafar Panahi, aujourd’hui âgé de 65 ans, est officiellement libre (après trois arrestations depuis 2009) et autorisé à exercer son métier en Iran par la République islamique, après avoir été interdit d’activité depuis 2010. Face à la presse à Cannes, le réalisateur a livré de poignantes confidences, sur un ton d’une sobriété d’acier : « Ma femme, qui est présente dans la salle, peut témoigner : le cinéma, c’est tout ce que je sais faire, je suis incapable de quoi que ce soit d’autre, même de visser une ampoule. Je n’ai donc cessé de tourner des films clandestinement et même si les sanctions me concernant ont été levées et que j’ai le droit de voyager, ma méthode n’a pas changé. »
Un tournage sous tension
Filmé sous le manteau dans les rues de Téhéran, sans en avoir fait valider au préalable le script par le ministère de la Culture et de l’Orientation islamique, Un simple accident fourmille de dialogues acerbes sur le régime des mollahs, son iniquité, sa cruauté. Certaines des actrices ne portent pas le voile à l’écran – un délit pénal lourdement sanctionné en Iran : « Je donne simplement à voir la réalité. Et la réalité dans mon pays c’est que, depuis le mouvement Femme, vie, liberté, la société iranienne a radicalement changé et de plus en plus de femmes se déplacent à Téhéran sans porter le voile. Je n’ai rien imposé, j’ai laissé le libre choix aux actrices et figurantes, ce sont elles-mêmes qui ont revendiqué le droit de tourner sans voile. »
Interrompu, une nuit vers une heure du matin, par l’intervention d’une quinzaine d’agents de sécurité en civil, contraignant l’équipe à cacher les rushes en catastrophe, le film pourrait bien valoir au réalisateur et à ses comédiens de sérieux ennuis avec les autorités. Jafar Panahi a rappelé au passage les conditions inhumaines de sa dernière incarcération : « J’ai été placé en isolement pendant 15 jours, les yeux bandés, dans une cellule de 1,50 m sur 2,50 m, où j’avais à peine la place de m’allonger. Il fallait sonner pour aller au WC, seul moment où j’avais le droit d’enlever le bandeau. Les interrogatoires pouvaient durer jusqu’à huit heures. J’ai ensuite été transféré dans une cellule deux fois plus grande, mais où nous étions trois. Puis dans une salle immense avec plus de 300 prisonniers, dont certains étaient en captivité depuis des décennies. Cela fait près d’un demi-siècle que ce régime emprisonne les Iraniens. »
Rentrer en Iran, filmer encore
Pour autant, Jafar Panahi, qui remporta en 2015 l’Ours d’or à Berlin pour Taxi Téhéran, ne craint guère son retour au pays : « Je ne suis pas un cas à part, je ne suis pas plus courageux ni ne me mets plus en danger que toutes ces femmes qui décident d’enlever leur voile. Je compte bien rentrer en Iran dès le lendemain de mon travail à Cannes et une fois rentré, la seule question que je me poserai sera de savoir quel sera mon prochain film. » Applaudissements spontanés de la salle.
« Notre présence dans ce projet nous expose à un danger bien inférieur à celui auquel s’exposent toutes les femmes iraniennes », a complété Majid Panahi (qui n’a aucun lien de parenté avec le cinéaste). Aussi résilients et combatifs, les autres acteurs présents – Vahid Mobasseri, Ebrahim Azizi, Hadis Pakbaten et Mariam Hafshari – ont eu aussi salué le courage des Iraniennes et confié leur émotion en découvrant pour la première fois le film terminé lors de sa projection à Cannes, la veille.
Jafar Panahi, dont Un simple accident est d’ores et déjà propulsé en tête des pronostics pour une présence au palmarès 2025, prophétise quant à lui l’impuissance définitive de la République islamique à museler l’armée des artistes : « Avec les évolutions technologiques actuelles, aucun pouvoir ne peut aujourd’hui empêcher un artiste de travailler. Et nous emprisonner, c’est de toute façon prendre le risque de nous laisser ressortir avec des dizaines de scénarios en tête. »
The New York Times, 26 mai
How Do You Follow One of the Craziest Cannes Movies Ever?
Julia Ducournau, who won the Palme d’Or for “Titane,” returns with the body-horror tale “Alpha.” The critical reception has not been kind.
Full text :
Many filmmakers dream of earning a standing ovation at the Cannes Film Festival, but success here comes with a steep downside: It sets sky-high expectations for your follow-up and the European critics can be merciless if that next film falls short.
After “The Artist” premiered at Cannes in 2011 and went on to win the best picture Oscar, the director Michel Hazanavicius returned three years later to the festival with “The Search,” which was so roundly booed that it never found a major U.S. distributor. The director Olivier Assayas followed his French hit “Clouds of Sils Maria” (2014) with “Personal Shopper” (2016), a film I actually preferred but French critics hissed at during the end credits.
And after Nicolas Winding Refn won the best director award at Cannes for the Ryan Gosling film “Drive” (2011), his next two movies were booed here. I’ll never forget that when Refn’s “The Neon Demon” concluded with a dedication to the director’s wife, Liv, a critic stood up next to me and shouted expletives at poor Liv in a thick French accent.
The latest filmmaker to face this gilded dilemma is Julia Ducournau, the French director who won the Palme d’Or four years ago for “Titane.” Rarely has that top prize gone to a movie so gory and wild: It followed a lesbian serial killer who has sex with a car, and that was just the first act! Ducournau’s Palme win felt bracingly new, not least because it was only the young director’s second movie. Where would she go from there?
In the years since, rumors swirled that Ducournau felt significant pressure to deliver a worthy follow-up. On Monday, she finally unveiled that film, “Alpha,” and Cannes critics pounced. Topping a movie as audacious as “Titane” was always going to be difficult, but the brutal reception suggests that some critics here were eager to cut Ducournau down to size.
“Alpha” stars Mélissa Boros as a 13-year-old who passes out at a party and wakes up to find the letter “A” tattooed on her arm. Her horrified mother (Golshifteh Farahani) fears that the tattoo may have been done with a contaminated needle and rushes her to the hospital for a battery of tests. In the meantime, the girl’s classmates begin to shun her, spreading rumors that she’s developed a contagious blood-borne virus.
If that sounds like a metaphor for the AIDS crisis, Ducournau pushes her point even further with a unique body-horror conceit: In the world of this film, a virus is spreading that primarily affects gay men and intravenous drug users, only this infection slowly turns people into stone. To illustrate that encroaching epidemic, Ducournau toggles between two timelines, a structure that seems deliberately disorienting. (After the first screening, two different journalists turned to me and asked, “Did that timeline make any sense to you?”)
Ducournau is nothing if not a provocateur, though she may have done her job too well this time. While Cannes critics boo less than they used to these days, they made their displeasure with “Alpha” known in other ways: One journalist told me it was the worst competition film he’d seen at Cannes in years, and the movie is currently tied with “Eddington” for second to last place on the Screen International grid, which averages scores from major critics throughout the festival.
Would they have been kinder if “Alpha” hadn’t arrived freighted with all those expectations? Ducournau may feel loyalty to Cannes for cementing her status as a major auteur, but bringing “Alpha” here guaranteed direct and perhaps unfair comparisons. A quieter debut at another festival like Venice or Toronto may have let the film stand on its own, but that’s the paradox of Cannes: It can launch a filmmaker into the stratosphere and, just as quickly, bring her back down to earth.
KyleBuchanan is a pop culture reporter and also serves as The Projectionist, the awards season columnist for The Times.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/21/movies/julia-ducournau-titane-cannes-alpha.html
Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 26 mai
An den Filmfestspielen von Cannes wird eine politische Palme vergeben
Das Festival verzeichnet wenig Ausreisser und seltene Highlights: «It Was Just an Accident» des Iraners Jafar Panahi gewinnt einen soliden Wettbewerb.
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Liegt die filmische Zukunft in der Erinnerung? Das solide Angebot des diesjährigen Festivals in Cannes zeigte auffallend viele Produktionen, die sich der Vergangenheit zuwenden. Auch die Politik fand vermehrt Beachtung: Der Ukrainer Sergei Loznitsa lieferte in «Two Prosecutors» eine eisige Beschreibung von Stalins Säuberungswellen, während Ari Aster in «Eddington» die Gräben ausleuchtete, die sich in den USA während des Covid-Lockdowns durch eine Kleinstadt zogen.
Zwei Beiträge im Wettbewerb thematisierten ausserdem die in den 1980er Jahren ausgebrochene Aids-Epidemie. In «Alpha» von Julia Ducournau verwandeln sich die Kranken in Marmorstatuen, während die Spanierin Carla Simón in «Romería» ihrer Familiengeschichte nachspürt.
Anregend sind solche Zeitreisen nicht zuletzt wegen der Kontraste und Vergleichsmöglichkeiten, die sich hierdurch ergeben: So erhellte etwa Lav Diaz’ dreistündiges Bio-Pic «Magalhães» nachträglich Tom Cruise’ letzte «Mission Impossible»-Folge, in der der amerikanische Star den Albtraum eines von künstlicher Intelligenz regierten Planeten heraufbeschwört. Das Unterfangen, die Kontrolle über die Welt zu gewinnen, nahm sich vermutlich nie so realistisch aus wie zu Beginn des 16. Jahrhunderts, als sich der portugiesische Seefahrer anschickte, die wichtigsten maritimen Handelsrouten des Pazifiks für die spanische Krone zu erobern.
Die langen Einstellungen, mit denen Diaz Magellans Reisen nachzeichnet, fokussieren zunächst auf dessen Einsamkeit. Im Lauf der Expedition nimmt die Megalomanie des Unterfangens jedoch selbstdestruktive Züge an. Als der Portugiese auf den Philippinen jenen Rachefeldzug auslöst, dem er schliesslich zum Opfer fallen wird, entsteht der Eindruck, er habe seinen eigenen Tod willentlich provoziert.
Klandestin gedrehter Film
Die Preisverleihung konnte am Samstag trotz einem mehrstündigen, offenbar von einem Sabotageakt ausgelösten Stromausfall planmässig durchgeführt werden. Die Jury war sichtlich darum bemüht, dem disparaten Angebot Rechnung zu tragen. Die Palme d’Or, die dem Iraner Jafar Panahi für «It Was Just an Accident» verliehen wurde, zeichnet einen Regisseur aus, der sowohl in künstlerischer als auch in politischer Hinsicht auf ein einzigartiges Engagement zurückblicken kann. Er zählt heute, nachdem er bereits den Leone d’Oro in Venedig und den Goldenen Bären in Berlin hat entgegennehmen können, zu den am meisten prämierten Cineasten der Gegenwart.
Dennoch fragt man sich, ob die klandestin gedrehte Parabel über Rache und Vergebung, die in der iranischen Gegenwart verankert ist und unübersehbar die Grenzen der Ausdrucksfreiheit testet, auch ohne den brennenden Kontext honoriert worden wäre. Insbesondere mit der Schlusssequenz, in der das moralische Dilemma des Opfers gegenüber seinem ehemaligen Peiniger eine Auflösung findet, gerät das Script in Gefahr, seine universelle Dimension zu verlieren.
Hoch verdient ist der Regiepreis, der an den Brasilianer Kleber Mendonça Filho für dessen «O agente secreto» ging. Dieser virtuos inszenierte Thriller könnte mit seinem stilistischen Raffinement und seiner Schwäche für die Groteske auch von Tarantino stammen. Dank einem herausragenden Hauptdarsteller (Wagner Moura, der den Schauspielerpreis gewann), einem mäandernden Drehbuch und Zeitsprüngen, die das Brasilien der Militärdiktatur mit der Gegenwart verknüpft, ist «O agente secreto» ein nuanciertes Bild der nationalen Befindlichkeiten gelungen.
Formschwaches Frankreich
Auch die übrigen Auszeichnungen spiegelten das Zögern der Jury angesichts der diversen Facetten des Angebots. Der Grand Prix ging an den Norweger Joachim Trier für «Sentimental Value», der eine psychologisch scharf umrissene Vater-Tochter-Beziehung nachzeichnet. Dagegen setzten die spanische Produktion «Sirat» von Oliver Laxe und der deutsche Beitrag «Sound of Falling», die sich den Jurypreis teilten, in erster Linie auf ihre formalen Stärken.
Weniger plausibel ist die Entscheidung, die zurückhaltende Darbietung der Debütantin Nadia Melliti, die für ihre Rolle im französischen Coming-of-Age-Drama «La petite dernière» von Hafsia Herzi prämiert wurde, den Performances von Jennifer Lawrence oder Valeria Golino vorzuziehen. Paradoxerweise schien der Preis die Schwäche des französischen Angebots am Festival zu unterstreichen. Das ist umso erstaunlicher, als Frankreich, das an der Produktion von 14 der insgesamt 22 Beiträge beteiligt war, in der internationalen Filmindustrie weiterhin eine Schlüsselposition besetzt.
The New York Times, 25 mai
Iranian Movie Shot in Secret Wins Palme d’Or at Cannes Film Festival
The film, “Un Simple Accident,” was directed by Jafar Panahi, a longtime festival favorite. The award capped a contest that was widely seen as the strongest in years.
Full text :
The sun was still shining when the 78th Cannes Film Festival came to an emotional, exhilarating close with the Palme d’Or going to “Un Simple Accident,” from the Iranian writer-director Jafar Panahi.
The announcement was met with cheers and a standing ovation in the Grand Lumière Theater. Accompanied by his actors, some who began weeping, an equally moved Panahi kept on his sunglasses as he accepted his award.
A longtime festival favorite, Panahi had until recently been barred from making movies in Iran or traveling outside the country. Although the restriction has been lifted, he shot “Un Simple Accident” clandestinely.
The movie tracks a group of men and women who join together after one of them kidnaps a man they believe tortured them in prison. Panahi, who has been imprisoned several times, drew his inspiration from stories he heard from other inmates while he was at Evin Prison in Tehran.The Palme for Panahi capped what was widely seen as one of the strongest festivals in years. For some, the selections offered reassuring evidence that the art would continue to endure — and thrive — despite the problems facing the industry. Certainly, President Trump’s recent threat to institute a 100 percent tariff on movies made in “foreign lands” had cast a shadow over the opening ceremony. By the close of the festival, however, the bounty of good and great work had palpably buoyed spirits.
The Palme d’Or was decided upon by a nine-person jury led by the French actress Juliette Binoche. “My friends, this is the end — it was such a show,” she said, turning to her fellow jurists, who included the American actor Jeremy Strong and the Indian filmmaker Payal Kapadia. Given Binoche’s auteur-rich résumé, it is perhaps unsurprising that this jury gave a special award to the Chinese filmmaker Bi Gan for “Resurrection,” a delirious, elegiac journey through cinema history.
The director Coralie Fargeat (“The Substance”) presented the Grand Prix, effectively the runner-up award, to “Sentimental Value,” a wistful, visually playful family drama from the Norwegian director Joachim Trier, who is best known for “The Worst Person in the World.”
“I’m very moved,” a very composed Trier said. Gesturing to the audience, he said that he shared the prize with his actors, including Stellan Skarsgard and Renate Reinsve, who play father and daughter in a story about art, family and the ghosts that haunt each. Like other winners, Trier praised Cannes for its commitment to the big screen.
The Jury Prize, presented by the American actress Da’Vine Joy Randolph, was split between two very different movies: “Sirât” and “Sound of Falling.” Sirât, from the French Spanish director Oliver Laxe, turns on a father who’s searching for his missing daughter in Morocco and ends up stranded in a desert with some ravers. “Sound of Falling,” from the German filmmaker Mascha Schilinski, is a visually exquisite ghost story that takes place over a century on the same sprawling farm.
The best actor award, presented by the Spanish actress Rossy de Palma, was given to Wagner Moura, the star of the Brazilian drama “The Secret Agent,” about a man on the run during the country’s military dictatorship. Its director, Kleber Mendonça Filho, accepted on behalf of the star, saying “I love him very much.” Mendonça Filho returned to the stage soon after to accept the prize for best director. It was presented by the French director Claude Lelouch, whose “A Man and a Woman” is featured on the festival poster.
“I was having Champagne,” Mendonça Filho said. After he praised Cannes, he gave a lusty shout-out to the theatrical experience: “I believe that cinemas build the character of a film.”
The French actor Daniel Auteuil presented the best actress prize to the newcomer Nadia Melliti, star of Hafsia Herzi’s touching drama “The Little Sister.” Melliti’s open, naturalistic performance — her first movie role — as a young lesbian struggling to reconcile her sexuality with her Muslim faith, had been widely and justly celebrated.
The American actor John C. Reilly, after referring to a power outage that affected Cannes and the surrounding Alpes-Maritimes region earlier in the day, announced that it was his birthday. A guitarist then strolled onstage and Reilly began singing “La Vie en Rose,” providing some levity in the briskly paced ceremony that was over in one hour. When Reilly finished, he presented the best screenplay to the Belgian filmmaking brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne for their ensemble drama “Young Mothers.” Also longtime festival favorites, they have won the Palme twice.
The Camera d’Or, for best first film, went to “The President’s Cake.” Accepting the award, its director, Hasan Hadi, said it was the first Iraqi movie to be honored at Cannes. The touching Nigerian drama “My Father’s Shadow,” from Akinola Davies Jr., received a special mention.
Manohla Dargis is the chief film critic for The Times.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/24/movies/cannes-palme-d-or-it-was-just-an-accident.html
Le Figaro, 25 mai
Notre critique d’Un simple accident, palme d’or du 78e Festival de Cannes
Le réalisateur iranien Jafar Panahi revient en compétition avec cette fiction tournée dans la clandestinité pleine de rebondissements.
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Que fait l’Iranien moderne ? Il creuse un trou dans le désert. Avec une pelle. En plein soleil. C’est pour une juste cause. Le but est d’enterrer vivant l’agent de renseignements qui vous a jadis torturé. Au dernier moment, le héros a un doute. Et si ça n’était pas le bon ? Certes, le type qu’il a enlevé a bien une jambe en plastique, mais il nie être celui qu’on surnommait alors « La guibole ». En plus, sur ses papiers, le nom a changé. Pour en avoir le cœur net, le héros pris de remords décide de convoquer d’autres victimes pour vérifier l’identité de leur bourreau. Quel hasard, quand même !
Tout ça parce que la voiture du tortionnaire a percuté un chien (l’animal s’est jeté sous les roues) et que le véhicule endommagé a abouti dans le garage où travaille notre homme. Le mécano n’en revient pas. On va voir ce qu’on va voir. Sa tournée l’amène à rameuter une photographe, un couple de futurs mariés déjà en tenue pour les photos, un ancien compagnon de souffrance.
Le van est rempli à ras bord, d’autant que le kidnappé gît inanimé dans un coffre en bois qui pourrait préfigurer son cercueil. Il y a eu un arrêt à une pharmacie pour se munir de somnifères. Il ne faut surtout pas que l’individu se réveille, qu’il reconnaisse leurs voix. Attention, on ne se méfiera jamais assez des gens de son espèce. Le périple ira du toit d’un parking à un hôpital.
Incidents en cascade
Des philosophies s’affrontent. Pour les uns, il n’est pas question de répondre à la violence par la brutalité. D’autres ont des conceptions moins clémentes. Qu’on me le laisse cinq minutes et vous verrez s’il n’avoue pas. Si, si, c’est lui, je suis sûr que c’est lui. On ne va pas le lâcher comme ça. Des détails affreux les ont traumatisés. Souvenez-vous, il nous a pendus trois jours par les pieds pour que nous dénoncions nos camarades.
La mariée pique une crise. N’oubliez pas que ce gars-là nous a gâché la vie. Après, elle n’a jamais plus été la même. Dans une station-service, elle vomit sur le ciment. La robe risque d’être tachée pour la noce du lendemain. Déjà, l’heureux élu en smoking a perdu son nœud papillon. Commentaire ironique du pompiste : « Ces deux-là ont mis la charrue avant les bœufs. »
Il y a des incidents en cascade. D’ailleurs, qu’est-ce qu’il a à venir les enquiquiner comme ça avec le passé ? Ç’aurait été plus pratique de tirer un trait là-dessus. Des vigiles ont des soupçons, demandent à vérifier ce que cache le minibus. La photographe intervient à pic. Ils ont récupéré le téléphone du séquestré entre quatre planches. Il n’arrête pas de sonner. Surtout, ne pas répondre.
Filigrane
Allons, la femme de leur otage est sur le point d’accoucher. Le mécano, brave dans le fond, décide de l’accompagner à la maternité. Durant la délivrance, la secrétaire voilée exige sa carte de crédit. Dépassé, il obéit. Le circuit continue. Le héros se retrouve seul dans la campagne, avec son ennemi ligoté à un arbre, les yeux bandés. Les insultes fusent. Les coups pleuvent. La sauvagerie ne se gêne pas pour revenir en fanfare. L’humanité, n’empêche, n’a pas dit son dernier mot. Voilà le drame.
Pour Un simple accident, Jafar Panahi a tourné une fois de plus dans la clandestinité. Cette audace a été récompensée. Il se renouvelle. Il était temps, sans doute. Ce cas de conscience marquera les esprits. On garde en tête une avalanche d’événements graves ou quotidiens, des avenues encombrées, des bruits de klaxon, des visages mal rasés, des larmes de rimmel, une prothèse qui grince, des cris dans le noir. L’Iran est là, avec ses terreurs. Panahi n’en parle pas si grossièrement. Il se contente d’aligner les petits faits vrais. Tout est en filigrane. À cela tient la réussite. Un simple accident est un film qui évite les majuscules. Et au loin, les lumières de Téhéran brillent dans la nuit.
Le Figaro, 26 mai
Cannes 2025 : notre critique de Valeur sentimentale, grand prix du Festival de Cannes
Le Norvégien Joachim Trier revient avec un film intimiste et ciselé autour d’un père et de ses deux filles. Émotion garantie et casting à l’unisson.
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Le Norvégien Joachim Trier revient avec un film intimiste et ciselé autour d’un père et de ses deux filles. Émotion garantie et casting à l’unisson.
Si on décernait un prix aux maisons qui peuplent le cinéma, celle filmée par Joachim Trier dans Valeur sentimentale décrocherait la palme. C’est une magnifique maison de bois noir et rouge, noyée dans la verdure à Oslo, des airs de datcha nordique et beaucoup de choses à dire. Lorsque le film commence, une voix off la décrit à travers la rédaction d’une enfant.
À 12 ans, la petite Nora a choisi de mettre en scène la demeure de sa famille dans un devoir. Ses aïeux intéressaient moins la fillette que le lieu en lui-même : la maison, témoin de tant d’éclats de voix, de disputes, d’agitation ressentait-elle quelque chose ? Se préférait-elle vide ou pleine de gens ? Souffrait-elle ?, écrit la sensible et inquiète Nora.
Désinvolte et charmeur
La rédaction raconte en accéléré un siècle de la famille Borg, voilà l’idée de génie de Joachim Trier – et de son scénariste attitré, Eskil Vogt – pour nous river à son histoire. Peuvent alors commencer les présentations. Nora (Renate Reinsve), devenue comédienne, Agnès (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas), sa cadette, historienne, et leur père (Stellan Skarsgard) qui débarque sans crier gare le jour des obsèques de son ex-femme. Désinvolte et charmeur, ce célèbre réalisateur semble avoir oublié qu’il ne s’est jamais trop soucié de ses filles après son divorce. Ce qui ne l’empêche pas de proposer aussitôt à Nora le premier rôle de son prochain film. Il l’a écrit pour elle et lui demande de lire le scénario. Refus catégorique de l’intéressée.
En 2021, Joachim Trier avait emballé le Festival de Cannes avec Julie (en 12 chapitres), portrait d’une jeune femme désorientée dans ses choix amoureux. Renate Reinsve illuminait la pellicule dans ce rôle créé sur mesure et raflait le prix d’interprétation féminine. Elle est bien évidemment la renversante Nora dans Valeur sentimentale, mais le réalisateur n’y dissèque plus seulement ses seuls sentiments : il la confronte à ceux d’autres personnages finement dessinés. Il peut compter pour cela sur un casting bien ficelé, à commencer par le formidable Stellan Skarsgard, acteur suédois familier des films de Lars von Trier, une nouvelle venue prometteuse, Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas, et une starlette américaine, Elle Fanning, à qui il donne une épaisseur inattendue. C’est elle la pièce rapportée, l’actrice choisie par Gustav Borg pour remplacer sa fille, qui va amener chacun à se révéler. Cela passera par beaucoup d’introspection, si difficile à rendre au cinéma. Pas pour Joachim Trier, qui s’attarde longuement sur les visages de ses comédiens, les regarde s’enflammer, ferrailler, rire, pleurer et aimer sans les brider, qui leur offre des pas de côté si fantaisistes, si joliment vus. Avec lui les comédiens s’épanouissent et vivent.
D’ailleurs, tout est mouvant dans cette famille. La cadette a joué enfant dans un film de son père, mais c’est sa sœur qui est devenue comédienne. L’aînée protégeait sa petite sœur quand le couple battait de l’aile. C’est aujourd’hui elle qui veille sur Nora perclus de doutes. Le père a raté quelque chose avec ses filles mais il se révèle un formidable grand-père pour le fils d’Agnès. Il est dur mais elles sont faites du même bois que lui. Joachim Trier n’a pas choisi un sujet tapageur, il ne raconte pas les horreurs du monde mais il bouleverse. Toutes les maisons de famille finissent par être vendues. Aujourd’hui, on les ripoline et on les aseptise pour en faire des objets de location. Et cela aussi peut briser un cœur.
Le Point, 24 mai
Nos 12 films coups de cœur à Cannes
Un Benicio del Toro loufoque, un Godard revisité, un thriller familial japonais, un conte animé enchanteur… Notre festival du cinéma en 12 films.
Full text :
La sélection officielle de la 78e édition du Festival de Cannes a témoigné d’un cinéma en pleine mutation, où l’audace créative côtoie l’expérience des maîtres. Le jury, présidé par Juliette Binoche, qui foulait pour la première fois les marches en 1985 avec Rendez-vous, d’André Téchiné, doit départager une vingtaine d’œuvres qui dessinent une cartographie sensible du 7e art. De la nouvelle proposition de Hafsia Herzi, La Petite Dernière, aux visions singulières de Wes Anderson avec The Phoenician Scheme, en passant par le retour attendu des frères Dardenne avec Jeunes Mères et Nouvelle Vague, de Richard Linklater, la compétition reflète un cinéma qui ne cesse de se réinventer.
Ce cru 2025 fait la part belle aux voix féminines avec six réalisatrices en compétition, un record dans l’histoire du Festival. Entre les propositions radicales de Kelly Reichardt (The Mastermind), les fresques intimistes de Carla Simon (Romería) et le nouveau film de Jafar Panahi (Un simple accident), ces œuvres témoignent d’un cinéma qui se fait l’écho des bouleversements de notre temps. Voici quelques coups de cœur de la rédaction du Point.
« Un simple accident », de Jafar Panahi
À la nuit tombée, en pleine campagne, un couple en voiture roule involontairement sur un chien errant. Tandis que sa femme et sa fillette patientent dans le véhicule accidenté, le mari sollicite l’aide d’un garagiste, Vahid, qui croit reconnaître en lui un agent des renseignements iraniens réputé pour sa cruauté : « la Guibole ». Surnommé ainsi en raison de sa jambe droite artificielle, le bourreau a torturé Vahid en captivité, ainsi que plusieurs autres membres de son entourage. Plus tard, la victime retrouve et kidnappe le père de famille, persuadé qu’il s’agit bien de son tortionnaire, maintenant séquestré dans son van. Un ami l’oriente alors vers Shiva (Mariam Afshari), une photographe de mariage, jadis contestataire du pouvoir, qui pourra l’aider à identifier avec certitude son otage. Pas simple : les détenus maltraités par l’éclopé portaient tous un bandeau obstruant leur vue. Mais les galères vont s’accumuler…
Flirtant avec la tragi-comédie, Un simple accident agglomère autour du personnage de Vahid (incarné par l’acteur Vahid Mobasseri) un petit groupe d’individus mêlés, d’abord sans le vouloir, puis activement, à son rapt improvisé : Shiva, ses clients (la jeune Goli et son époux), ainsi qu’un autre ex-détenu, Hamid, marqué au fer rouge lui aussi par les sévices de « la Guibole ». Alors que rien ne se déroule comme prévu et que l’affaire prend une tournure presque rocambolesque, Jafar Panahi tisse une véritable leçon d’humanité qui, lors d’un dernier plan final digne d’un coup de théâtre avant le baisser de rideau, trace une frontière définitive entre le peuple iranien et les mollahs qui le martyrisent. À 64 ans, Panahi signe une nouvelle œuvre majeure de cet incroyable cinéma iranien, un modèle d’écriture et de courage politique. P. G.
En salle le 10 septembre.
« The Phoenician Scheme », de Wes Anderson
Tout commence par un crash d’avion – privé bien sûr, car, chez Wes Anderson, tout est luxe et volupté… mais jamais calme ! Le merveilleusement nommé Zsa-Zsa Korda (Benicio del Toro), trafiquant d’armes richissime et magnat de l’aviation, sort miraculeusement indemne de cette tentative de meurtre, comme des cinq précédentes. Le voici pressé de retrouver sa fille, Liesel (Mia Threapleton), une religieuse cloîtrée dans un couvent, et de lui communiquer les secrets de son grand projet – le « plan phénicien » du titre – contenu dans une série de valises débordant de cartes et d’objets.
Avec un sens consommé du récit, Wes Anderson déploie à chaque ouverture de valise une parade de stars – Benedict Cumberbatch, Scarlett Johansson, Willem Dafoe, Tom Hanks, Mathieu Amalric… on en passe. Comme toujours chez le réalisateur de La Famille Tenenbaum (2001), l’enjeu n’est pas de dégoter un trésor (même si le chapelet de pierres précieuses de Liesel fait rêver), mais de renouer des liens familiaux distendus. La performance pleine de panache de Benicio del Toro et la fausse ingénuité de la nouvelle venue Mia Threapleton (la fille de Kate Winslet) font merveille dans cette fantaisie colorée, plus mélancolique qu’il n’y paraît. F. C.
En salle le 28 mai.
« Valeur sentimentale », de Joachim Trier
Nora (Renate Reinsve) est une comédienne de théâtre avant-gardiste, célibataire endurcie et hantée par un spleen tenace. Sa source d’équilibre reste sa sœur Agnès (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas), heureuse en ménage et mère d’un adorable petit garçon. Un jour, Gustav (Stellan Skarsgard), le père cinéaste de Nora et Agnès, réapparaît dans leurs vies après une longue absence. Au soir de sa carrière, il aimerait faire jouer Nora dans un film sur l’histoire douloureuse de leur famille. Face au refus catégorique de sa fille, il se tourne vers la jeune star hollywoodienne Rachel Kemp… Au risque de provoquer de nouvelles fractures irrévocables.
On pourrait taxer Valeur sentimentale de drame familial bourgeois pour initiés des petits cercles du spectacle et, parfois, le film ne vole pas ce coup de griffe. Mais Joachim Trier met en place les fêlures de ses personnages avec un tel humanisme, une telle justesse dans les sentiments et une telle élégance dans la forme qu’à la fin de la projection, l’émotion balaie tout sur son passage. Tout à tour intriguant, hypnotique, hilarant, touchant, Valeur sentimentale déroute souvent par ses cassures de ton et l’impression d’aligner les vignettes de vie plutôt qu’une dramaturgie classique. Mais ces pièces d’un vaste puzzle prennent tout leur sens au dernier acte et l’on reste marqué, longtemps après la projection, par ce beau tableau doux-amer à l’ambiance bergmanienne. Notre palme du cœur, comme on dit. P. G.
En salle le 20 août.
« La Disparition de Josef Mengele », de Kirill Serebrennikov
Dans ce film vertigineux, Kirill Serebrennikov signe le portrait terrifiant de Josef Mengele, le médecin nazi du camp d’Auschwitz. Adapté du roman d’Olivier Guez (Prix Renaudot 2017) et réalisé dans un noir et blanc sépulcral (à l’exception du format 8 mm couleur pour les séquences de tortures dans le camp), le film tourne autour de la traque de ce criminel qui, au lendemain de la Seconde Guerre mondiale, organisa méticuleusement sa disparition. Le cinéaste russe se glisse dans la tête de ce fanatique et le suit à la trace au fil d’un suspense haletant qui débute dès 1949, lorsqu’il débarque à Buenos Aires. Caché sous divers pseudonymes, il s’invente une nouvelle vie et se réfugie ensuite au Brésil, grâce au soutien financier de sa famille et des réseaux d’anciens nazis sur place. Celui que l’on surnomme « l’ange de la mort » est magistralement interprété par l’acteur allemand August Diehl (vu dans Une vie cachée, de Terrence Malick) qui donne une dimension diabolique à son personnage d’éternel errant. J.-L. W.
Sortie en salle non fixée.
« La Petite Dernière », de Hafsia Herzi
Découverte dans La Graine et le Mulet (2007) d’Abdellatif Kechiche et César de la meilleure actrice cette année pour Borgo de Stéphane Demoustier, Hafsia Herzi n’en finit pas de déployer son talent. Le regard droit, la force tranquille qui la caractérisent comme comédienne font la réussite de son troisième film en tant que réalisatrice, la bouleversante Petite Dernière (d’après le roman de Fatima Daas). L’histoire d’une jeune fille musulmane pratiquante et lesbienne, fille respectueuse et amoureuse éperdue, footballeuse et littéraire.
Avec maîtrise, Hafsia Herzi évite tout stéréotype, laisse éclore des personnages singuliers, jamais prisonniers d’un discours militant. Il faut du courage pour braver les tabous, filmer à la fois la sexualité naissante d’une jeune homosexuelle et une prière matinale ou une visite chez l’imam. Une débutante, Nadia Melliti (photo, à g.), incarne Fatima avec la rage butée et la vulnérabilité bouleversante d’une Sandrine Bonnaire chez Maurice Pialat. Un long gros plan peu avant la fin du film pourrait – devrait ! – à lui seul lui valoir un prix d’interprétation. F. C.
Sortie en salle non fixée.
« Eddington », d’Ari Aster
Eddington, Nouveau-Mexique, mai 2020. En pleine pandémie de Covid-19, les 2 435 habitants de cette bourgade nichée au milieu de nulle part se laissent peu à peu contaminer par un autre mal : celui de fractures béantes entre divers camps retranchés dans leurs bastions idéologiques. Au cœur du réacteur bientôt en fusion : un conflit entre le maire de la ville, Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal, photo), et le shérif, Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix). Le premier applique une prophylaxie stricte – port du masque systématique, respect des gestes barrières… – tandis que le second la conteste au nom de l’absurdité de certaines situations.
L’affrontement personnel entre l’édile et le policier tourne à la joute politique… jusqu’à une escalade sans retour. Autour d’eux, Eddington n’échappe pas non plus aux soubresauts d’une Amérique déchirée par le récent meurtre de George Floyd (un Afro-Américain tué par un policier lors d’une arrestation brutale à Minneapolis). Trop long, comme toujours chez Aster, Eddington n’en reste pas moins de plus en plus excitant au fil de son récit, qui bascule dans le thriller à mi-parcours… puis dans une indescriptible folie où l’humour noirissime le dispute au gore et à une ambiance de jeu vidéo. Un jeu de massacre. P. G.
En salle le 16 juillet.
« Lumière pâle sur les collines », de Kei Ishikawa
Ishiguro, l’auteur des Vestiges du jour, Prix Nobel de littérature 2017, né au Japon mais qui a grandi en Angleterre, a présenté, à Cannes, le film Lumière pâle sur les collines, réalisé par Kei Ishikawa à partir de son premier roman, du même nom, sélectionné dans Un certain regard. Et quel merveilleux film, en effet, que cette histoire confrontant deux femmes qui deviennent amies dans le Nagasaki des années 1950 à ce qui s’est passé pour leurs enfants, en Angleterre, trente ans après. Ou du moins, c’est ce que l’on croit !
Les images d’une beauté folle, les actrices bouleversantes – dont la muse de Kore-eda, Suzu Hirose, ou la petite fille qui joue Keiko, si poignante – font de ce thriller familial sur les origines, qui interroge les séquelles intimes de l’explosion de la bombe atomique, le prix de la honte et celui de l’amour maternel, un bijou de poésie à la portée universelle. C. O.-D.-B.
En salle le 15 octobre.
« Une enfance allemande. Île d’Amrum 1945 », de Fatih Akin
En 1945, sur l’île d’Amrum, en mer du Nord. La fin de la Seconde Guerre mondiale approche. À 12 ans, Nanning, garçon blond aux yeux bleus, travaille dans un champ de pommes de terre pour aider sa famille à survivre. Il vit dans le culte de Hitler et arbore fièrement son uniforme des Jeunesses hitlériennes. Pour complaire à sa mère qui lui réclame du pain blanc avec du miel alors qu’il y a sur l’île une pénurie de farine et de sucre, Nanning n’hésite pas à braver les dangers d’un estran aux sables mouvants. Mais il va découvrir brutalement la complexité du monde et la fin de l’innocence quand la fermière pour laquelle il travaille, incarnée par Diane Kruger (photo), le congédie.
Huit ans après le thriller In the Fade, le cinéaste allemand d’origine turque Fatih Akin revient sur la Croisette avec un film historique à hauteur d’enfant. La force d’Une enfance allemande. Île d’Amrum 1945 réside dans le fragile équilibre entre la dimension historique et l’intimité du récit. Une œuvre puissante sur la perte d’innocence et la résilience, portée par une magnifique photographie et l’interprétation bluffante du jeune comédien Jasper Billerbeck. O. U.
En salle le 24 décembre.
« Nouvelle Vague », de Richard Linklater
Réalisé en noir et blanc, rythmé, souvent comique, il s’agit d’un film sur le tournage en roue libre d’un autre film devenu iconique : À bout de souffle, de Jean-Luc Godard. C’est à la fois le manifeste de la Nouvelle Vague, le reflet d’une époque effervescente (1960) et le portrait alerte d’un cinéaste anticonformiste, radical, illuminé. Son idée fixe ? « Faire souffrir la pellicule », oublier les codes techniques, ne jamais faire répéter les acteurs pour créer l’instantané et la surprise.
Après avoir trituré le scénario offert par son copain des Cahiers du cinéma, François Truffaut (Les Quatre Cents Coups), le cinéaste aux lunettes noires se lance dans cette histoire de petit voyou qui tourne mal sans trop savoir où il va. Richard Linklater a le truc pour nous embarquer aussitôt dans l’aventure, portée par une formidable équipe de jeunes acteurs : Guillaume Marbeck (Godard), Aubry Dullin (photo, Belmondo), Zoey Deutch (photo, Jean Seberg), Bruno Dreyfürst (le producteur Georges de Beauregard). À bout de souffle revit sous nos yeux. J.-L. W.
Sortie le 8 octobre.
« Arco », d’Ugo Bienvenu
« Un jour, j’ai dessiné une tête au bout d’un trait d’arc-en-ciel. Mon personnage était né. » Il s’appelle Arco, 10 ans, issu de l’imagination fertile du dessinateur, auteur de BD, de courts-métrages et de clips Ugo Bienvenu. À 38 ans, il signe son premier film d’animation, produit notamment par Natalie Portman. L’histoire, en 2075, d’une petite fille, Iris, qui voit tomber du ciel un garçon vêtu d’une combinaison arc-en-ciel. C’est Arco, venu d’un futur lointain et idyllique où voyager dans le temps est possible. Problème : il a perdu la pierre magique qui doit lui permettre de retourner chez lui, provoquant ainsi une série d’aventures pleines de rebondissements…
Arco symbolise un futur proche, « ce qui pourrait nous arriver de mieux », selon son auteur, qui revendique cette utopie où l’homme serait reconnecté à la nature. Au-delà de ses images de toute beauté et de sa poésie toute simple, il a tout pour nous enchanter et nous engage à réfléchir au monde de demain, celui laissé à nos enfants et petits enfants. J.-L. W.
Sortie en salle non fixée.
« Eleanor the Great », de Scarlett Johansson
À l’affiche du nouveau film de Wes Anderson, The Phoenician Scheme, Scarlett Johansson en a profité pour présenter à Cannes son premier film derrière la caméra : Eleanor the Great. L’histoire d’un gros mensonge entretenu par Eleanor Morgenstein (June Squibb), juive convertie de 93 ans, qui a quitté la Floride pour rejoindre sa fille (Jessica Hecht, la Susan de Friends) à New York. Elle est vive, drôle et a tendance à s’arranger avec la vérité. La preuve : après la disparition de sa meilleure amie, Bessie, une survivante de l’Holocauste, elle s’est approprié son passé douloureux à Auschwitz . Sans y voir de mal ni mesurer les conséquences de cette histoire qui émeut Nina (Erin Kellyman), une étudiante en journalisme, et son père, célèbre présentateur télé (Chiwetel Ejiofor, Love Actually, Docteur Strange). La supercherie éclate lors d’une prise de parole pour les survivants de la Shoah…
Au lieu de verser dans le drame, Scarlett Johansson pose un regard bienveillant, plein de douceur, sur le personnage d’Eleanor dont elle ne fait pas une vieille dame indigne et lui accorde même les circonstances atténuantes. Sans trop approfondir le sujet, l’actrice-réalisatrice signe avec un zeste d’humour un film classique, plein de douceur et où les bons sentiments sont de mise. L’émotion aussi. J.-L. W.
Sortie en salle non fixée.
« Vie privée », de Rebecca Zlotowski
Hors compétition à Cannes, Rebecca Zlotowski signe une sorte de thriller psychologique qui flirte avec la comédie, le tout servi par la présence exceptionnelle de Jodie Foster pour son premier rôle-titre en français et en France. L’actrice américaine, qui maîtrise parfaitement notre langue, se glisse avec brio dans la peau d’une psychiatre parisienne, Lilian Steiner, troublée par le suicide de l’une de ses patientes, Paula (Virginie Efira), dont elle a enregistré toutes les consultations et qu’elle a aimé en secret. Elle décide de mener son enquête, soupçonne d’emblée le mari (Mathieu Almaric) et sa fille (Luàna Bajrami) de l’avoir empoisonnée, consulte une hypnotiseuse, s’imagine musicienne pendant l’Occupation, arrêtée par son fils milicien (Vincent Lacoste) qui, dans la vie, vient d’être papa. Tout s’embrouille dans sa tête. Nous voici entraînés dans un jeu de piste très « psy », joué non sans humour par Lilian/Jodie Foster qui va jusqu’au bout de son délire et fait équipe avec son ex-mari, joué par Daniel Auteuil, qui l’aide à mener son enquête et, surtout, à reprendre ses esprits. Avec lui, la vie paraît plus simple, plus lumineuse et le film bascule dans la comédie sentimentale. Morale de l’histoire : le couple peut être une bonne thérapie. J.-L. W.
Vie privée,en salle le 26 novembre.
https://www.lepoint.fr/culture/nos-12-films-coups-de-coeur-a-cannes-24-05-2025-2590402_3.php
Le Figaro, 24 mai
Cannes 2025 : trois favoris émergent d’une édition brouillonne, avec des films clivants et des déceptions en pagaille
La 78e édition du festival se termine sur un goût d’inachevé. Peu de films ont fait l’unanimité, laissant une critique divisée comme rarement face à une sélection, glamour sur le papier, mais ayant du mal à tenir ses promesses.
Full text :
À l’annonce de la sélection officielle du 78e Festival de Cannes mi-avril, l’enthousiasme était de mise : le cru 2025 s’annonçait historique et rutilant. Le programme concocté par Thierry Frémaux mêlait vétérans (les Dardenne, Wes Anderson) et une nouvelle génération de cinéastes quadras où les réalisatrices tenaient leur rang en réalisant sept des 22 films en lice pour la palme d’or. Les stars hollywoodiennes allaient se bousculer sur la Croisette : Denzel Washington, Jodie Foster, Robert de Niro, Isabelle Huppert, Jennifer Lawrence, Benedict Cumberbatch, Robert Pattinson, Pedro Pascal, Emma Stone, Joaquin Phoenix, Austin Butler, Tom Cruise, Josh O’Connor… Millenials, boomers comme génération Z étaient servis.
Malgré toutes ces promesses alléchantes, plane sur la Croisette un air de flottement, un goût d’inachevé. De nombreux films attendus sont retombés comme des soufflés. Difficile de prédire un successeur aussi euphorisant qu’Anora, palme d’or 2024. De mémoire de critiques, cela faisait longtemps qu’un Festival de Cannes n’avait pas été aussi clivant. Peu d’œuvres arrivant à faire consensus.
Auspices tonitruants
Cette 78e édition avait pourtant démarré sous les meilleurs auspices. Animée par Laurent Lafitte, la cérémonie d’ouverture semblait portée par cette énergie frénétique promise. La soirée a embrassé d’emblée un ton très politique, en rupture avec les derniers grands raouts de la planète cinéma, réunie début mars pour les Oscars et mutique sur le sujet. Lauréat d’une palme d’honneur que lui a décernée Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert de Niro a livré un plaidoyer pour la démocratie américaine menacée par le retour de Donald Trump à la Maison-Blanche : «Dans notre pays, nous luttons d’arrache pied pour défendre la démocratie que nous considérons comme acquise. L’art est en quête de la liberté. C’est pourquoi nous sommes une menace pour les autocrates et les fascistes de ce monde. » Dans la foulée, la présidente du jury de ce cru 2025, Juliette Binoche a lancé un cri d’alarme sur la situation à Gaza et en Israël.
Les convulsions géopolitiques ont dominé une bonne partie compétition. Réalisée par Ari Aster, la fable Eddington est une parabole des divisions idéologiques actuelles de l’Amérique. Se déroulant à l’époque des purges staliniennes Deux procureurs de l’Ukrainien Sergei Loznitsa tend aussi un miroir à la Russie de Poutine. Le cinéma iranien a fait un retour en force porté par Jafar Panahi et Saeed Roustae. Le premier dans Un simple accident ausculte la tentation d’ex-détenus de se venger de leurs tortionnaires, une attaque frontale contre la République islamique. Le second suit dans Woman and Child le destin d’une mère de famille sur le point de refaire sa vie. Déjà égratigné dans La Conspiration du Caire, le président égyptien al-Sissi est plus que jamais dans le viseur des Aigles de la république du réalisateur suédo-égyptien Tarik Saleh. Un comédien y est contraint d’incarner l’ancien général putschiste dans un biopic tout à sa gloire. Sans oublier, L’Agent secret du Brésilien Kleber Mendonça Filho, portrait d’un homme traqué pour de mystérieuses raisons pendant la dictature brésilienne.
Litanie de déceptions et chiasme entre critiques
Effet miroir, écho ? Le moins que l’on puisse dire est que cette sélection n’a laissé personne indifférent. « Plusieurs titres ont été très polarisants. Peut-être cette sélection reflétait-elle simplement l’état d’esprit des cinéastes d’aujourd’hui, existentiellement parlant. Ce fut un véritable plaisir de voir les critiques s’entre-déchirer », observe le journaliste canadien Barry Hertz du Globe And Mail. Parmi les titres les plus fustigés figurent ceux qui avaient pourtant la distribution la plus hollywoodienne et flamboyante : le neo-western Eddington, où se toisent Joaquin Phoenix et Pedro Pascal, Die My Love, portrait d’un couple en prise avec la dépression postpartum campé par Jennifer Lawrence et Robert Pattinson. Même les blockbusters, projetés hors compétition, ont fait pschit. De Mission : impossible : The Final Reckoning au remake de Kurosawa Highest 2 Lowest de Spike Lee.
Quatre ans après sa palme d’or pour Titane, le retour sur la Croisette de Julia Ducournau avec Alpha, allégorie du Sida, n’a pas laissé de marbre que ses personnages. « Méditation confuse et tourmentée », pour Variety. « Parabole d’une originalité saisissante et d’une exagération déconcertante », s’interroge Hollywood Reporter. « Un pudding amphigourique », diagnostique Le Figaro. Si nos critiques ont été séduits par les deux autres films tricolores de la compétition La Petite Dernière et Dossier 137, ils ont toutefois suscité moins d’enthousiasme chez les journalistes internationaux. Trop français, sans doute, comme le faisait remarquer une critique danoise après avoir vu Partir un jour, le film d’ouverture.
Des notes médiocres, des pronostics incertains
Les tableaux de notes des critiques reflètent cette édition polarisante. Que ce soit celui de la société internationale cinéphile, des critiques internationaux de Screen Daily, de Ioncinema ou de l’association des critiques chinois, peu de films ont dépassé en première semaine la barre fatidique de 3 sur 5, seuil atteint par les précédentes palmes d’or. Dans ces classements, les mieux placés sont le polar brésilien L’Agent secret sur la première marche du podium, Sound of Falling, portrait intergénérationnel de femmes sur un siècle, et Sirat, road-movie dans le désert marocain du Franco-Espagnol Oliver Laxe. Trois drames qui ont profondément déçu Le Figaro, à rebours de ses confrères. « Sirat néglige l’intrigue. Et la puissance des décibels de la bande-son accentue la débâcle », observe Éric Neuhoff. « Sound of Falling , de la réalisatrice allemande Mascha Schilinski, est une œuvre trop longue, déroutante, prétentieuse et incompréhensible », note Florence Vierron. Pour Étienne Sorin, « L’Agent secret, de Kleber Mendonça Filho, entre série A, B et Z peine à évoquer la dictature au Brésil ». Cette succession de déceptions depuis Eddington « donne des airs de Mostra de Venise à Cannes », estime notre confrère. Ces dernières années, le festival italien a parfois aligné « des stars hollywoodiennes dans des navets ».
Les emplettes du distributeur Neon, abonné aux palmes d’or
La seconde semaine de la compétition a charrié son lot de nouveaux chiasmes. Plébiscité par Le Figaro, le poétique History of Sound sur l’idylle dans l’Amérique de l’Entre-deux-guerres entre deux passionnés de musique folk s’est vu qualifier de « Brokeback Mountain sous sédatifs» par la presse spécialisée, insensible au charme combiné de Paul Mescal et Josh O’Connor. Si le rêve fiévreux Résurrection du Chinois Bi Gan a transcendé une partie des festivaliers, Éric Neuhoff a calé devant cet indigeste « mélange des genres, durée exponentielle, intrigue fumeuse ».
Il a fallu attendre Nouvelle Vague, de Richard Linklater, qui retrace le tournage d’À bout de souffle, de Jean-Luc Godard pour mettre les cinéphiles des deux rives de l’Atlantique sur la même longueur d’onde. De la tendresse, c’est aussi l’étendard du récit familial Valeur sentimentale de Joachim Trier, qui a généré, avec Un simple accident, le premier vrai concert de louanges de ce festival. Le réalisateur norvégien retrouve sa muse de Julie (en 12 chapitres), Renate Reinsve, pour une étude de l’amour et du deuil, de la réussite professionnelle, du suicide et de la paternité défaillante. Un retour en force du cinéaste et de la comédienne déjà primée à Cannes, épaulés par Stellan Skarsgard et la star hollywoodienne Elle Fanning. Avec à la clef une salve d’applaudissements de 19 minutes.
En voilà un qui sera au palmarès, mais est-ce suffisant pour une palme ? Il faudra surveiller les longs-métrages de Jafar Panahi, Kleber Mendonça Filho eux aussi portés par un bouche-à-oreille solide. Avec un indice encore qui donne une longeur d’avance à ces trois films : Valeur sentimentale, L’Agent secret et Un simple accident ont été acquis par Neon. Depuis Parasite en 2019, le distributeur américain a raflé toutes les palmes d’or, sans exception. Samedi vers 19 h 45, il en aura peut-être rajouté une sixième à son palmarès.
The New York Times, 24 mai
The Best Movies of 2025, So Far
Our critics picked 10 films that you might have missed but that are worth your time on this long holiday weekend.
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“Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning” and the live-action “Lilo & Stitch” are flooding theaters this Memorial Day weekend. But if you don’t want to follow the crowd, it’s also a good time to catch up on some terrific films you may have missed earlier in the year. I asked our chief film critic, Manohla Dargis, and our movie critic, Alissa Wilkinson, to recommend releases worth your time. All are in theaters or available online.
‘Sinners’
The story: The twins Smoke and Stack (both played by Michael B. Jordan) return from Al Capone’s Chicago to open a juke joint in Clarksdale, Miss. That’s when the devil, or rather, an Irish vampire, shows up in this talker of a film.
Manohla Dargis’s take: Directed by Ryan Coogler, this “is a big-screen exultation — a passionate, effusive praise song about life and love, including the love of movies. Set in Jim Crow Mississippi, it is a genre-defying, mind-bending fantasia overflowing with great performances, dancing vampires and a lot of ideas about love and history.”
Read the review; interviews with Coogler and Jordan, and other cast members; and a critic’s essay.
‘I’m Still Here’
Stream it on Netflix or rent it on most major platforms.
The story: Set in Brazil beginning in 1970, when a military dictatorship ruled the country, this drama follows the efforts of Eunice Paiva (Fernanda Torres) to keep her family together and still work as an activist after her congressman husband, Rubens Paiva, is arrested and disappeared by the authorities. Based on a true story, the film, directed by Walter Salles, won the Oscar for best international feature.
Alissa Wilkinson’s take: “In her performance — which won a Golden Globe and [earned] an Oscar nomination — Torres stuns. Protecting her children means leaning into joy within the fear, hope in the midst of pain. Torres double-layers her performance with all of those emotions, and her searching eyes are magnetic.”
Read the review and an interview with Torres.
‘Black Bag’
Stream it on Peacock or rent it on most major platforms.
The story: Cate Blanchett and Michael Fassbender play married British intelligence agents who are each tasked with ferreting out a mole, who may possibly be their spouse in this Steven Soderbergh thriller.
Dargis’s take: The film is “sleek, witty and lean to the bone, a fizzy, engaging puzzler about beautiful spies doing the sort of extraordinary things that the rest of us only read about in novels and — if we’re lucky — watch onscreen. It’s nonsense, but the kind of glorious grown-up nonsense that critics like to say they (as in Hollywood) no longer make.” Read the review.
‘Friendship’
The story: Tim Robinson plays Craig, a nice-enough guy with a wife and a house in the suburbs but no friends, until the cool new neighbor (Paul Rudd) moves in. Since this is a cringe comedy, all will not go well.
Wilkinson’s take: The film is “is often funny and always distressing. … Robinson’s performance, which sometimes feels dropped in from a parallel dimension that’s about 3 percent different from our own, injects Craig with a quality most similar to an erratically ticking time bomb.” Read the review.
‘Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl’
Stream it on Netflix.
The story: In the latest stop-motion adventure of the inventor Wallace and his trusty beagle, Gromit, the two must contend with the evil mute penguin Feathers McGraw and a garden-gnome robot gone awry.
Dargis’s take: The movie is “a diverting low-key thriller with Bond-like flourishes.” It moves with “smooth efficiency from its amusing, shadowy start to gently slapstick finish, propelled by its characters and [co-director and co-writer Nick] Park’s customary sweet-and-silly humor.” Read the review.
‘Eephus’
The story: In small-town Douglas, Mass., two recreational baseball teams gather to play one last game on a field that’s going to be razed to make way for a school.
Wilkinson’s take: The movie “exists outside sports movie tropes altogether, though it’s most certainly a baseball movie. It dwells in some languid liminal space between hangout movie and elegy, a tribute to the community institutions that hold us together.” Read the review.
‘The Annihilation of Fish’
Stream it on Kanopy.
The story: In this gentle comedy, a Jamaican immigrant who goes by the name Fish (James Earl Jones) has been battling an invisible demon when he heads to Los Angeles. There he meets a woman (Lynn Redgrave) with her own invisible companion. The film, by Charles Burnett, wasn’t released for 26 years.
Dargis’s take: Calling it a“deeply humane, singular view from the margins,” she wrote, “Jones, who holds the movie throughout, imbues Fish with delicate charisma that becomes more pronounced as the story unfolds and emotions deepen.”
Read the review and an interview with the director.
‘Caught by the Tides’
The story: Mixing footage shot for previous movies with new scenes, the Chinese filmmaker Jia Zhangke follows Qiaoqiao and her lover, Bin, a low-level criminal, over 20 years.
Dargis’s take: The film is “a tour de force that is at once an affecting portrait of a people in flux and a soulful, generous-hearted autobiographic testament from one of our greatest living filmmakers.” Read the review.
‘Presence’
The story: The second Steven Soderbergh film on this list is a ghost story set in the seemingly normal suburban home of a family that includes a star-athlete son and a daughter who’s clearly been traumatized.
Dargis’s take: The girl’s “past, her parents’ marriage and the ghost’s restricted point of view together create palpable unease that the filmmakers build on until everyone is vibrating with tension and things have gotten weird. Although there are a few haunted-house shocks, the cumulative effect is more unsettling than scary.” Read the review.
‘The Last Showgirl’
The story: When the long-running Vegas show she is in closes, an aging dancer (played by Pamela Anderson) struggles to find work and to connect with her grown daughter even as she finds community with friends (including one played by Jamie Lee Curtis).
Dargis’s take: Directed by Gia Coppola, the drama “tells a familiar story of bad luck and outwardly questionable choices with gentleness, a great deal of love for its characters and an obvious appreciation for the affirming highs and bitter lows that age and beauty afford. Modestly scaled and loosely plotted, it is an unusually tender movie.” Read the review.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/23/movies/best-movies-2025-so-far.html
The Wall Street Journal, 23 mai
‘Mission: Impossible—The Final Reckoning’ Review: The Cult of Tom Cruise
The action franchise’s eighth installment tilts even further into hero worship, as its star races to save the world from nefarious artificial intelligence.
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Note: “Mission: Impossible—The Final Reckoning,” out this weekend, picks up the story from 2023’s “Mission: Impossible—Dead Reckoning Part One.” Read our critic’s review of that film here.
“Mission: Impossible—The Final Reckoning” features a key in the form of a cross, a St. Christopher medal and references to Noah’s Ark but reserves its reverence for its onscreen savior, messiah and chosen one. “A Tom Cruise production,” the credits tell us, and you won’t forget it for a single moment.
That need not be a bad thing. The producer-star delivered the two best offerings in the series since the original 1996 feature with 2018’s “Mission: Impossible—Fallout” and 2023’s “Mission: Impossible—Dead Reckoning Part One” (calling the latest edition Part Two might have been a subtitle too many). This time, though, the story falters.
The series has always been an effort in the sometimes-awkward business of stitching together extravagant set pieces, but the eighth installment’s characterizations, dialogue and villainy are all thin, and the blowout sequences aren’t exciting enough. Too often, the self-serving mission of making Mr. Cruise look cool clashes with the audience-serving mission of making sense. The balance between vanity and sanity leans the wrong way.
In what amounts to the second half of a nearly six-hour movie, artificial intelligence has culminated in the Entity, which is seizing control of the world’s nuclear arsenals and intends to obliterate humanity once it conquers America’s. The U.S., led by President Erika Sloane (Angela Bassett), weighs the same options outlined in the Cold War movie “Fail Safe” as a last-ditch effort to avert the worst possible outcome. When the president contemplates nuking the other eight nuclear powers to stave off total war, an adviser informs her this would cause “an unprecedented political crisis.” You think?
But Mr. Cruise’s Ethan Hunt has the two-part cruciform key to a vault on a downed Russian submarine that contains the source code to the Entity, and could simply kill it if he had the thumb drive containing poison-pill software engineered by Ethan’s hacker genius buddy, Luther (Ving Rhames). Gabriel (Esai Morales), the nefarious megalomaniac who had the key in the last movie until Ethan took it, this time steals the poison pill. Moreover, no one knows where the sunken sub is. The only way to get its coordinates is to visit a remote Alaskan island where, amusingly enough, we meet the CIA veteran whose “black vault” was breached by Ethan, dangling like a marionette, in a famous scene in the 1996 movie.
Ethan’s teammates—the pickpocket Grace (Hayley Atwell), tech nerd Benji (Simon Pegg) and assassin Paris (Pom Klementieff)—are back but get very little to do; Mr. Morales gets even less, popping in for just a few minutes of chuckling cartoonishness. Other fine actors such as Nick Offerman and Janet McTeer are reduced to filling out the background. Instead of making them count, the movie keeps its focus on Ethan’s questionable doings. Why would a 60-something man sprint across Westminster Bridge in London? Wouldn’t any automobile be faster? Why would Ethan jump off a helicopter and into the frigid waters of the Bering Sea, miles from anything? Do we really need at least four scenes of a shirtless Mr. Cruise, two of which also feature him in his briefs? For a superficially brainy spy thriller, the movie is really dumb. When Ethan, having shed his scuba gear and nearly naked, rapidly swims up hundreds of feet from the ocean floor to the surface through Arctic waters so cold there are icebergs afloat, the effect is as preposterous as Batman and Robin surfing to Earth from the upper atmosphere in “Batman & Robin.”
If most superhero movies can be dismissed for being smarmy and frivolous, “M:I 8” goes too far the other way, affecting a pose of somber doomcasting that drains most of the fun. There’s a death cult of Entity worshipers who pray for the worst, and events to counter them take on the same overtone as a weird religion, with Ethan being casually told he’d be a good choice to rule the world. The script, by director Christopher McQuarrie and Erik Jendresen, lacks wit, is weighed down by thick gobs of exposition (cut the red wire, grab the glowing thing, etc.) and has a weakness for clunky portentousness. The dialogue features so many howlers it could have been written by the pack of sled dogs who join the mission in Alaska.
The film tries to make a meal out of a leftover with Ethan’s line “Nothing is written” (shamelessly ripped off from “Lawrence of Arabia”), but also contains talk of Ethan as a sort of cult leader destined to deliver us all. A penchant for grandiosity over coherence defines “M:I 8.” Mr. Cruise should remember that his films work best when he’s more of a maverick than a messiah.
Le Figaro, 23 mai
Cédric Klapisch pour la première fois à Cannes : « Je ne suis pas un cinéaste assez sérieux »
ENTRETIEN – Avec La Venue de l’avenir, projeté hors compétition, le réalisateur est sélectionné pour la première fois au festival. Rencontre avec un homme heureux mais lucide.
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Dans la brasserie où il a donné rendez-vous, il a l’air comme chez lui. Souriant, les yeux qui frisent, Cédric Klapisch arbore une décontraction naturelle qui lui va bien au teint. À 63 ans, il vient d’être sélectionné pour la première fois au Festival de Cannes avec La Venue de l’avenir. Le réalisateur d’Un air de famille et d’En corps savoure sa présence cannoise, mais reste un peu sur ses gardes.
LE FIGARO. – Vous êtes sélectionné pour la première fois à Cannes. Que ressentez-vous ?
CÉDRIC KLAPISCH. – J’entretiens une relation particulière avec le Festival de Cannes. J’ai appris à vivre sans, alors qu’à titre personnel j’y vais quasiment chaque année. C’est mon ami Santiago Amigorena, mon scénariste, qui en parle justement dans son livre sur Cannes paru cette année. Il rappelle que nous y sommes venus pour la première fois ensemble en 1985, alors que j’étais étudiant en cinéma. Depuis, j’y suis allé une quarantaine de fois.
Je me souviens que, pendant des décennies, le genre de la comédie n’a pas eu les faveurs du festival. Je vois que c’est en train de changer
Cédric Klapisch
Quarante ans de carrière, mais une seule sélection. Comment l’expliquez-vous ?
Je suis évidemment très fier que mon film soit projeté à Cannes. Ce n’est que du plaisir. Mais je ne suis pas dupe. Je reste quelqu’un qui réalise des comédies populaires. Je comprends pourquoi mes films n’y sont jamais allés. Je ne suis pas un cinéaste assez sérieux. Je me souviens que, pendant des décennies, le genre de la comédie n’a pas eu les faveurs du festival. Je vois que c’est en train de changer. Et cela me va parfaitement ! (Rires.) Surtout, le fait de ne pas y avoir été pendant des années m’a donné du recul.
Que représente cette manifestation pour vous ?
Cannes est un pèlerinage pour le monde du cinéma mondial. Quand on aime le septième art, on aime ce qui se passe ici, avec la diversité de films, d’événements et de populations qui s’y croisent. J’ai tout de suite aimé ça.
D’où est venue l’idée de La Venue de l’avenir ?
Le point de départ, c’était l’envie de tourner un film d’époque. Mais très vite, avec Santiago Amigorena, nous avons compris que ce qui nous intéressait, c’était le face-à-face entre deux époques. J’avais envie de parler de la naissance de l’impressionnisme avec le regard d’aujourd’hui.
Ma culture est issue de la bande dessinée. Comme Alain Chabat, je me suis très tôt nourri des histoires concoctées par René Goscinny, Gotlib ou d’autres auteurs de BD des années 1970-1980
Cédric Klapisch
Le cinéma français se frotte rarement à la science-fiction. Vous l’avez déjà fait avec Jean-Paul Belmondo dans Peut-être. Ne retrouve-t-on pas ce même type de voyage temporel avec La Venue de l’avenir ?
Vous avez raison, la structure du film est l’absolu inverse de celle de Peut-être. Simplement, au lieu d’aller dans le futur, nous partons dans le passé. Ces deux films se ressemblent en négatif. Cela peut paraître naïf. Mais c’est quelque chose d’assumé chez moi. J’assume ma naïveté. Souvent, les gens qui n’aiment pas mon cinéma me reprochent d’être naïf. Ma culture est issue de la bande dessinée. Comme Alain Chabat, je me suis très tôt nourri des histoires concoctées par René Goscinny, Gotlib ou d’autres auteurs de BD des années 1970-1980. Ce côté enfantin permet d’enfoncer certaines barrières.
L’impressionnisme, c’est l’art de capter l’instant. Dans votre film, c’est l’inverse. N’est-ce pas paradoxal ?
Oui, ce film a été très préparé. Au cinéma, tout est affaire d’illusion. Pourtant, j’ai volontairement joué la carte de l’ébauche sur certains de mes films, comme Chacun cherche son chat ou L’Auberge espagnole. Ils sont parfois presque improvisés, jetés. Et ça, effectivement, ça se rapproche de ce que je cherchais : capter des impressions.
Quel souvenir gardez-vous de L’Auberge espagnole ?
Une espèce de fusion. Ce sont deux mois de tournage à Barcelone et une semaine à Paris. Beaucoup de choses se passaient en même temps. C’est le moment où je suis tombé amoureux de ma femme. C’était incandescent. Il y avait cette lumière barcelonaise, cette atmosphère, ce côté festif. Nous dînions le soir tous ensemble, et le lendemain nous tournions. Parfois, il y avait des choses qui se passaient au restaurant la veille et que j’intégrais à l’histoire le lendemain.
Romain Duris n’est-il pas un peu votre Jean-Pierre Léaud, une sorte d’alter ego de cinéma ?
Je sais que François Truffaut disait beaucoup ça de sa relation avec Jean-Pierre Léaud. Moi, je n’ai jamais considéré Romain Duris comme mon alter ego ou le personnage de Xavier Rousseau comme une sorte de double. Avec Romain, nous avons fait huit films, si l’on compte la série Salade grecque. Nous avons développé une grande complicité. Il y a des éléments de ma vie, notamment dans L’Auberge espagnole. Mais plus j’ai avancé dans la trilogie, moins il s’agissait de ma vie personnelle. Quant au Péril jeune, j’avais envie de répondre à la question : « Qu’est-ce que ça fait d’avoir 17 ans ? » Quand il est sorti, c’est devenu un film culte malgré le fait que l’on mettait en scène tous les ratages et la misère sexuelle des adolescents de cet âge-là. C’était l’antithèse de La Boum ! (Rires.)
Qu’en est-il de votre premier long-métrage, Riens du tout, avec Fabrice Luchini ?
Je garde beaucoup de tendresse pour ce film. À l’époque, je travaillais sur des films d’entreprises et passais mon temps dans des bureaux. C’est de là qu’est venue l’idée de faire une histoire sur le monde du travail. Au départ, j’ai voulu Michel Blanc dans le rôle, mais il a refusé. Je me suis alors tourné vers Fabrice Luchini, que j’avais adoré dans La Discrète. Avec bonheur, il a accepté. Pour moi, Luchini a sublimé le film en apportant une naïveté sympathique, une sincérité à ce rôle de patron des Grandes Galeries qui entraîne ses employés dans ce qu’on appelait le management participatif. Le film a plu autant à la CGT qu’au Medef !
Comment est née votre vocation de cinéaste ?
Je suis d’abord passé par la photographie. Mon père, qui était physicien, avait fait installer un labo photo à la maison. J’ai passé des heures à développer mes clichés à l’adolescence. Je me passionnais pour Doisneau, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Willy Ronis ou Brassaï. Ce qui opère mon passage vers le cinéma, c’est mon goût pour raconter des histoires. C’est d’ailleurs ce que je raconte à mots couverts dans La Venue de l’avenir avec le personnage de Vassili Schneider, qui incarne un photographe des débuts de la photographie.
Comment avez-vous choisi Suzanne Lindon ?
Suzanne possède un charme singulier. Dès l’audition, j’ai su que c’était elle. Elle a emporté le morceau haut la main. Ce qui m’a séduit, c’est sa maturité, alors qu’elle n’a que 25 ans. Je cherchais une actrice populaire. Dans le sens étymologique du terme. Quelqu’un qui vient du peuple. Aujourd’hui, les choses populaires se trouvent en banlieue. Je crois que le langage de la banlieue, sa gestuelle et son phrasé ne correspondent pas à une jeune fille du XIXe siècle. Suzanne n’était pas trop marquée par un style urbain. Elle s’est approprié l’époque en un tournemain…
Atlantico, 23 mai
Ça n’est pas du cinéma : Derrière les cascades de Tom Cruise dans Mission : Impossible, les capacités insoupçonnées du corps humain (bien entraîné…)
Les cascades de Tom Cruise dans la saga Mission : Impossible défient la logique autant que les lois de la gravité. Mais derrière ces exploits cinématographiques se cache une réalité fascinante : avec un entraînement intensif, le corps humain est capable d’atteindre des prouesses insoupçonnées. Jusqu’où peut-on repousser ses limites ?
Full text :
Il a sauté de falaises, s’est accroché à des avions en plein décollage et a retenu sa respiration sous l’eau aussi longtemps que des apnéistes professionnels. Aujourd’hui, à 62 ans, Tom Cruise retrouve le rôle d’Ethan Hunt pour une dernière mission, et il continue de réaliser ses propres cascades.
Avec Mission : Impossible – The Final Reckoning, la saga atteint son apogée. Mais derrière ces spectacles à couper le souffle se cache une question fascinante : jusqu’où le corps humain peut-il être poussé – et entraîné – pour réaliser l’impossible ?
Il a sauté de falaises, s’est accroché à des avions en plein décollage et a retenu sa respiration sous l’eau aussi longtemps que des apnéistes professionnels. Aujourd’hui, à 62 ans, Tom Cruise retrouve le rôle d’Ethan Hunt pour une dernière mission, et il continue de réaliser ses propres cascades.
Avec Mission : Impossible – The Final Reckoning, la saga atteint son apogée. Mais derrière ces spectacles à couper le souffle se cache une question fascinante : jusqu’où le corps humain peut-il être poussé – et entraîné – pour réaliser l’impossible ?
Et à quel prix ? Lors du tournage des huit films Mission : Impossible, Cruise a subi une fracture de la cheville, des côtes fêlées et une déchirure de l’épaule.
Votre mission, si vous l’acceptez, est d’évaluer les capacités – et les limites – du corps humain pour atteindre ces sommets impressionnants. Jusqu’où est-il possible de s’entraîner pour réaliser l’impossible ?
Respirer sous l’eau
Dans Mission Impossible – Rogue Nation, Hunt navigue dans un coffre-fort sous-marin pour récupérer un registre volé. Cruise souhaitait filmer l’ensemble en une seule prise et a fait appel à des instructeurs d’apnée pour retenir sa respiration pendant la durée requise : plus de six minutes !
Un humain moyen peut retenir sa respiration pendant environ 30 à 90 secondes. Et ce, sans entraînement. Cependant, le corps humain possède un réflexe de plongée inné qui lui permet de s’adapter temporairement à l’immersion sous l’eau.
La réaction consiste à ralentir le rythme cardiaque et à rediriger le sang vers le cœur, ce qui permet de réduire les besoins métaboliques et de préserver le fonctionnement des organes vitaux, comme le cerveau et le cœur.
C’est bien beau, mais il faut maintenant penser à nager, à résister à la pression de l’eau sur les poumons et à lutter contre cette envie désespérée de prendre une grande inspiration, due à l’augmentation du CO₂, ce qui, sous l’eau, serait catastrophique.
Et si le niveau d’oxygène du plongeur chute trop bas, il risque de perdre connaissance. C’est pourquoi la noyade en eau peu profonde représente un risque réel.
C’est là que l’entraînement à l’apnée entre en jeu. Avec de la pratique, il existe plusieurs moyens d’augmenter la durée de votre immersion. Parmi ces techniques, on peut citer la maîtrise des techniques de respiration pour conserver un maximum d’air dans les poumons. Une pratique soutenue peut également augmenter la capacité de stockage d’oxygène dans le sang.
Ce processus prend des mois, voire des années, et peut prolonger la durée d’immersion jusqu’à environ cinq minutes en moyenne. Ce que Cruise a réussi à réaliser est tout simplement exceptionnel.
Escalade libre
Les films Mission Impossible s’ouvrent souvent sur Ethan Hunt escaladant des bâtiments ou des falaises abruptes avec l’agilité d’une chèvre de montagne. Il semble grimper librement sans harnais et, au début de Mission Impossible 2, s’agrippant d’une seule main. Bien que Cruise ait utilisé des câbles de sécurité pour se sécuriser, l’escalade était 100 % réelle.
Et puis, comment oublier cette scène ? Celle du premier Mission Impossible, où il doit suspendre tous ses membres à quelques centimètres du sol pour éviter de déclencher les alarmes.
Bien que Cruise n’ait pas révélé son programme d’entraînement spécifique pour ces figures, à ma connaissance, réaliser n’importe laquelle de ces actions nécessiterait un dos et une ceinture abdominale exceptionnellement forts.
Les muscles du dos maintiennent la colonne vertébrale droite et verticale. Certains, comme le grand dorsal, couvrent l’espace entre le dos et les membres. Ces muscles, prisés des culturistes, sont également particulièrement précieux pour les grimpeurs, permettant d’effectuer une traction ou de se hisser sur une paroi rocheuse.
Par ailleurs, de nombreux autres muscles sont nécessaires à l’escalade extrême : ceux qui permettent une prise solide, permettent d’atteindre des objets et de les pousser, et maintiennent la tension et la tenue. Il n’est pas étonnant que l’escalade soit considérée comme l’un des meilleurs exercices pour tout le corps.
Il n’est pas surprenant que Cruise soit connu pour s’être entraîné intensivement pour cela. Pour comprendre ne serait-ce qu’un aspect de la difficulté qu’il a pu rencontrer, vous pourriez essayer d’adopter la posture du vol de saut, ventre au sol, et voir combien de temps vous pouvez la tenir. Je ne vous dirai pas à quel point ma propre tentative a été pitoyable.
Quelle explosion ! Hunt a également échappé à pas mal d’explosions, d’un hélicoptère dans le tunnel sous la Manche à un aquarium en feu à Prague. Dans Mission : Impossible 3, sur le pont de la baie de Chesapeake, un autre hélicoptère lançant un missile déclenche une explosion qui envoie Hunt percuter une voiture. Encore une fois, Cruise a tout fait lui-même, au prix de deux côtes fêlées.
Des dispositifs pyrotechniques ont été utilisés pour l’explosion, mais bien sûr, ils n’ont pas pu servir à soulever Cruise et à le plaquer contre la voiture. La solution ? Une série de câbles ont été utilisés pour le traîner latéralement. Jamais la consigne « brace, brace » n’a été aussi juste.
Et pour info, avoir des côtes cassées ou meurtries, c’est loin d’être agréable. Certains les décrivent comme l’une des blessures les plus douloureuses qui soient, car le simple fait de tousser, d’éternuer ou de respirer aggrave la douleur.
Mais Tom Cruise se relève, se ressaisit et passe à l’action. Sa motivation ? Il aurait affirmé vouloir faire vivre au public ce que l’on ressent réellement à ce moment-là. Et quel beau garçon !
The Wall Street Journal, 23 mai
‘Love’ Review: Intimacy and Interconnection in Oslo
The first installment of a loosely linked trilogy, Dag Johan Haugerud’s film follows a Norwegian doctor and nurse as they navigate various relationships in and outside of the hospital.
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The 60-year-old Norwegian novelist and filmmaker Dag Johan Haugerud has embarked on a loose trilogy whose parts bear titles so death-and-taxes fundamental as to suggest a ponderously sweeping ambition. First comes “Love,” opening this weekend, and then come “Sex” and “Dreams,” due later this year.
Yet “Love,” at least, has few pretensions of being a grand statement. It’s a modest, moving drama abundant with conversation, and while the movie considers major questions—about intimacy, monogamy, care—it never becomes weighed down by them. This is, in part, because it’s also a shimmering, contemplative portrait of a handful of people and the modern city in which they live. Fair warning: It might make you want to move to Oslo.
The two main characters are Marianne (Andrea Bræin Hovig), a urologist, and Tor (Tayo Cittadella Jacobsen), a nurse who works with her. In the opening scene, Marianne tells a seemingly uncomprehending man that he has prostate cancer. She delivers the news with a well-trained matter-of-factness that avoids both unproductive gloom and vacuous optimism, and this frank style—shared by Tor, though in some respects he is more sensitive—shapes their lives and relationships beyond the hospital.
Those relationships include Marianne’s with her friend Heidi (Marte Engebrigtsen), who works for the municipal culture department, and Ole (Thomas Gullestad), the handsome, divorced geologist with whom Heidi sets her up. He lives a quick ferry ride away from downtown Oslo, and from his roof offers Marianne, Heidi and a few others, assembled to work on a project celebrating the Norwegian capital, a survey of the “cauldron” in which the city sits. We’re given a slowly panning view of the area, at once registering its scale and its limits. As the group squeezes back through a window into the house, Marianne wordlessly places a hand on Ole’s behind—a not-so-subtle move that neither of them really expected.
It’s also the start of a series of surprises in the personal lives of Marianne and Tor, whom she happens to meet on the ferry after leaving Ole. He enjoys the ferry as a cruising spot, looking on Grindr for other men on the boat and meeting them in encounters that may turn sexual or be as simple as a conversation. Tor will later have just such a conversation with Bjørn (Lars Jacob Holm), an older psychologist grown weary of his patients’ troubles. But when Tor later sees Bjørn in the hospital, receiving treatment for cancer, he realizes that Bjørn faces a grave problem himself.
The “love” of the film’s title exists in a few different forms, and extends in different directions. There is love between Marianne and Ole, though Mr. Haugerud doesn’t press it into an overly familiar romantic shape, allowing room for Marianne’s skepticism; Ole’s life, as a single father whose ex-wife lives next door, is complicated. The director depicts another kind of love in the relationship between Bjørn and Tor, who tenderly cares for Bjørn after he is sent home from the hospital. Whether the feeling exists in the hook-up that Marianne, inspired by Tor, has with a man she meets on the ferry is another question. It is, certainly, the occasion for a unique intimacy. But the film also explores how such an encounter can prompt a moment of negative self-reflection, as one feels caught in the close gaze of a stranger’s eyes.
There is an unforced structural symmetry in the arcs of Marianne and Tor, as the former rebels against the expectation of monogamy and the latter becomes increasingly involved with one man, albeit not quite romantically. The two of them discuss their lives with a generous openness that feels related to their professions, which confront them daily with the unglamorous, unignorable realities of the human body—its diseases and its malfunctions, its frailty and its flatulence. Yet their conversations don’t feel clinical so much as honest and unjudgmental in the face of varied experience, and both actors bring to them captivating warmth and idiosyncrasy: Ms. Hovig is radiant and unsentimental, and Mr. Jacobsen finds a flirtatious charm and self-possessed maturity beneath his roguishly attractive mien.
Mr. Haugerud allows his film to proceed at an unhurried pace, punctuating scenes with onscreen dates that give it a diaristic quality. The score, by Peder Kjellsby, enriches the drama with burnished tones of fluegelhorn that wouldn’t be out of place in a more typical romance. Yet perhaps that’s the point—Hollywood couples aren’t the only ones deserving of a lush soundtrack. With “Love,” Mr. Haugerud has fashioned a film with a rich complexity of feelings, navigated by people taking full advantage of their own freedoms. It’s the sort of talky European drama that, in its well-expressed thoughtfulness, leaves one feeling strangely refreshed. I’ll happily take two more.
Mr. Barnes is the Journal’s assistant Arts in Review editor.
The Wall Street Journal, 23 mai
‘Nonnas’ Review: Vince Vaughn’s Healing Recipe
Vince Vaughn, in this sincere dramedy, plays a man who opens a restaurant that aims to offer authentic flavors by employing Italian grandmothers.
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“Being John Malkovich,” with its outlandish script by Charlie Kaufman, was one of the more creative and twisted concepts ever to make its way to the screen. So how about a spinoff called “Being Vince Vaughn”? No. Vince Vaughn is usually being Vince Vaughn.
But then something like “Nonnas” comes along and one detects a tampering with the recipe. A dash of poignancy? An intimation of mortality? Based on an actual New York restaurant that hired genuine grandmas to cook genuine Italian food, “Nonnas” is directed by Stephen Chbosky (“The Perks of Being a Wallflower”; the film version of “Dear Evan Hansen”) with undistilled sincerity and dollops of goo. But Mr. Vaughn’s Joe Scaravella, who seems to hew quite closely to the story’s real-life restaurateur, is free of Vaughn-ish smirk. He approaches pathos.
Having tended at home to his beloved mother, Maria (Kate Eastman plays the young version), Joe has been the classic caregiver, his own life on hold. For how long? Liz Maccie’s script doesn’t spell it out, but doesn’t really need to: Joe is nearly 50 years old, now lives alone in Brooklyn, and aside from his job as a mechanic for the city transit system doesn’t have much of a life. His friends are worried. Immediately after his mom’s funeral, his cousin Bruno (Joe Manganiello) and Bruno’s wife, Stella (Drea de Matteo), start lobbying him to use the insurance payout to find something to do, finance something he loves, and give his life some meaning aside from belching buses, a yearning after the food he ate as a kid, and the recipes he never bothered to collect from mom or his own nonna (Karen Giordano). He decides he’ll open a restaurant. On Staten Island.
If the story weren’t based on fact, it would seem even more cookie-cutter. Joe encounters very predictable problems with a business he knows nothing about; he leans on Bruno the construction contractor (is that an Italian cliché?) to direct the heavy lifting at what will eventually become Enoteca Maria; he meets the girl he once stood up for the prom, Olivia (Linda Cardellini), at a farmer’s market. That Joe will become romantically involved with a woman he last saw in high school is more poignant than Mr. Chbosky chooses to make it, though the sense of time lost and regained informs the entire story, as well as Joe’s master plan: enlisting Italian senior citizens who can cook to staff the kitchen of his bistro. He basically wants a family back. He imagines he can re-create one over a stovetop.
It isn’t an entirely outlandish idea. In the world of nonfiction TV, the hosts of “Milk Street’s My Family Recipe,” a spinoff of the cooking show and magazine, refashion recipes that their guest participants remember well, but can’t quite replicate. (It apparently launched in 2022, but seems to have only recently reached this viewer’s PBS outlets.) It is certainly a cliché, but the Proustian-madeleine moment—of tasting something beloved from the past and being overcome by longing—is what the film is essentially all about.
“Nonnas” is in many ways a less sophisticated version of the wonderful 1996 restaurant movie “Big Night” (something punctuated by the brief appearance of Campbell Scott, who co-directed “Big Night” with Stanley Tucci). The nonnas themselves deliver their own nostalgic sensation, a minor Italian renaissance: Brenda Vaccaro is Antonella, Olivia’s friend and one of Joe’s recruits; Lorraine Bracco plays Roberta, a Sicilian ready to revive ancient feuds with the Bolognese Antonella; Teresa, a former nun, is portrayed by a terrific Talia Shire, she of the Coppola clan. The half-Italian Susan Sarandon is Enoteca Maria’s pastry chef, Gia, her cannoli a sweet sensation—maybe as sweet as this movie, one of those rare films a viewer can watch with mom. Or nonna.
Nonnas Friday, Netflixhttps://www.wsj.com/arts-culture/film/nonnas-review-vince-vaughns-healing-recipe-eb750f8a?mod=arts-culture_feat2_film_pos1
The Wall Street Journal, 22 mai
How a French Film Festival Decides the Fate of Movies in America
Cannes was always glamorous—now it determines whether films live or die
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To launch his latest “Mission: Impossible” this week, Tom Cruise strode a red carpet in France in a tuxedo and aviator shades while an orchestra played his franchise’s theme song. In the same setting three years ago, a fighter jet flyover heralded the premiere of his “Top Gun: Maverick.”
The world of movies has gotten more scattered and arguably less relevant in recent years, but the Cannes Film Festival has only grown in influence. To use an Americanism, it has become the Super Bowl of international cinema—one of the last cultural focal points everyone buys into, often for different reasons.
Whether you’re a megabudget Hollywood action movie that needs to overperform everywhere at the box office or, say, a boutique drama from Europe angling for awards glory, Cannes is increasingly the best place to start wrapping yourself in prestige.
“It’s not just another premiere,” Paramount Pictures chief executive Brian Robbins said of the new “Final Reckoning,” Cruise’s eighth “Mission: Impossible” movie over three decades. “It’s actually a real piece of art.” And Cannes, said the studio head, “is a great place to do this if you have the goods.”
This highbrow film conclave, running through next week, has been taking place on the French Riviera since 1946. It’s a fashion runway, a platform for celebrity gawking and a prompt for the annual question: What is the Croisette? (Translation: the city promenade serving as the festival’s grand entrance.)
But mainly Cannes kicks off a cycle of premieres and promotion that culminates in awards season, in which international voters now have more sway than ever—especially at the Oscars. Beyond the festival itself, Cannes is also a marketplace for film buyers and sellers from 140 nations. Collectively it’s a mood setter for the global movie industry, including major issues affecting Hollywood, and this year it’s looking especially complicated.
President Trump gave the ecosystem a shake on May 4 when he announced his intention to slap 100% tariffs on movies “produced in foreign lands.” The announcement sowed confusion and panic in the industry, given the globally interconnected ways movies are made and distributed these days. The industry relies on a crazy quilt of global production, with moviemakers lured to far-flung countries by stories, talent and, above all, cheaper costs. It also depends on an international box office that helps balance the bottom line.
Instead of tariffs, Hollywood is now pushing for greater government tax bonuses to incentivize more domestic shoots. “Runaway production,” the term for movie projects leaving Los Angeles (or America completely) for budget-friendlier places, is just one of the fronts where filmmakers and movie companies are fighting to stay viable.
“Maybe lost in the [tariffs] conversation is the fact that American cinema has been one of our country’s most successful and consistent forms of export, both in terms of business and culture,” said Glen Basner, founder of sales firm FilmNation.
Fueled by a combination of “espresso, rosé and adrenaline,” Basner and FilmNation helped parcel out the rights to the victor in last year’s Cannes festival competition: Palme d’Or prize winner “Anora,” filmmaker Sean Baker’s fairy tale-gone-wrong for a sex worker in New York. About 10 months later, the movie won five Oscars, including best picture.
Films introduced at Cannes in 2024 tallied a record 31 Academy Award nominations and nine wins this year. Those winners included Demi Moore’s horror movie “The Substance,” which was set in L.A. but shot in France. “Flow,” an animated picture from Latvia, earned about $5 million at the domestic box office and beat Pixar’s “Inside Out 2” ($653 million) and DreamWorks’s “The Wild Robot” ($144 million) for best animated feature.
One possible reason for the growing Cannes-to-Oscars pipeline is that the ranks of Academy Awards voters outside the U.S. have increased. The tastes of this contingent, the theory goes, line up with those who select and vote on the lineups at such festivals as Cannes and Venice, which takes place annually at summer’s end.
Film companies have learned to ride this globalization wave. Indie distributor Neon has backed the last five Palme d’Or winners in a row, from “Parasite” (which went to become the first non-English language film to win the best-picture Oscar) to “Anora.”
In the U.S., the Cannes-ification of the Oscars and other awards has added to the disconnect between the movies the masses tend to go for and those that get showered with accolades. (One possible exception emerged recently: Ryan Coogler’s “Sinners,” a hit with critics and in theaters, where its domestic ticket sales outpaced international receipts.)
The festival competition at Cannes opened this week with a volley of rave reviews for “The Sound of Falling.” Director Mascha Schilinski’s second film tells the stories of female characters on a German farm across a century. One critic declared, “cinema is too small a word for what this sprawling yet intimate epic achieves in its ethereal, unnerving brilliance.”
Other films in the lineup include director Ari Aster’s “Eddington,” a drama that digs into the hostilities that boiled over during the Covid pandemic, and stars Joaquin Phoenix, Pedro Pascal and Emma Stone.
Heartthrob actors Paul Mescal and Josh O’Connor may get a “Brokeback Mountain” moment in “The History of Sound,” a period romance between two men who collect field recordings in Maine.
Actors making their debuts as directors include Kristen Stewart (with “The Chronology of Water”), Harris Dickinson (“Urchin”) and Scarlett Johansson (“Eleanor the Great,” featuring 95-year-old June Squibb).
Filmmaker Richard Linklater is competing in the festival with “Nouvelle Vague,” which imagines the making of “Breathless,” the 1960 Jean-Luc Godard film that crowned the new-wave moment. “Nouvelle Vague” is a black-and-white film with French dialogue from a Texan director known for the stoner comedy “Dazed and Confused.”
It’s another example of the film world’s blurring borders, said Cinetic Media founder John Sloss, who has worked with Linklater since 1990’s “Slacker” made the director a champion of the U.S. indie scene. “It’s a bit of a high-wire act,” Sloss said of the risks in premiering “Nouvelle Vague” in France, where the legacy of “Breathless” is sacred. But the team behind Linklater’s film is also betting that it will go over everywhere else, including the director’s home turf.
“It’s a film about young people putting on a show,” Sloss said. “Rick believes Americans will love it.”
Le Figaro, 22 mai
Cannes 2025 : notre critique de Highest 2 Lowest, le disque rayé de Spike Lee et Denzel Washington
Longtemps seuls à porter la conscience noire au cœur de Hollywood, les deux compères se perdent dans ce film qui aligne quelques blagues même pas drôles.
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Si l’aller-retour express à Cannes de Denzel Washington, entre deux représentations d’Othello à Broadway, aggrave un peu plus le bilan carbone du plus grand festival du monde, la star américaine n’a pas fait le voyage pour rien. Il a reçu une palme d’or d’honneur pour l’ensemble de sa carrière, lundi soir, peu avant la projection de Highest 2 Lowest, le nouveau film de Spike Lee, présenté hors compétition. Spike Lee, 68 ans, a fait le show sur le tapis rouge tandis que Denzel Washington, 70 ans, a retenu ses larmes dans la salle.
Ces deux grands cabots ont longtemps été seuls à porter la conscience noire au sein de l’industrie hollywoodienne, ensemble ou séparément (Malcolm X, Glory, Cry Freedom…), aujourd’hui rejoints par d’autres artistes (Ryan Coogler, Jordan Peele, Barry Jenkins, Michael B. Jordan ou le fiston John David Washington). La relève est là mais les deux briscards ne lâchent pas l’affaire. Highest 2 Lowest prouve pourtant qu’il est temps de faire autre chose (théâtre, puzzle, collier de nouilles…).
Un cinéaste pur jus
C’est moins le remake d’un très beau film d’Akira Kurosawa, High and Low (1963) qu’une nouvelle adaptation d’un très bon livre d’Ed McBain, le créateur de la série des 87e district, disparu en 2005. Un romancier new-yorkais pur jus, comme Spike Lee est un cinéaste pur jus. C’est d’ailleurs ce qu’il y a de mieux dans Highest 2 Lowest, ce plaisir à filmer la Grosse Pomme, ville la plus cinégénique du monde, qu’on croirait inventée pour le cinéma. Il se fait attendre. Ici, on est loin du Brooklyn de Do the Right Thing .
David King (Denzel Washington) est un patron de maison de disques avec un penthouse donnant sur Manhattan, une maison de campagne dans les Hamptons, un chauffeur repris de justice (Jeffrey Wright), une femme sublime et un fils de 17 ans fan de basket. Sur le point de racheter les parts de son associé pour garder le contrôle de son label, son fils se fait kidnapper. Le ravisseur demande 17,5 millions de dollars en francs suisses (le poids idéal en coupures de 1000 : 15 kg).
Entre deux blagues pour moquer les Celtics de Boston, Spike Lee filme d’abord un improbable huis clos dans la maison de King, mettant en scène les scènes d’interrogatoire avec la police et les scènes de mélo familial de la même façon, avec une sous-couche de musique épouvantable – on a même cru entendre de la harpe. On dirait un clip philanthropique du couple Obama.
Les choses s’arrangent un peu quand Spike Lee sort dans la rue. Une parade portoricaine accompagne sur un air de salsa une course-poursuite dans le métro. Denzel Washington ne prend pas l’intrigue au sérieux. Il a raison. Sa battle de rap avec A$AP Rocky – M. Rihanna à la ville, sans sa prothèse dentaire dorée – est amusante. Si on aime l’humour de daron qui fait la morale à la nouvelle génération, accablée de tous les maux (réseaux sociaux, arrivisme).
Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 22 mai
In Cannes wird ein Mann unter einer umgestürzten Palme begraben – die wohlfeilen Statements der Stars wirken in diesem Jahr noch aufgesetzter als sonst
Die Stars lassen sich feiern, während sie das Elend auf der Welt anmahnen. Eindrücke vom moralinsauren Filmfestival.
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Ein tragisches Unglück ereignete sich dieser Tage in Cannes, als ein Mann von einer umstürzenden Palme getroffen wurde. Nach einem heftigen Windstoss war die Palme auf dem Boulevard de la Croisette, unweit des Festivalzentrums, eingeknickt. Der offenbar morsche, drei Meter hohe Baum begrub einen Schauspielagenten unter sich.
Über den Zustand des Verunglückten gibt es unterschiedliche Meldungen. Augenzeugen berichteten zunächst von einer Blutlache unter dem Kopf des Mannes, laut einer offiziellen Stelle soll das Opfer jedoch nur leichte Verletzungen davongetragen haben.
Ein amerikanischer Regisseur, der zur Unglücksstelle geeilt war, erklärte gegenüber Reuters, dass er eine Menschenansammlung gesehen habe, einige Leute auch, die gefilmt hätten: «Ich hielt es für eine Paparazzi-Situation.» Im ersten Moment denkt man an einen Star, das ist der natürliche Reflex in Cannes.
Dichtestress im Hafen
Die Croisette im Mai ist ein unwirklicher Ort. Von der Presseterrasse im Festivalpalast geht der Blick über den Hafen, wo es aussieht, als würden sich die Jachten stapeln, Dichtestress an der Marina. Auf der anderen Seite des Gebäudekomplexes, zum Boulevard hin, befindet sich der rote Teppich.
Keine 150 Meter entfernt steht das Hotel Barrière Le Majestic, wo die grossen Namen einquartiert sind. Selbstredend wird die Strecke im Autokorso zurückgelegt. Zu Fuss geht der Star nur an den Fotografen vorbei und die vierundzwanzig Treppenstufen hoch zum Grand Auditorium Lumière. Vierundzwanzig Stufen bis hinauf in den Kino-Olymp.
Die Ironie des Schicksals: Hier geht es um die Palme, während wenige Meter entfernt ein armer Fussgänger fast von einer ebensolchen erschlagen wird.
Im Leben liegen Glück und Unglück oft näher beieinander, als man denkt. Cannes führt einem vor Augen, wie nah. Nicht allein wegen des Opfers der Palme. Oder wegen des Obdachlosen, der um die Ecke des Festivals seine Kartons ausgelegt hat. Stolpern tut man über anderes. Vor allem über die politischen Einwürfe der Stars.
Stars gegen Israel
Die schönsten und privilegiertesten Leute lassen sich feiern, während sie en passant das Elend der Welt anmahnen: Das ist zwar nicht nur in Cannes so. Aber hier hat es oft einen besonders unangenehmen Beigeschmack. Denn vor der glamourösesten Kulisse der Welt wirken die wohlfeilen Statements der Stars noch aufgesetzter als sonst. In Cannes ist vieles Kosmetik, der politische Anstrich erst recht.
Auch dieses Jahr richtet sich der Fokus wieder auf Gaza. Mit Russland mögen sich die Künstler kaum mehr abmühen, gegen Putin zu protestieren, verspricht zu wenig Aufmerksamkeit. Cannes spiegelt den Zeitgeist. Iran ist nur am Rande Thema. Selbst Depardieu bringt die Leute nicht so recht in Wallung. Wer sich heutzutage als Star mit zivilgesellschaftlichem Engagement profilieren will, unterschreibt einen Anti-Israel-Wisch.
Wenn es gegen den Judenstaat geht, ist Verlass auf Richard Gere, Susan Sarandon und Javier Bardem. Im neusten Schreiben, das pünktlich zu Cannes aufgesetzt wurde, betonen auch Pedro Almodóvar, Joaquin Phoenix, Ruben Östlund, Jonathan Glazer und viele andere ihre Verbundenheit mit Palästina.
In Briefform ist der Protest nicht nur bequem, sondern praktisch risikofrei. Niemand muss sich einer Debatte stellen. Andererseits wäre das auch nicht zwingend ergiebiger. Es gibt begnadete Schauspieler, die erstaunliche Mühe haben, sich neben der Kamera zu artikulieren. Javier Bardem oder Joaquin Phoenix auf einem Panel zum Nahostkonflikt nähmen sich skurril aus.
Doch solche Panels gibt es ohnehin nicht in Cannes. In erster Linie wird hier gestöckelt. Gesprochen wird, wenn, dann übers Business. Ausserhalb des Festivalpalasts sind die Länderpavillons aufgestellt, wo sich etwa Produzenten treffen, um Koproduktionen auszuloten. Auch Palästina hat ein Zelt. Vor dem Eingang ist eine Wäscheleine mit Pro-Palästina-T-Shirts aufgehängt, womöglich will man an ein Flüchtlingslager erinnern.
Bereits stattgefunden hat hier ein Treffen von «auserlesenen Schweizer Produzenten mit den aufstrebenden palästinensischen Filmemachern». Federführend bei der Initiative ist der Genfer Regisseur Nicolas Wadimoff, der sich der palästinensischen Sache schon länger annimmt.
In seinem jüngsten Film würdigt er das Palästinenserhilfswerk UNRWA. Ob er auch dessen Mittäter am Massaker vom 7. Oktober thematisiert, bleibt abzuwarten. Der Film hat es nicht nach Cannes geschafft. Ausser mit Solidarität für Palästina tut sich das hiesige Kino nicht hervor. Auch die 78. Festivalausgabe findet praktisch ohne das Filmland Schweiz statt.
Filme ohne Juden
Deutschland ist erfolgreicher. Dort profitiert man vom Holocaust: Die deutsche Geschichte gibt 80 Jahre nach dem Ende des Zweiten Weltkriegs noch immer viel her, was sich kreativ bewirtschaften lässt. Vor allem wenn es darum geht, jüdische Schicksale auszublenden, sind die Filmemacher in ihrem Element. Nicht nur die deutschen, um fair zu sein. Der irritierende Trend begann vor Jahren mit dem «Untergang», Jonathan Glazer trieb ihn mit «The Zone of Interest» auf die Spitze.
Fatih Akin schliesst sich an. «Amrum» erzählt von einem sehr blonden Bengel auf der Nordseeinsel, der der deprimierten Nazimutter helfen will. Die hat ausgerechnet in der Sekunde ein Kind bekommen, als im Radio Hitlers Tod vermeldet wurde. Jetzt hat sie keinen Appetit mehr. Oder allerhöchstens Lust auf ein Weissbrot mit Butter und Honig. Der Bub macht sich auf ins Abenteuer, um ihr in Zeiten der Mangelwirtschaft das Frühstück zu besorgen. Deutsche Kritiker finden das eine grossartige Erzählung, wieso auch immer.
«In die Sonne schauen», der zweite Spielfilm von Mascha Schilinski, hat für die noch grösseren Begeisterungsstürme gesorgt. Der Wettbewerbsbeitrag wabert als assoziatives, streng stilisiertes Drama durch hundert Jahre deutsche Geschichte, wobei mit unvermittelten Zeitsprüngen aus den Leben von vier Mädchen aus vier Generationen auf einem altmärkischen Bauernhof erzählt wird.
Man muss sich einen langgezogenen Film vorstellen. Körnige Bilder, die manchmal im Dunkeln abzusaufen drohen, dann wieder viel Sonne abbekommen. Irgendwas zwischen Ingmar Bergman und Terrence Malick. Wenn man es richtig verstanden hat, geht es um übertragene Schuld und vererbte Traumata, der Holocaust bleibt dabei eine Leerstelle. Sicher hat sich Schilinski etwas dabei gedacht. «In die Sonne schauen» ist ein Film, der seinem Zuschauer zu verstehen gibt, dass er klüger ist als er. Deutschland sieht Chancen auf eine Goldene Palme.
Auschwitz wird gescannt
Kann man noch sinnstiftend von der Shoah erzählen? Wojciech Soczewica ist ein optimistischer Mann. Der CEO der Stiftung Auschwitz-Birkenau ist nach Cannes gekommen, um bessere Holocaust-Filme zu ermöglichen. Oder zumindest wahrheitsgetreuere.
Er sucht nach Geldern. Denn in Auschwitz ist man gegenwärtig dabei, jeden Winkel des Konzentrationslagers zu scannen. «Picture from Auschwitz» nennt sich das Projekt, das Filmproduktionen eine digitale Nachbildung des Lagers zur Verfügung stellen will. Denn das KZ soll in Filmen endlich genau so aussehen, wie es in Wirklichkeit war.
Bedingung ist einzig, dass die Filme auf eine authentische Darstellung abzielen. «Wenn wir überzeugt sind, dass ein Film auf Fakten basiert, vergeben wir die Lizenz», sagt Soczewica im Gespräch mit der NZZ. Nicht jeder Film bekommt sozusagen den Koscher-Stempel.
Einem Tarantino, der die Geschichte des Zweiten Weltkriegs radikal umschreibt wie in «Inglourious Basterds», würde das 3-D-Modell nicht zur Verfügung gestellt: «Unsere Stiftung steht für die Authentizität», betont Soczewica. «Wenn jemand etwas Fiktives erzählen möchte, was nicht den Fakten entspricht, dann ist das unter Umständen auch sehr spannend, aber es wird nicht in Zusammenarbeit mit der Gedenkstätte geschehen.»
Entstanden ist das Projekt, weil Filmaufnahmen in Auschwitz verboten sind. Sie wären schlichtweg nicht durchführbar, wie Soczewica erklärt: «Wir haben jedes Jahr zwei Millionen Besucher, die Zahl wächst. Das sind ungefähr 1000 pro Stunde.» Für Filmteams ist kein Platz. Nicht zu reden vom Schaden, den sie anrichten könnten. Diesen können sie allerdings auch anders verursachen.
The New York Times, 21 mai
‘Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning’ Review: Tom Cruise Defies All
For the eighth installment of this stunt-spectacular franchise, the star returns to fight off A.I. planetary domination, the bends, gravity and maybe mortality itself.
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For nearly three decades, Tom Cruise has been running, soaring, slugging and white-knuckling it through the “Mission: Impossible” series. It’s been fun, on and off, but it’s no wonder he looks so beaten up on the poster for the latest edition, “The Final Reckoning.” Cruise — who turns 63 this year — long seemed impervious to ordinary time, with a boyishness that lasted well into middle age. His early stardom had already granted him a kind of immortality. Yet as the lines on his face discreetly deepened, and he kept pushing himself to lunatic extremes in this series, it seemed as if he were challenging physical death itself.
Cruise is at it again in “The Final Reckoning” — the enjoyably unhinged follow-up to “Dead Reckoning Part One” (2023) — plunging into deep waters, hanging off an airborne plane and insistently defying the odds as well as his own mortality. It’s unclear why the title changed between the two parts. It might have been a marketing decision; dead is a bummer, of course, and the word implied that Cruise’s Ethan Hunt, an American operative extraordinaire, was heading toward the sort of bleak sign-off that capped Daniel Craig’s run as James Bond. Whatever the case, the change suits Cruise’s Ethan, whose abilities have grown so progressively super since the series began in 1996 they seem quasi-mystical.
“Dead Reckoning” ended with Ethan and his team trying to stop an artificial intelligence called the Entity that’s set on destroying Earth. (Why? Why not?) The A.I.’s plan is the ultimate power grab, although it also seems like overkill, given that humanity is already hurtling toward self-destruction. But the Entity’s exceedingly possible mission keeps everyone busy, including Ethan’s right-hand whizzes, Luther (Ving Rhames) and Benji (Simon Pegg), along with his love interest, Grace (Hayley Atwell), and the giddily anarchic one-woman wrecking machine Paris (Pom Klementieff). Mostly, though, the Entity’s annihilating designs mean that Ethan has to step up his game from superhero to global redeemer.
So, once more, Ethan et. al. go unto the breach as they try to stop the Entity, which has thrown the world into chaos, inspired a doomsday cult and is trying to seize the world’s nukes — the usual. One of the dividends of the better big-studio productions is that they tend to be crowded with talented performers who can keep a straight face when delivering nonsense and sometimes bring feeling to the proceedings. So, as the clock runs down, characters enter and exit, including Angela Bassett’s tight-jawed American president and an army of appealing supporting players: Tramell Tillman, Janet McTeer, Shea Whigham, Holt McCallany, Nick Offerman and Hannah Waddingham.
This is the fourth “Mission: Impossible” movie directed by Christopher McQuarrie, who keeps the machinery well-oiled and smoothly running, even when cutting among multiple lines of action. (He shares screenwriting credit with Erik Jendresen.) Shrewdly, he often uses a similar approach when the pace slows and characters convene to explain what’s going on and why (mainly to us), cutting from one person to another, as each delivers a helpful sentence or two. This conversational turn-taking livens up all the information-heavy explanations and helps feed the forward momentum. None of it makes any sense, of course, no matter how sincerely the actors say their lines, yet everything flows.
Logic isn’t the reason movies like this exist or why we go to them, and one of the sustaining pleasures of the “Mission: Impossible” series has been its commitment to its own outrageousness. Cruise’s stunts have always been among the most outlandish and most memorable attractions in the series, which was spun off from the 1960s television show of the same title. He stepped into the role by escaping a wall of water and descending spiderlike into a luminously white, high-security vault, hanging by an unnervingly thin rope. The entire thing popped with cool stunts, striking locations, exotic doings and the sheer spectacle of Cruise’s intense physical performance.
The filmmakers on the first “Mission: Impossible” — it was directed by Brian De Palma from a script by David Koepp and Robert Towne — gave the inaugural production some auteurist credibility, suggesting that this was more than just another Bond knockoff. Other directors consequently signed on, with McQuarrie (who wrote the twisty thriller “The Usual Suspects”) having now directed half the movies. He obviously makes Cruise comfortable; age may have loosened him up, but it’s clear that McQuarrie has, too, perhaps because he knows how to showcase his star’s talents, as multiple flashbacks to their earlier movies in “Final Reckoning” keep reminding you.
Flashbacks in a franchise can be an efficient way to bring both new and returning viewers up to narrative speed. The ones here do just that, but in aggregate, they do double-time as an extended-play highlight reel of some of Cruise’s/Ethan’s greatest hits. These blasts from the past strengthen the franchise’s continuity, and also have a distinctly self-congratulatory cast to them. They remind you that Cruise has had serious (bruised, battered) skin in the game from the beginning. At the end of the first film, Ethan looks wrung out. He’s been through hell, and has a black eye, but just as he settles back, a new mission arrives and the sounds of Lalo Schifrin’s hooky theme music rev up once more.
Why does he keep going? Cruise has been in better, more critically acclaimed movies, but he’s most famous for — his stardom best appreciated in and signified by — the “Top Gun” movies and the “Mission: Impossible” series. In each, his characters demonstrate extraordinary, even preposterous abilities, yet the movies only finally work because Cruise always makes sure that you see them — and him — sweat. He puts in the hard work for these diversions, and he wants you to know it, whether Ethan is baring his nearly naked body, as he repeatedly does in “Final Reckoning,” or is clinging to a biplane in midair, the rushing wind pulling his face into a Francis Bacon-style grimace.
There’s vanity in Cruise’s commitment to extremes, and perhaps mania — who knows? Whatever makes him tick and inspires him to keep pushing and testing his limits is an open question, if presumably less relevant to viewers than whether the movies are actually worth seeing. “Final Reckoning” is flat-out ridiculous, but it’s a model example of blockbuster entertainment at its most highly polished, and I enjoyed it thoroughly, despite its clichés, extravagant violence and gung-ho militarism. Among other things, there is something reassuring in the sight of a diverse group of male and female employees from both the government and military ready to sacrifice all for the greater good.
Male-driven action movies often have a savior complex, with heroes who are beaten and brutalized only at last to rise vengefully triumphant. “Final Reckoning” leans hard into that familiar theme — the team faces betrayal, the fate of everyone on Earth is in Ethan’s hands — which gives the movie a quasi-religious dimension. That’s weird, no doubt, but there’s something plaintive about Ethan’s fight this time because it echoes the urgent struggles of workers in the entertainment industry (and everywhere else) to prevent their replacement by artificial intelligence. For years, Cruise has put on a very good show pretending to nearly die for our pleasure; now, though, his body really does seem on the line.
Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning
Rated PG-13 for action-movie violence. Running time: 2 hours 49 minutes. In theaters.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/14/movies/mission-impossible-final-reckoning-review-tom-cruise.html
Le Figaro, 21 mai
Cannes 2025 : notre critique de La Disparition de Josef Mengele, plongée dans la noirceur
CANNES PREMIÈRE – Le Russe Kirill Serebrennikov adapte fidèlement le roman primé d’Olivier Guez sur la fuite du nazi en Amérique du Sud. Percutant mais dérangeant.
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Dans une université brésilienne, un professeur de sciences exhibe un squelette devant ses étudiants. Cette dépouille était autrefois un homme, leur explique-t-il. Un frisson de gêne secoue l’assemblée. L’homme était surnommé « l’Ange de la mort ». Est-ce que ça leur dit quelque chose ? Aucun n’est capable de répondre. À commencer par les jumeaux dont le professeur confond les noms, ce qui fait rire les copains. En guise de première scène, cette allusion à la besogne horrifique de Josef Mengele qui réalisait à Auschwitz des expérimentations médicales sur les jumeaux déportés apparaît un peu grossière.
Kirill Serebrennikov, cinéaste russe exilé, a choisi cet aparté décalé avant de rentrer poings serrés dans le vif de son sujet : l’évocation du destin de l’un des pires criminels du XXe siècle. Le réalisateur de La Femme de Tchaïkovski et de Limonov adapte le roman d’Olivier Guez La Disparition de Josef Mengele, prix Renaudot 1917, sur la cavale du nazi, enfui en Amérique du Sud. Occasion de faire le portrait d’un vrai pervers mais aussi de raconter en filigrane l’amnésie de l’Allemagne après la guerre et la complaisance des pays sud-américains à l’égard de ces criminels. Son Amérique du Sud est en noir et blanc, quand l’Allemagne nazie est en couleur lorsqu’il évoque, dans une séquence insupportable, le Mengele des camps. Il est bon d’avertir le spectateur que cette seule scène – plutôt complaisante envers la violence qu’elle veut dénoncer – choque dans un film à la tonalité tenue.
Aréopage de fuyards
En 1956, Helmut Gregor, alias Josef Mengele, vit dans la semi-clandestinité à Buenos Aires, ville où on peut acheter Der Weg, journal qui paraît comme si le IIIe Reich ne s’était jamais écroulé. L’ancien médecin d’Auschwitz a retrouvé de l’allant au sein d’un aréopage de fuyards qui rêvent de restaurer le régime de Hitler, fustigeant « ce con d’Adenauer » et la RDA, « une ineptie ». Gregor est pourtant toujours sur ses gardes, de peur d’être démasqué. Ce qui ne l’empêche pas de retourner une fois à Guntzbourg, dans son fief bavarois. Et d’arranger son remariage avec sa belle-sœur, devenue veuve, afin que l’héritage florissant de l’entreprise de tracteurs reste dans la famille.
Le majordome est content de revoir « Monsieur Mengele ». C’est par ces détails qui seraient pittoresques s’ils n’étaient glaçants que le réalisateur parvient à pointer l’ignominie de l’affaire. « Les gens gardent de bons souvenirs de toi, ici », « Tu n’as fait que ton devoir », « La preuve, il n’y a pas de mandat d’arrêt à ton encontre » : ces petites phrases reviennent comme un refrain, dans la bouche de gens droits dans leurs bottes cirées. En Allemagne, des nazis réoccupent peu à peu des postes importants. Mais pas Mengele, bientôt appelé « Peter Hochbichler » pour le couple de fermiers hongrois qui l’accueille comme gérant d’exploitation à 300 kilomètres de São Paulo.
Indécrottable
Ici, plus de salut nazi ni de petite cour en uniforme : l’homme, de plus en plus paranoïaque, fait profil bas, une meute de chiens à ses basques. L’acteur August Diehl incarne avec une constance de marathonien les différents visages du salopard sur trente ans. Par quelque relent nazi, quelque geste déplacé, quelque éructation vociférée, il parvient chaque fois à nous montrer combien cet homme qui vieillit seul reste monstrueux et mérite un jugement. Les chasseurs de nazis n’y parviendront jamais, à l’inverse d’Eichmann, enlevé par le Mossad, jugé en Israël et pendu.
« Mais les Juifs, qu’est-ce qu’ils t’ont fait ? », lui demande son fils Rolf, visiteur clandestin. Il élude, justifie, louvoie, s’innocente avant de repartir dans une énième diatribe antisémite. Indécrottable. Mengele est alors Don Pedro, un vieillard habitant la masure d’une banlieue déshéritée de São Paulo et qui tente de soudoyer sa bonne pour des faveurs sexuelles. Kirill Serebrennikov filme cette déchéance suant la haine et la peur avec une force contenue, une rage rentrée qui percute. Quand d’autres auraient rendu les armes face au personnage.
« La Disparition de Josef Mengele »
La note du Figaro : 2/4
Durée : 2 h 15
Date de sortie non communiquée
The Wall Street Journal, 21 mai
‘The Kiss’ Review: Stefan Zweig’s Drama of Human Folly
Bille August directs an adaptation of a novel by Zweig, following the scandal and romance surrounding a young Danish cavalry lieutenant as World War I begins to engulf Europe.
Full text :
With his dozens of novels and stories, the wide-ranging Austrian writer Stefan Zweig (1881-1942) has been inspiring filmmakers for more than 90 years. The latest of many examples is “The Kiss,” from the eminent Danish director Bille August. As is typical of Zweig’s work, psychological depth combines with suspenseful plotting, in this case to serve a parable about the follies that led to World War I.
An emotionally unstable continent and an equally volatile young woman move in parallel in a tale set in 1914 Denmark, where an impecunious young cavalry lieutenant, Anton (Esben Smed), who struggles for acceptance among his much wealthier peers, is determined above all else to restore family honor after a scandal involving his father. While undergoing vaguely absurd training exercises with his neutral country’s army—he and his fellow officers attack straw figures with swords, seemingly unfamiliar with the concept of machine guns—he assists an elderly driver in getting his car out of the mud. This spontaneous act of kindness turns out to have unexpected consequences.
The grateful motorist turns out to be the local nobleman, Baron Løvenskjold (Lars Mikkelsen), who invites Anton to one of his posh dinner parties. Anton is intrigued by the aristocrat’s beautiful blond daughter, Edith (Clara Rosager), but commits the faux pas of inviting her to dance, not realizing she uses a wheelchair because her back was broken when a horse fell on her. Anton, who is almost tragically nice, sends her flowers in a typically gallant gesture and the two strike up a tender friendship. His fellow officers mock him for his apparent interest in this emotionally and physically damaged woman, whom they mock as “the cripple.”
Mr. August, at age 76 one of Europe’s senior directors, retains the patient, elegant, unshowy style of such highly regarded features as “Pelle the Conqueror,” which won the 1988 Oscar for best foreign-language film, and the Ingmar Bergman-scripted “The Best Intentions,” which was another major success in 1991. Like many other European directors, he took a mid-career detour into bigger-budget English-language productions that turned out unevenly (“The House of the Spirits,” 1993; “Smilla’s Sense of Snow,” 1997). But he returned to his native land, and language, to again make affecting, modest works. He has 12 features to his credit since the turn of the century, and “The Kiss” is another admirable drama that cuts deeply, with an undercurrent of the woeful irony that defined Zweig’s own life. (A Jew who escaped the Nazis, he later died by suicide in Brazil.)
The appeal of Edith’s delicate beauty is self-evident, and it’s easy to picture her as the ballerina she yearned to be. Yet Anton’s pity for her keeps pulling him deeper into her emotional vortex: His finest qualities, taken to extremes, are unhealthy, and Mr. August could have recycled the title “The Best Intentions” for this story. The 1939 Zweig novel that inspired it usually carries the English title “Beware of Pity” (and was previously filmed under that title, in 1946, without the Danish setting Mr. August has introduced). Compassion leads Anton to make decisions that are understandable, virtuous and dangerous.
“The Kiss” depends heavily on the wonderfully nuanced lead performance by Mr. Smed, whose face is a map of swirling currents as Anton tries to balance his urge to give Edith some hope with his instinct to get away from her and her increasingly frightening outbursts of despair. Mr. Smed and Mr. August make us feel what he’s going through and understand his every action as Europe prepares for war and Edith presses for a treatment that will help her walk again. Getting counsel from both the baron and a practical doctor (David Dencik), Anton turns into an expertly crafted example of the perils of being Mr. Nice Guy.
As he keeps walking into his own traps, so does the continent. Though equating the war story with the personal one may seem a bit forced in the abstract, Zweig and Mr. August (who co-wrote the script with Greg Latter) handle them with sufficient delicacy to make the film effective. What might have come across as a soap opera in lesser hands instead feels appropriately weighty. As he steers events toward a devastating climax, Mr. August proves he’s still an able steward of refined human drama.
https://www.wsj.com/arts-culture/film/the-kiss-review-a-historical-drama-of-human-folly-2cb70709
Le Point, 20 mai
Pourquoi « Alpha », le nouveau film de Julia Ducournau, nous a exaspérés
Troisième long métrage de la réalisatrice de « Titane », cette interminable métaphore des années sida, présentée à Cannes, injecte une symbolique lourdingue à un récit poseur et soporifique.
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Grave nous avait séduits. Titane nous avait consternés. Alpha nous a exaspérés. Au moins, dans The Substance, l’an dernier, Coralie Fargeat, la consœur de Julia Ducournau, elle aussi obsédée par le body horror et le cinéma de Cronenberg, n’oubliait pas de nous divertir par un style extraverti à grands coups d’électrochocs gores. De film en film, si une substance semble bien couler dans la veine du cinéma de Julia Ducournau, c’est hélas celle de la prétention pompière et autocentrée.
Joué en criant à pleins poumons ou en multipliant les crises de larmes par ses trois acteurs principaux – la jeune Mélissa Boros, Golshifteh Farahani et Tahar Rahim –, ce parfait prototype de film-français-pour-compétition-officielle-au-Festival-de-Cannes nous plonge dans une dystopie du passé, à la charnière entre les années 1980 et 1990. Dans une ville sans identité battue par un mystérieux vent de poussière rouge, un effrayant virus décime la population, transformant peu à peu les organes internes de ses victimes en argile friable et recouvrant leur épiderme d’un vernis de marbre blanchâtre du plus bel effet. Les trépassés, qui s’accumulent sur les lits de l’hôpital débordé où travaille la doctoresse sans nom (incarnée par Golshifteh Farahani), ressemblent aux gisants des sculptures funéraires de l’art chrétien.
Dans ce monde désincarné, sur lequel nous n’aurons guère plus d’informations (c’est trop vulgaire, vous comprenez, mieux vaut laisser le spectateur dans la purée de pois), la toubib se fait un sang d’encre pour Alpha, sa fille de 13 ans, qui rentre d’une soirée avec l’épaule tailladée d’un « A » manifestement tatoué à l’aiguille non stérilisée. Va-t-elle tomber malade elle aussi ? Des tests s’imposent. Alpha, qui s’éveille à l’amour quand tout s’effrite, est par ailleurs traumatisée depuis son enfance par la toxicomanie de son oncle Amin (Tahar Rahim, délesté de 20 kg, maigre comme un clou), hébergé à la maison et bientôt, lui aussi, contaminé par le mal.
Alpha, pensum bêta par Julia
Tourné dans le plus grand secret, Alpha est, de l’aveu même de la réalisatrice sacrée à Cannes en 2021 pour Titane, une création-catharsis sur les premières années de l’épidémie de sida, qui ont tant marqué son plus jeune âge, lorsque le VIH était encore une force indestructible et inconnue, ravageant sans appel ni délai les vies de malades mis au ban de la société. À travers le destin d’Amin et de sa nièce, Alpha tisse une intrigue doloriste sur le rejet de l’autre, la peur de la contamination et le salut par l’amour. Pourquoi pas ? Encore eût-il fallu que l’allégorie ne se complaise pas autant dans l’opacité poseuse et le refus absolu par Julia Ducournau de greffer à ses exigences artistiques un minimum syndical en matière de crédibilité.
Malheureusement, le scénario d’argile d’Alpha, bien moins malin qu’il ne se croit, se morcelle en moins de temps qu’il n’en faut pour crier « nanar toxique ! ». D’une suffisance vertigineuse, scandé par une musique classique ou électro à l’assourdissant mixage, ce sinistre pensum qui confond mystère et paresse d’écriture nous anesthésie au fil de ses deux heures, s’embourbant peu à peu dans le grotesque. Rahim grimace et gesticule, Golshifteh, au diapason, alterne deux expressions (colère et sanglots) et inutile de charger davantage la barque pour Mélissa Boros.
Le pire du cinéma de Cronenberg
Les fameuses fulgurances visuelles dont l’autrice est coutumière nous tirent, certes, parfois d’une torpeur contagieuse – le film s’ouvre notamment au générique sur un impressionnant zoom numérique dans son titre, la caméra finissant par ressortir par les pores de l’avant-bras d’Amin, criblé de sordides marques de seringue. Plus tard, une saisissante scène de piscine avec Alpha (charmant prénom, bientôt tendance ?), où son sang se mêle au chlore, nous tétanise brièvement et, tel un sursaut inespéré, le temps d’une seconde, la cinéaste touche enfin du doigt son sujet : la panique haineuse provoquée par la hantise de la maladie. Las : l’illusion fait vite plouf.
Quoi d’autre ? À dessein claustrophobique – quasiment toutes les scènes se déroulent en intérieur, les rares extérieurs étant presque toujours filmés de nuit –, Alpha nous étouffe et tue dans l’œuf notre implication émotionnelle à force de scènes inutilement étirées, d’onirisme gonflant, de montage sans queue ni tête (attendez d’endurer le dernier acte…). L’acteur Finnegan Oldfield passe une tête en prof d’anglais gay faisant la classe aux camarades de la gamine, il nous parle de rêve dans le rêve et d’illusion de réalité, les dialogues s’autorégalent de leur subtilité.
Le spectateur, lui, continue de compter les minutes, guettant sans trop d’espoir une piqûre d’adrénaline pour réveiller une trame sous assistance respiratoire. Peine perdue. Titane nous délivrait du calvaire au son de la La Passion selon saint Matthieu de Bach. Galopant comme toujours après le pire du cinoche de David Cronenberg, Julia Ducournau dégaine ici le second mouvement de la 7e de Beethoven, véritable cliché musical du cinéma d’apocalypse, qui nous tabasse à son tour les tympans pour clore un tunnel d’abyssal ennui. Arrêtons les frais : Alpha, palme de la léthargie.
« Alpha », de Julia Ducournau (2 h 08). En salle le 20 août 2025.
The New York Times, Movie Review, 19 mai
‘The Damned’ Review: Unfortunate Sons
In Roberto Minervini’s intimate and impressionistic drama, a group of Civil War scouts faces the harsh realities of the uncharted Montana territory.
Full text :
The skies are overcast and the tone is contemplative in “The Damned,” as a small company of Union Army soldiers sets out in 1862 to explore the dangerously unmapped territories of the American West.
What emerges, though, is more akin to a mood poem than a war movie. In keeping with the socially conscious sensibilities of its director, the Italian-born Roberto Minervini (whose previous work has sometimes probed the forgotten souls of rural Texas and urban Louisiana), “The Damned” is shaped as a wistful and laconic study of the minutiae of survival. Though billed as his first fiction film, it wobbles tantalizingly on a permeable line between narrative and documentary. Unscripted events and largely unnamed characters emerge organically from the director’s offscreen prompts and the men’s immersion in the life of the camp where much of the movie takes place.
This means that, for long stretches, we’re watching the soldiers pitch tents, play cards, do laundry and complain about the deepening winter and declining rations. Embedded alongside the men, we eavesdrop on conversations that range from instructive to confessional, hopeful to cautiously philosophical. They have come from all over, with beliefs as varied as their reasons for enlisting. A golden-haired 16-year-old admits to having shot only rabbits and squirrels before following his father and older brother into the Army. When the three pray together, secure in their faith that the only happiness lies in the afterlife, his innocence is heartbreaking.
If God is here at all, he’s in the details: the pot of coffee bubbling on a laboriously built fire; the dusting of snow on a pitch-black beard; the veins of gold in a lump of quartz.
“This land has it all,” one man marvels, seeing beyond the conflict to the promise of the soil and the wildlife around them. At times, these moments are acutely lyrical, as when we watch a soldier lovingly clean his horse’s head (of mud or blood, we don’t know), then press his forehead against the animal in silent communion.
Politics is almost entirely absent, along with its accompanying animosities. When a Virginian, who joined up in defiance of his slave-owning neighbors, quietly announces that “putting people in chains is wrong,” there is no argument from those comrades who are simply there for the paycheck. By contrast, the ease of the film’s early rhythms and the intimacy of Carlos Alfonso Corral’s images have an almost lulling effect, the sense of tranquillity so strong that when the shooting starts, the shock is real.
For a time, all is chaos, the men frantically running, apparently without direction or strategy. Are they heading toward or away from the invisible shooters? We assume they’re being ambushed by Confederate snipers, or perhaps even the silent cowboys who circled them one day, but the director doesn’t clarify. Pointlessness is his point, as is terror, exemplified by the trembling soldier who desperately hunkers his body against a hillock, the competence and confidence he displayed in earlier scenes already melted away.
Shot in Montana in 2022, using mainly nonprofessional actors (including local firefighters and members of the National Guard), “The Damned” relies on improvised dialogue and a resolute refusal to manufacture tension or good guy-bad guy distinctions. The style is impressionistic and minimalist: Sometimes the only illumination is a flaming torch, the only color Union blue, the only soundtrack the howling of wolves. Cold and hunger and a general aimlessness give the men — and us — time to reflect on the horror of a mission that requires them to kill their fellow countrymen. And when one man remarks that many of his beliefs had later turned out to be false, even the family of Baptists has no answer.
In the movie’s final section, a hushed mournfulness prevails as the dead are buried and the company searches for a route through the mountains. Minervini, who moved to New York just months before the Sept. 11 attacks, isn’t interested in lecturing us on pacifism. Yet as we once again experience a painfully divided nation, we’re also occupying a cinematic space between the past of “The Damned” and the near-future schism of Alex Garland’s “Civil War” (2024). In that space, we can clearly see how far we have come and how little we have learned.
The Damned
Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 29 minutes. In theaters.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/15/movies/the-damned-review.html
The Guardian, 16 mai
Cannes film festival: Two Prosecutors review – a petrifying portrait of Stalinist insurrection
Drawn from a suppressed story by gulag survivor Georgy Demidov, Sergei Loznitsa’s haunting film unravels a terrifying parable of bureaucratic evil
Full text :
An icy chill of fear and justified paranoia radiates from this starkly austere and gripping movie from Sergei Loznitsa, set in Stalin’s Russia of the late 30s and based on a story by the dissident author and scientist Georgy Demidov, who was held in the gulag for 14 years during the second world war and harassed by the state until his death in the late 1980s.
The resulting movie, with its slow, extended scenes from single camera positions, mimics the zombie existence of the Soviet state and allows a terrible anxiety to accumulate: it is about a malign bureaucracy which protects and replicates itself by infecting those who challenge it with a bacillus of guilt. There is something of Dostoevsky’s The House of the Dead and also – with the appearance of two strangely grinning, singing men in a railway carriage – Kafka’s The Castle.
Loznitsa moreover allows us also to register that the wretched political prisoner of his tale is a veteran of Stalin’s brutal battle to suppress the Ukrainian nationalist Symon Petliura. And given the nightmarish claustrophobia and disorientation in the scenes in cells, official corridors, staircases and government antechambers, there is maybe a filmic footnote in the fact that Demidov worked for the scientist Lev Landau, the subject of Ilya Khrzhanovsky’s huge and deeply pessimistic multi-movie installation project Dau in 2020.
The first prosecutor of the title is Kornyev, played by Aleksandr Kuznetsov, an idealistic young lawyer, given a startlingly early promotion to a state prosecutor role – his beardless youth fascinates and irritates the grizzled old time-servers with whom he comes into contact.
He has received a bizarre “letter” from Stepniak (Aleksandr Fillipenko) an ageing and desperately ill high security prisoner in Bryansk – written in blood on a piece of torn cardboard (which has escaped the bonfire that prison authorities make of protest letters like these). The letter alleges that the security services, the NKVD, are without reference to the rule of law, using the prisons and judicial system to torture and murder an entire older generation of party veterans like him, to bring in a fanatically loyal but callow and incompetent cohort of Stalin loyalists.
The prison authorities make the politely persistent Kornyev wait hours before being allowed to visit Stepniak in his cell, transparently hoping he will just give up and go away – Loznitsa shows this weaponised inertia is the traditional official approach to petitioners everywhere in the Soviet Union.
They also claim that the prisoner’s ill health and possible infection mean Kornyev really should “postpone” his visit. It is an obvious obfuscation and yet the idea of getting infected by Stepniak has a weird and queasy relevance.
Horrified by Stepniak’s appalling condition and the evidence of torture, and aware of Stepniak’s own respected legal scholarship and expertise (he is perhaps the second prosecutor of the title), Kornyev gets on a train to Moscow to raise his concerns with the highest possible authority – convinced that the locals will do nothing – and this is the deadpan chief prosecutor Vyshinsky (Anatoliy Beliy) who makes Kornyev wait hours just like the prison governor and listens to his explosive allegations with unsettlingly attentive calm.
From here, there are more bizarre hints of an occult conspiracy to frighten and deter and contain Kornyev – meetings with people who appear to have nothing to do with each other but who, like the various neighbours in Rosemary’s Baby, are in fact connected. On the train to Moscow, Kornyev encounters a garrulous old soldier with a wooden leg who is an eerie doppelganger of the prisoner Stepniak (and played by the same actor) and who makes wisecracks about young Kornyev being a virgin which are to be uncannily echoed later.
In the government building, Kornyev meets a young man who claims to be his law-school contemporary, pointedly asking about this case he is pursuing – but Kornyev can’t remember ever having met him before. And most disturbingly of all, Kornyev runs into a strange man, perhaps a petitioner, who stands up against the wall motionless, evidently paralysed with fear, hoping that no official person will talk to him and who asks Kornyev in a low whisper which is the way out of there. Perhaps Kornyev himself should himself become very inconspicuous and motionless before making his own exit.
It is a very disturbing parable of the insidious micro-processes of tyranny.
Two Prosecutors screened at the Cannes film festival
The Wall Street Journal, 15 mai
‘Mission: Impossible—The Final Reckoning’ Review: The Cult of Tom Cruise
The action franchise’s eighth installment tilts even further into hero worship, as its star races to save the world from nefarious artificial intelligence.
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“Mission: Impossible—The Final Reckoning” (opening May 23) features a key in the form of a cross, a St. Christopher medal and references to Noah’s Ark but reserves its reverence for its onscreen savior, messiah and chosen one. “A Tom Cruise production,” the credits tell us, and you won’t forget it for a single moment.
That need not be a bad thing. The producer-star delivered the two best offerings in the series since the original 1996 feature with 2018’s “Mission: Impossible—Fallout” and 2023’s “Mission: Impossible—Dead Reckoning Part One” (calling the latest edition Part Two might have been a subtitle too many). This time, though, the story falters.
The series has always been an effort in the sometimes-awkward business of stitching together extravagant set pieces, but the eighth installment’s characterizations, dialogue and villainy are all thin, and the blowout sequences aren’t exciting enough. Too often, the self-serving mission of making Mr. Cruise look cool clashes with the audience-serving mission of making sense. The balance between vanity and sanity leans the wrong way.
In what amounts to the second half of a nearly six-hour movie, artificial intelligence has culminated in the Entity, which is seizing control of the world’s nuclear arsenals and intends to obliterate humanity once it conquers America’s. The U.S., led by President Erika Sloane (Angela Bassett), weighs the same options outlined in the Cold War movie “Fail Safe” as a last-ditch effort to avert the worst possible outcome. When the president contemplates nuking the other eight nuclear powers to stave off total war, an adviser informs her this would cause “an unprecedented political crisis.” You think?
But Mr. Cruise’s Ethan Hunt has the two-part cruciform key to a vault on a downed Russian submarine that contains the source code to the Entity, and could simply kill it if he had the thumb drive containing poison-pill software engineered by Ethan’s hacker genius buddy, Luther (Ving Rhames). Gabriel (Esai Morales), the nefarious megalomaniac who had the key in the last movie until Ethan took it, this time steals the poison pill. Moreover, no one knows where the sunken sub is. The only way to get its coordinates is to visit a remote Alaskan island where, amusingly enough, we meet the CIA veteran whose “black vault” was breached by Ethan, dangling like a marionette, in a famous scene in the 1996 movie.
Ethan’s teammates—the pickpocket Grace (Hayley Atwell), tech nerd Benji (Simon Pegg) and assassin Paris (Pom Klementieff)—are back but get very little to do; Mr. Morales gets even less, popping in for just a few minutes of chuckling cartoonishness. Other fine actors such as Nick Offerman and Janet McTeer are reduced to filling out the background. Instead of making them count, the movie keeps its focus on Ethan’s questionable doings. Why would a 60-something man sprint across Westminster Bridge in London? Wouldn’t any automobile be faster? Why would Ethan jump off a helicopter and into the frigid waters of the Bering Sea, miles from anything? Do we really need at least four scenes of a shirtless Mr. Cruise, two of which also feature him in his briefs? For a superficially brainy spy thriller, the movie is really dumb. When Ethan, having shed his scuba gear and nearly naked, rapidly swims up hundreds of feet from the ocean floor to the surface through Arctic waters so cold there are icebergs afloat, the effect is as preposterous as Batman and Robin surfing to Earth from the upper atmosphere in “Batman & Robin.”
If most superhero movies can be dismissed for being smarmy and frivolous, “M:I 8” goes too far the other way, affecting a pose of somber doomcasting that drains most of the fun. There’s a death cult of Entity worshipers who pray for the worst, and events to counter them take on the same overtone as a weird religion, with Ethan being casually told he’d be a good choice to rule the world. The script, by director Christopher McQuarrie and Erik Jendresen, lacks wit, is weighed down by thick gobs of exposition (cut the red wire, grab the glowing thing, etc.) and has a weakness for clunky portentousness. The dialogue features so many howlers it could have been written by the pack of sled dogs who join the mission in Alaska.
The film tries to make a meal out of a leftover with Ethan’s line “Nothing is written” (shamelessly ripped off from “Lawrence of Arabia”), but also contains talk of Ethan as a sort of cult leader destined to deliver us all. A penchant for grandiosity over coherence defines “M:I 8.” Mr. Cruise should remember that his films work best when he’s more of a maverick than a messiah.
The New York Times, 15 mai
Guest Essay : The Indecency of the Cannes Red Carpet’s Decency Rules
Full text :
We regret to inform your Instagram feed that there will be no exposed nipples on the Cannes Film Festival’s red carpet this year. There will, officially, “for decency reasons,” be no nudity at all. No “naked dressing,” then, and also apparently none of the opposite: “voluminous outfits,” including dresses with attention-dragging trains.
All this is new, ever since the opulent 12-day affair that kicked off Tuesday announced these rules just a day earlier. And, given how much fun the celebrities who show up have had over the years wearing not much or too much on the red carpet, in order to look their best and maybe set themselves up for a viral moment, the whole thing seems especially galling.
Yes, it’s inconvenient for the stars, who plan their outfits months in advance. It’s also bad for us, the fans, who live for this stuff that we obviously will never wear.
The Cannes power play is tone-deaf at best and misogynistic at worst. It also comes at a time when women’s autonomy over their bodies is being threatened worldwide. “It’s really not up to any person,” said the stylist Karla Welch, whose clients include Hailey Bieber, Tracee Ellis Ross and Karlie Kloss, “to tell women how to express themselves.” She added, “It’s not up to a governing body to tell us how to be in the world. We don’t need governing bodies governing our bodies.”
“In our red-carpet culture, if a woman just wears a pretty dress, oh, she’s so boring. Oh, she’s so plain,” said Mickey Boardman, the director of special projects at Paper magazine. “Women get crucified no matter what they do. You tell them they have to be one thing, and now you’re punishing them. It’s ridiculous.”
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As for the order to turn down the volume, perish the thought that a woman (or anyone of any gender expression who deigns to don a gown, for that matter) dares to take up a little space, as the Dominican actress Massiel Taveras did last year with an exuberant train that cascaded down the famed Cannes steps. She ended up in a verbal altercation with a security guard after fanning out her frock. The same year, the same security guard stepped on the end of Kelly Rowland’s dress.
I wanted to know if this is where these rules came from — from the bad press Cannes rightly got. But the press office did not directly respond. It did email this to me: “The Cannes Film Festival has made explicit in its charter certain rules that have long been in effect,” adding, “The aim is not to regulate attire per se, but to prohibit full nudity on the red carpet, in accordance with the institutional framework of the event and French law. In cases where garments are excessively voluminous, the festival reserves the right to deny access to individuals whose attire could obstruct the movement of other guests or complicate seating arrangements in the screening rooms.”
I find it hard to believe that the Oscars — not to mention the Met Gala — can accommodate outsize outfits but Cannes cannot. I asked the press office to define “full nudity,” to confirm if sheer outfits were permissible and explain who, exactly, demanded this sartorial manifesto. It has yet to reply.
Particularly frustrating is how the festival is asserting control over how women present their bodies on the red carpet when there are no rules about nudity in the films being screened. Apparently, it’s fine for an actor to strip down when a director demands it, but when she chooses to showcase her body on her own terms, it violates decorum.
The Cannes festival has never been so puritanical. Save the controversy surrounding the expectation that women wear high heels, which led the likes of Julia Roberts and Kristen Stewart to walk the red carpet barefoot in 2016 and 2018, its fashion has been wonderfully rebellious and risqué. Jane Birkin slithered down the famed staircase in a dress slit above her hip in 1974. Madonna stripped down to Jean Paul Gaultier lingerie in 1991. Yet now, in 2025, a dress that slightly exposes an areola is somehow lewd.
“Fashion and entertainment are deeply intertwined,” said the fashion commentator Nicky Campbell. “Cannes is a highly visible global red carpet and has become one of the premier stages to make a fashion statement, and the new dress code is such a hindrance to that.”
Some have suggested that the no-nudity rule is a response to Bianca Censori’s entirely see-through mesh dress at the Grammys. Hanan Besovic, an online fashion commentator, blamed the rise of the right: “Everything is going more conservative.” Cannes, he said, is failing to understand both its guests and its audience. “You’re telling me that people in the film industry don’t know how to make their own choices about what is appropriate?”
And to be fair, there has been something of a naked-dressing race to go viral at major events in recent years. There have been examples “where it’s just gone too far and doesn’t speak to the essence of what the fashion is,” said Sally LaPointe, a designer who frequently incorporates sheer fabrics into her collections. She contends that the style is here to stay. “Women are empowered. And they don’t want to be told what they can and cannot do,” she said.
Cher made history in a translucent, beaded Bob Mackie gown at the 1974 Met Gala, as did Beyoncé in 2012 in her beaded black-mesh mermaid gown trimmed in violet plumes by Givenchy. With a subtle modesty panel around the torso, it was considerably covered up when compared with today’s sheer specimens, but it was a great moment for the “free the nipple” movement.
All that is to say that looks like the gauzy, strategically revealing Saint Laurent dress that Bella Hadid wore to Cannes last year have become commonplace. Saint Laurent is owned by Kering, a Cannes festival partner. At least a few of the label’s spring 2025 runway looks could arguably be categorized as “naked.” These new rules potentially put stars the brand agreed to dress in a diaphanous design in a conundrum.
And at the very least, the timing of the dress-code change was utterly impractical. Halle Berry said she had to swap dresses at the last minute, for fear of violating the volume rule. But Ms. Hadid, arguably, broke the new rules on Tuesday in her revealing Saint Laurent dress.
One could argue that the Cannes memo portends a naked-dressing fatigue, though I’m not sure that whoever’s in charge of the festival dress-code memos is qualified to lord over Western fashion’s cultural and aesthetic shifts. Which raises the question of who is in control here. It even makes one question the authenticity of the festival’s 2018 response to the #MeToo movement and the Harvey Weinstein scandal, which was particularly embarrassing for Cannes, given his deep-seated involvement with the institution. That year Cannes championed female directors, who have been notably underrepresented throughout much of the festival’s eight decades.
Please, governing bodies, stop attempting to dictate how grown women — how grown anyone— must look, dress and behave. Fashion, like film, is about free expression. Don’t ruin everyone’s good time.
Katharine K. Zarrella is a writer and editor and the fashion critic at large at Document Journal. She lectures at New York’s Parsons School of Design and London’s Central Saint Martins.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/14/opinion/cannes-red-carpet-nudity.html
The New York Times, 10 mai
‘Friendship’ Review: Are Men OK?
Tim Robinson and Paul Rudd star in the kind of comedy you watch from behind your hands.
Full text:
One of the most unforgivable (and unforgettable) sins you can commit in youth, say around the sixth grade, happens when you’re desperate to join a new friend group. You want to be cool. You want to be part of their circle. So when someone cracks a joke, you laugh with everyone, then add your own hilarious rejoinder — and everyone just stares. Some invisible line has been crossed. You took the joke too far, and now it’s dead and, with it, your social life, your reputation and your chances of ever being happy again.
This feeling goes a long way toward explaining why “Friendship,” the new cringe-com starring Tim Robinson and Paul Rudd, is often funny and always distressing. The feature debut of the writer and director Andrew DeYoung definitely shares DNA with “I Think You Should Leave,” Robinson’s hit Netflix comedy series, in which he usually plays a guy who can’t quite make out the social cues everyone else seems to follow without trying. So he’s always doing something bizarre, and it’s funny because it’s uncomfortable.
This makes Robinson the perfect, and possibly only, lead for DeYoung’s script. It’s about a man named Craig Waterman who has attained the markers of adulthood — a lovely wife (Tami, played by Kate Mara), a teenage son (Jack Dylan Grazer) who still at least talks to him, gainful employment, a nice-enough house — but is functionally still the sixth grader in that friend circle.
Except Craig, being a certain variety of grown American man, doesn’t have friends, per se. He has Tami, who is almost unbelievably nice to him given he’s sort of a putz: obsessed with avoiding Marvel spoilers, loyal to only one brand of clothing that he apparently sources from a restaurant called Ocean View Dining. His co-workers joke around with one another on their smoke breaks, which he watches from his office window, nose all but pressed against the glass. Then, one day, he meets the new neighbor, Austin Carmichael (Rudd), who turns out to be the coolest guy Craig could imagine. Austin has a mustache. He’s the local weatherman. He plays in a band. He buys antique weaponry. He knows just which rules to break to have a good time.
So Craig develops a kind of obsession with Austin, not exactly the creepy kind but not exactly uncreepy, either. Hanging out with Austin, Craig can see a different future for himself, one in which he is a rad, manly, sought-after leader who jams out on the drums and impresses everyone around him. If Craig hangs out with Austin, people will want to be his friend, too.
At first, it works. But you already know Craig is going to mess this up, in his own special equivalent of that sixth-grade nightmare, and “Friendship” ventures into increasingly surreal territory from there.
Cringe comedy requires a dose of plausibility, the unsettling sense that no matter how weird things get, it’s got the watcher’s basic number. Here that’s accomplished through sheer ordinariness. Craig is a profoundly predictable man, a guy with few ambitions or original thoughts. (On a drug trip, sold to him as profoundly revelatory of the meaning of life, he sees himself ordering a Subway sandwich.) He’s not bad at his job, and he hasn’t screwed up his life. He’s just, well, I don’t know, annoying.
In other words, we definitely know this guy. We’ve probably been trying hard, since middle school at least, not to be him. But Robinson’s performance, which sometimes feels dropped in from a parallel dimension that’s about 3 percent different from our own, injects Craig with a quality most similar to an erratically ticking time bomb. Not having developed an interior life, he’s all vibe and reaction: Shame or provocation might make him shrivel, or explode, or some unimaginable third thing.
That results, at times, in a movie that feels like it’s spinning its wheels, going nowhere for long stretches, with Craig just getting more and more exasperated. Yet that same energy keeps the movie watchable even in its lagging stretches, especially since Rudd is there to provide a foil with a handsome confidence that occasionally takes a weird turn. Anything could happen precisely because there’s barely anything happening. These are ordinary guys, living in middling split-level ranch houses in a suburban subdivision with not much else going on. They could be anybody. They might be us. (In fact, when we glimpse pieces of mail a few times, there’s a street and a town and a country but no state — it’s just a made-up place that could be anywhere.)
Technically the film is about male friendship, about the many elements of modern life that conspire to keep men lonely, from fear of not performing masculinity correctly to a lack of places for the average guy in the suburbs to make a buddy. Yet it felt to me more like a feature-length version of that ubiquitous, half-joking rhetorical question: Are men OK?
Some men are fine, the film suggests, but they’re minor characters. It’s the messed-up ones who force everyone to keep looking at them, listening to them, reacting to them. Guys like Craig clearly just never got the memo. Guys like Austin figured out how to ditch their most embarrassing impulses at some point along the way, but are terrified their cover will get blown. When those particular elements combine in a friendship, the results are lethal. These men are so lonely. Thankfully, in a movie, they’re also really funny.
Friendship
Rated R, mostly for the cringing but also for the kind of stuff desperate guys talk about, and a drug trip involving a toad. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. In theaters.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/08/movies/friendship-review.html
The Economist, 9 mai
Lights, camera, tariffs? Hollywood is in trouble. Politicians should not try to save it
Tariffs will not help, and taxpayers have no good reason to
Full text:
IN “HOME ALONE 2” he made do with a cameo. Now Donald Trump has cast himself in the role of Hollywood’s saviour. “The Movie Industry in America is DYING”, America’s president posted on May 4th on Truth Social, his social-media site. Other countries’ “concerted effort” to lure film production away not only hurts the economy, but also poses a “National Security threat”, he claimed, since foreign films are used as propaganda. To redress these ills, Mr Trump proposed a 100% tariff on films produced abroad.
In Hollywood the presidential post provoked a cacophony of R-rated swearing. The film and television industry is remarkably globalised: a movie might be written in Los Angeles, co-financed by Wall Street and international investors and filmed in several countries. America’s entertainment industry generated $22.6bn in exports in 2023, according to the Motion Picture Association. If America slapped tariffs on foreign films, other countries might retaliate. It is not clear how such tariffs would work, nor whether Mr Trump’s off-the-cuff proposal will ever amount to a real policy, but they could hugely disrupt an industry already reeling from the decline of cinema-going and a rocky transition to streaming.
Cash-strapped studios would have to pass some of the extra costs on to viewers—who have so far benefited most from the internationalisation of film-making. American studios like to shoot abroad because it is cheaper. It also means they can choose from a wider range of striking scenery and work with local experts, which makes for better films. (Britain, for instance, specialises in visual effects.) Most movie fans won’t care whether the next “Avengers” film or Disney remake is shot in Los Angeles, Vancouver or Budapest, so long as the end product is entertaining.
And, thanks to streamers, viewers now have access to a vast array of storytelling from anywhere in the world: the most popular show on Netflix is “Squid Game”, a South Korean dystopian drama that has accrued more than 3.5bn viewing hours since 2021. In this global marketplace of ideas, American producers can find new collaborators and pick up inspiration.
Hollywood may not have liked Mr Trump’s proposal, but many writers, directors and lawmakers agree that he has identified a real problem. Film and TV production fell globally following the writers’ and actors’ strikes of 2023; production in southern California, however, has fallen off a cliff. (The wildfires earlier this year brought another shock.) According to FilmLA, which tracks filming in Greater Los Angeles, the region hosted fewer days of shooting in 2024 than any year except 2020, when most filming was stopped in the pandemic. California is still home to more film and TV jobs than any other American state, but its share is declining.
Hollywood is a catch-all term for the movie industry but it is also a district, where workers at studios can gaze up at the white-lettered sign in the hills. Angelenos have long worried that they are losing their grip on the city’s best-known industry. Production first fled from LA to Canada in the 1990s when the US dollar was very strong, says Kevin Klowden of the Milken Institute, a think-tank in Santa Monica. In the 1990s and early 2000s states such as Louisiana and New Mexico began offering tax incentives to lure production. Mr Klowden notes that “Breaking Bad”, which was set and primarily filmed in Albuquerque, New Mexico, was originally meant to take place in Riverside, California. Eventually, in 2009, California began offering tax incentives of its own.
They are less generous, however, than those on offer elsewhere. Britain offers a tax credit on films and high-end TV at a rate of 34%. This is one reason why blockbusters such as “Barbie”, “Deadpool & Wolverine” and “Wicked” were filmed there. Last year spending on production in Britain reached £5.6bn ($7.5bn), an increase of 31% from 2023; much of it came from American companies.
All the while, California has been getting more expensive. Film industry workers make roughly 20% more in the Golden State than the national average. The workforce is heavily unionised and studios have to pay workers enough to live in one of the least-affordable housing markets in America. Rob Lowe, an actor, has explained why his game show shoots overseas: “It’s cheaper to bring 100 American people to Ireland than to walk across the lot at Fox.”
Some industry workers are leaving LA, slowly eroding the network effects that have helped the city keep other wannabe film capitals at bay. The production decline means spots in writing rooms are scarce. Sean Collins-Smith, a TV writer, lives off his residual payments for his work on episodes of “Chicago PD”, a police procedural. As a writer, he says, “If you don’t work for two or three years, you got no choice” but to leave.
Mr Trump already seems to have backed away from his tariff pledge, but it is unclear what might replace it. Jon Voight, an actor and one of the president’s “special ambassadors” to Hollywood, wants federal tax incentives. The shock that hit Hollywood when Mr Trump’s Truth Social post landed has turned to cautious optimism. Movie moguls would love to receive federal handouts, and California’s Democratic governor, Gavin Newsom, has their backs. Responding to Mr Trump’s tariff proposal, he suggested that Uncle Sam should give the industry $7.5bn a year instead. “Obviously, the president got excited about tariffs,” says Ben Allen, a California state senator who represents much of LA’s west side, “but there are other ways to help.”
Why is Mr Trump interested in helping Hollywood at all? Foreign films are hardly a security threat; as propaganda tools, they are far less potent than social media. Lifting Hollywood over its foreign rivals could be seen as an “America First” policy, and movie bigwigs are pressing this button by likening their woes to those of the rust belt. Russell Hollander, the head of the Directors Guild of America, suggests that if enough film production leaves LA, “Hollywood can become the next Detroit.”
However, creating a federal handout for moviemakers would require congressional approval. Since the industry is concentrated in liberal states such as California and New York, that may not sit well with Republican lawmakers.
Even if Congress did act, California would still have to contend with other states’ incentive schemes. New York is mulling expanding its film tax credit; the Golden State may follow suit. Yet California’s Legislative Analyst’s Office has found “no compelling evidence” that such incentives boost the state’s economy, or eventually pay for themselves. Squeezing taxpayers to cosset the world’s most glamorous industry may prove hard to justify, come election time. In politics, as in the movies, there may be tears when the credits roll. ■
The Wall Street Journal, 9 mai
Trump’s Bad Hollywood Trade Movie
His tariff proposal brings back the poltergeist of economic uncertainty.
Full text:
The stock market was apparently recovering too much confidence in the Donald Trump administration. He fixed that with his spontaneous 100% tariff on foreign movies.
No, it wouldn’t land on Americans the way some of his other tariff acts would. But his Sunday social-media post was an especially shimmering, Technicolor example of Mr. Trump messing with the economy and people’s livelihoods on whim, to satisfy his daily need of attention.
It isn’t what industry representatives were seeking to put U.S. production on an even tax footing with foreign locations.
It’s not practical—movies are digital services whose physical production process, to the extent it still exists, takes place everywhere and anywhere. How even to identify and tax the foreign content of intermediate products as they fly back and forth on the internet?
The instant outcome is already the opposite of the one intended. Nobody will finance a movie until the questions are answered.
As always, if more howlingly than ever, Mr. Trump claims “national security” as a justification.
Translation: Every sector of the economy is at risk—not from foreign enemies but from Mr. Trump.
To boot, Hollywood runs a strong surplus in the U.S. services (not goods) account, $15 billion a year.
This display of Trump impulse control lands just as Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent engages in a concerted effort to suggest Trump trade actions aren’t senseless. Mr. Trump, he told financial luminaries at the Milken conference Monday, may not proceed in a “straight line” but look soon for deals to save America’s relations with its 17 biggest partners (which Mr. Trump has endangered) minus China.
With Beijing, the administration has its eye on a “big beautiful rebalancing,” with China consuming more of what it produces and, implicitly, recycling less into U.S. IOUs to feed our runaway deficit spending.
Strictly speaking, reordering China’s domestic priorities is a delicate matter and not a U.S. job. But grown-ups in the world’s most consequential economic relationship know change must come. Old-age pensions might let Chinese seniors and their adult children consume more. Maybe reform will come to China’s residential permit system, which worsens the insecurity of its 300 million internal migrants. Fixing this, says U.S. economist Yukon Huang, would by itself boost China’s domestic consumption by 2%, enough to offset its current account surplus with the world.
The choice is China’s but a policy-led adjustment would suit both countries better than a willy-nilly, panic-led adjustment. Say: The U.S. running its credit rating into the ground. The dollar crashing. China losing trillions on its U.S. holdings. Politics in both countries becoming unglued. Leadership groups in each finding their positions assailed. Maybe there’s a war, etc.
Plenty of tensions would still exist in U.S.-China relations, but stabilizing economic links would increase the chances of working through them, one can hope.
Mr. Trump decided this week to call The Wall Street Journal “China oriented” (whatever that means) and say it had “gone to hell,” though our actual place of business remains New York City.
Mr. Trump contains multitudes. His trade policy is full of incompatible possibilities: Tariffs will lead to free-trade deals. Wait, tariffs will be permanent and help the U.S. steal our lost jobs back. Wait, no, the jobs will stay in China. The imports will continue. But now we’ll tax them to fix the budget deficit.
Mr. Trump is good at one part of his office. He understands politics well enough to understand that attributing the U.S.-China trade deficit to nefarious foreign practices (which exist) and weak-kneed prior U.S. leaders is a winner for him.
Who’s to say this isn’t a way of accruing political capital from U.S. voters to deal with genuine problems in U.S.-China relations?
Unfortunately, Mr. Trump increasingly is the one to say it. His Hollywood snafu, in the scheme of things, may not ruin Christmas as much as some of his other trade gestures. But it was peculiarly well-shaped to remind a global audience of his propensity for thoughtless action, which hangs over every global business.
In one way this is especially ill-timed. Like all authoritarians, Xi Jinping lays much store by his dignity, and is said to be unwilling to risk a White House comedy show like other foreign leaders have experienced—Canada’s Mark Carney being the latest on Tuesday.
Experts regularly talk about this now as an obstacle to avoiding the near shutdown of U.S.-China trade the U.S. set in motion with Mr. Trump’s 145% tariff.
Mr. Trump is his own worst enemy. His aides have to resort to five levels of chess to make it seem like the administration is nonetheless pressing toward some coherent and useful goal. This miracle they can’t keep pulling off. Someone should remind him that important things are at stake.
The Economist, 8 mai
Back Story : The morals of “Sinners”, a fantasia of vampires and the blues
Ryan Coogler’s hit film is a riff on the uses and abuses of genre
Full text:
Agenre is a shorthand way to describe a story or a song. But as well as a category, it can be a judgment: a tool to elevate some kinds of art and denigrate others. Often the judgment extends beyond the work to the people who make or appreciate it, typecasting or marginalising them by disposition (science fiction is for nerds) or by sex (romance novels are girly). Or by race.
“Sinners”, a box-office smash that has conquered the internet, is a work of multiplicity. Written and directed by Ryan Coogler, it has several endings—sit through the credits if you want to catch them all—and two lead characters, identical twins known as Smoke and Stack. Both are played by Michael B. Jordan (pictured), who lights his double’s cigarette, fights him and cradles him in his arms. Meanwhile the rollicking film slides between numerous screen genres. Indeed the idea of genre, its uses and abuses, may be its deepest theme.
Mr Coogler’s previous titles include “Creed”, a well-received “Rocky” spin-off, and the hit “Black Panther” films. His latest unfolds over 24 hours in 1932. Having fought in the first world war and hustled for Al Capone in Chicago, Smoke and Stack come home to Clarksdale, in the Mississippi Delta. The pair of dandyish toughs buy an old sawmill and hastily convert it into a juke joint. The headline act on opening night is their cousin Sammie (Miles Caton), an aspiring bluesman nicknamed Preacher Boy on account of his godly father.
So far, so historical drama-ish. The story alludes to the toils and traumas of the segregated South, such as sharecropping, chain gangs and lynching. The landscape is bloodstained, figuratively and, on the barn’s floorboards, literally. (The Ku Klux Klan features as well, in a sequence in which “Sinners” morphs briefly into an action flick.)
Genre-wise, however, it is only warming up. The setting is a clue to a zany swerve: Clarksdale is where, meeting the devil at a crossroads, the bluesman Robert Johnson is said to have traded his soul for his talent. Here the fiends are vampires, who besiege the juke joint and chomp the necks of its patrons. “Sinners” thus joins recent books and productions—such as “The Trees” by Percival Everett and the TV series “Lovecraft Country”—that use the supernatural to suggest the grotesqueries of America’s racial past. This is a strand of history that some politicians want to scrub from curriculums, museums and ultimately memory. They are failing.
So “Sinners” is part gangsterish period drama, part vampire horror, with a grenade’s-worth of action movie thrown in. But it is a musical too. A bravura medley of cinema genres that are typically kept apart, it is also a riff on the musical sort.
The film is a homage to the Delta blues, a monumental art form forged in grinding adversity. In a bold fantasia in its middle stretch, Sammie’s performance at the juke joint conjures up the spirits of the antecedents of the blues, and of its progeny, among them West African dancers and a DJ. Sammie’s music is a triumph, yet it is imperilled. His preacher father disapproves of it. Then there are the vampires.
They are musicians themselves; their taste is Irish folk. But they covet the blues. “I want your stories and I want your songs,” their leader growls. The vampires are predatory and appropriative, just as other, predominantly white styles of music, from rock‘n’roll to country, preyed on the blues, profiting from its rhythms and chords. “White folks, they like the blues just fine,” a character says. “They just don’t like the people who make it.” Succumbing to the bloodsuckers means compromise and loss.
Still, a bite from the vampires has an upside—a nuance that helps make Mr Coogler’s wild movie a profound one. It isn’t just that you might live for ever. In a film with a keen interest in who pays whom and how much, the vampires have gold. Above all, they offer a seductive musical camaraderie; join their coven, and you slip off the constraints of genre.
Genres are a way to see the world and respond to it. Each has a canon, conventions and dignity—in “Sinners”, especially the blues. But genres are also simplifications. After all, it may take more than one screen formula and mood to evoke a person’s story, let alone a country’s. And they can be divisive, splitting up art forms that are as much alike as distinct, and splitting up people with them.
Stack’s old flame (Hailee Steinfeld) is a mixed-race woman named Mary who passes as white. “What are you?” asks Sammie, trying to pin her down. “I’m a human being,” Mary tells him. ■
The New York Times, 7 mai
Wim Wenders on Where the War in Europe Really Ended 80 Years Ago
In a short film and in conversation, the German filmmaker ponders the meaning of freedom, the complacency of peace and the new insecurity from Russia’s war and Donald Trump.
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Wim Wenders, the renowned German film director, is nearly 80 years old, as old as the peace in Europe that followed the capitulation of the Nazi regime.
“From my childhood onward, I have lived 80 years in peace,” he says in a short film he has directed to commemorate the end of World War II. But now, with a war in Ukraine that he calls “a war against Europe,” Wenders says that the stakes have rarely been higher.
“Eighty years after the liberation of our continent, we Europeans are realizing again that peace cannot be taken for granted,” he says in the film. “It is now up to us to take the keys to freedom into our own hands.”
In an interview in his Berlin office, Wenders said that the decades of peace “defined my life,” as the war had defined the life of his parents. His father, an army surgeon, spent five years at the front and was the only one of his class who did not die there, Wenders said. “I had the privilege to be among the first generation of Germans who lived for 80 years in peace,” he said. “None of my ancestors had that privilege.”
Europe and Germany are crammed with varied efforts to remember the end of the war this week, including somber memorial events at concentration camps like Dachau and Bergen-Belsen. But Wenders’ film is a rare personal and political testament from the man behind award-winning movies including “Paris, Texas,” “Wings of Desire” and “The American Friend.”
The new film is less than five minutes long and called “The Keys to Freedom,” a moody, meditative visit to a little-known spot where history was made: a small school in Reims, France, where at 2:41 a.m. on May 7, 1945, the German army signed its unconditional surrender in front of allied commanders. The school, now the Lycée Franklin Roosevelt, then housed the headquarters of Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, the Supreme Allied Commander, Europe.
Today there is a small museum in the school called the Museum of the Surrender, which includes the top floor map room where the commanders worked and the capitulation was signed.
When Eisenhower and his team left the school, they handed the keys to the city’s authorities, and they are now displayed in a small display case at the museum. “The commander in chief returns the keys to the mayor of Reims and says, ‘These are the keys to the freedom of the world,’” Wenders says in the film. “I was very touched by the sight of these keys, even though now they’re just keys in a small museum.”
Wenders wanders the museum, looking at other exhibits and chatting with current students. The surrender is recaptured through archival footage of the day’s events and a modern reconstruction, with actors.
The Soviets insisted that the German high command repeat its surrender in Berlin, which they had conquered. That event took place on the following evening, May 8, which is generally recognized as the moment the war in Europe officially ended. For years, under Soviet occupation, the building where the agreement was ratified was known as The Museum of the Unconditional Surrender of Fascist Germany in the Great Patriotic War 1941-1945, but after German reunification it was renamed Museum Berlin-Karlshorst.
“The idea was to go where the real thing was negotiated and signed, not just ratified, like what then was repeated on May 8, in Karlshorst — but the real McCoy,” Wenders said. “A place in France to which I owed that freedom in which my life has taken place.”
Wenders, who was born in August 1945, became a key figure in what was known as the “New German Cinema” movement of the 1960s and ’70s, an influential art house revolution by the postwar generation. In recent years, he has turned toward documentaries, which are less complicated to fund and get greenlit these days, he said. He narrates “The Keys to Freedom” in three languages, German, English and French, and said he considered it a political film that looked back to his earliest work documenting German protests against the war in Vietnam.
The film was sparked by an idea from Germany’s foreign ministry. Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and the re-election of Europe-skeptic President Trump, it has been looking to be more forthright in its public messaging, especially about German values and the country’s commitment to European security, said Peter Ptassek, a senior diplomat in charge of strategic communications.
The ministry approached Wenders, who agreed to work for free, as did most of his team. The ministry provided “under 100,000 euros” (about $113,000) for the project, to help pay for technical staff and production, Ptassek said.
“With the war in Ukraine and what’s happening now in the U.S., we realized we had to raise our voice and explain ourselves,” Ptassek said. “If you don’t explain what you’re doing, you lose trust.”
“‘The ‘Keys to Freedom’ is a symbol that fits so well,” he added. “Eighty years of American protection no longer seem reliable. We have to take these keys and assume our responsibility.”
Wenders hopes the film will speak to young people, but he has doubts. Even the French students in the school in Reims think of the war as ancient history, he said. “They are the third generation living in this peace, and therefore they take it for granted,” he said. “So it makes it easy to believe that this is eternal.”
The shoot in Reims “made me acutely aware how precious freedom can be,” Wenders said. “In my life too, I had taken it for granted, and seeing that little war room made me realize how fragile it really is.”
Talking to the students, he said, “made me realize that it’s quite a job, politically in Europe at this moment, to make people even take the word freedom seriously. Even the word doesn’t mean much because they know nothing else. So that’s why I wanted to keep the film really open at the end,” he said, to present the idea that “we have to be aware of the fact that Uncle Sam isn’t doing our job for very much longer, and we might have to defend this freedom ourselves.”
Steven Erlanger is the chief diplomatic correspondent in Europe and is based in Berlin. He has reported from over 120 countries, including Thailand, France, Israel, Germany and the former Soviet Union.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/05/movies/wim-wenders-the-keys-to-freedom.html
Le Point, 1 mai
« Les Linceuls » : le dernier film de David Cronenberg divise la rédaction
CRITIQUE. Dans « Les Linceuls », David Cronenberg raconte l’histoire d’un veuf qui observe, via un écran, la décomposition du corps, six pieds sous terre, de sa défunte épouse.
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Présenté en compétition officielle au Festival de Cannes en 2024, le dernier film de David Cronenberg, Les Linceuls, sort enfin sur les écrans, ce mercredi 30 avril, près d’un an après. Ici, le metteur en scène livre un long-métrage sur le deuil, teinté d’autobiographie.
Mais le résultat n’a pas eu l’heur de plaire à tous les journalistes de la rédaction du Point. Les avis sont très partagés.
Contre : David Cronenberg se perd
Ça commence bien : le patient a mal aux dents. « Le chagrin pourrit les dents », dit-il à son dentiste, qui le croit sur parole. Il s’appelle M. Karsh (Vincent Cassel), inconsolable depuis la mort de sa femme, Becca (Diane Kruger). Pour s’occuper, il tient un luxueux restaurant qui donne sur un cimetière. Le détail a son importance. Pour conjurer son chagrin, il a eu l’idée de mettre au point une technique qui permet d’observer en direct la décomposition des cadavres. Ce qu’il a fait avec sa femme en l’enveloppant dans un linceul high-tech qui lui donne des airs de zombie. Sur la pierre tombale, un écran dernier cri diffuse les images de la défunte. Ça le rassure.
Problème : M. Karsh, qui est abstinent depuis son veuvage, ne dort plus la nuit et rêve que sa femme, nue, vient lui rendre visite. Tous deux parlent des jours heureux. Rien que de très normal jusqu’au moment où le veuf solitaire s’aperçoit que neuf tombes ont été profanées, dont celle de son épouse. Par qui ? Pourquoi ? Serait-ce l’œuvre d’espions russes ou chinois ? Toute cette histoire qui fleure le complot l’excite au plus haut point.
C’est là où David Cronenberg, 82 ans et toujours le même sens du morbide, intervient sans trop savoir où il va lui-même, multipliant les fausses pistes, les rebondissements prévisibles, les références à ce body horror qui est sa marque de fabrique. Pour l’anecdote, on sait qu’il a récemment perdu sa femme Carolyn d’un cancer et a écrit d’ailleurs un bon roman, Consumés, beaucoup plus pertinent que la soupe qu’il nous sert ici en images, avec des dialogues aussi creux que plats.
La suite des Linceuls ? Croquignolesque. Le veuf a une belle-sœur, toiletteuse pour chiens, tellement excitée par cette histoire de cadavres profanés qu’elle est capable de se substituer à sa sœur disparue – ce qui prouve qu’elle a bon cœur. De quoi redonner le moral à son beau-frère, qui continue d’enquêter. En chemin, il croise des personnages improbables, une Asiatique aveugle, un chirurgien sans états d’âme…
Bref, on patauge dans une intrigue fumeuse et bavarde où s’entremêlent l’IA, l’écoterrorisme, l’ésotérisme, la dictature des écrans et toutes sortes de clichés maniés avec un brin d’ironie par un maître de cérémonie qui s’offre ici une forme de thérapie de groupe.
Vincent Cassel, cheveux gris et mine grave, se donne de faux airs de Cronenberg et Diane Kruger, qui a perdu un bras, n’a pas l’air de bien comprendre ce qui se passe.
Passé presque inaperçu au dernier Festival de Cannes, dont il est un habitué (Crash, Prix spécial du jury 1996, Spider, 2002, History of violence, 2005), David Cronenberg s’est crashé avec ce thriller sentimentalo-érotico-fourre-tout et a dû attendre un an avant de sortir en salle, ce qui n’est jamais bon signe. Très tendance depuis ses débuts avec son obsession marquée pour le sang, les corps disloqués, les têtes explosées, David Cronenberg, le chantre de l’horreur clinique, justement oscarisé pour La Mouche (1986), est arrivé au bout de son processus créatif. Du coup, sa méditation au milieu des morts et des fantômes nous fait bâiller.
Pour : un thriller parano et désespéré
Lors du Festival de Cannes 2024, Les Linceuls s’est fait complètement éclipser par The Substance. Le body horror féministe de Coralie Fargeat est reparti avec la reconnaissance de la critique et le prix du scénario, tandis que le film de David Cronenberg s’est fait laminer et a dû attendre près d’un an pour sa sortie française. Pourtant, Coralie Fargeat s’est contentée de copier-remixer l’œuvre de Cronenberg, tandis que le cinéaste de 82 ans a livré un de ses films les plus personnels, les plus désespérés, avec en bonus la scène la plus traumatique du Festival de Cannes.
Immense cinéaste, le Canadien David Cronenberg – la plus belle coupe de cheveux du 7e art avec David Lynch – a façonné nos rêves depuis le milieu des années 1970. Chantre de l’horreur parasitaire, papa du body horror (« Je ne sais même pas ce que cela veut dire », déclare l’intéressé en se marrant), de la violence et de la sexualité maladive, il a accouché de séquences qui ont marqué les spectateurs du monde entier au fer rouge, un peu comme l’œil ouvert au rasoir de Luis Buñuel ou le monolithe de Stanley Kubrick.
Quelques exemples ? Les parasites à la forme phallique de Frissons ; les têtes explosées de Scanners ; la cassette vidéo insérée dans l’abdomen de James Woods dans Videodrome ; l’accouchement d’une larve géante dans La Mouche… Alors qu’il a débuté dans le cinéma genre avec des œuvres bourrées de sexe et de violence (« Le genre permet de faire passer plein de choses en contrebande. Qu’est-ce que La Mouche, sinon l’histoire d’un scientifique qui s’éprend d’une femme, tombe malade et meurt ? Qu’est-ce qui va produire un truc pareil ? »), il est devenu au fil des années l’auteur célébré de Faux-semblants, du Festin nu, d’A History of Violence, de Cosmopolis…, un cinéaste à la fois visionnaire et prophétique, abonné aux plus grands festivals.
En 2014, David Cronenberg arrête le cinéma pour s’occuper de sa femme Carolyn, en train de mourir d’un cancer. Il écrit un excellent roman, Consumés, puis sort de sa retraite cinématographique, en 2022, avec le très étrange Les Crimes du futur, interprété par Viggo Mortensen, Kristen Stewart et Léa Seydoux, où il mixe sexe et bistouri, douleur et orgasme, et transforme les épreuves traversées en œuvre d’art.
Il revient aujourd’hui avec Les Linceuls, dans lequel il expose son chagrin après la mort de son épouse, en 2017, son impossibilité à retourner dans le monde des vivants. « J’ai écrit ce film alors que je subissais le contrecoup de la mort de ma femme. Ce drame m’a touché très profondément et ce qui devait être une exploration technique est devenu, peu à peu, une exploration émotionnelle et personnelle. Je crois avoir déjà dit que mon film le plus autobiographique était The Brood (Chromosome 3, 1979). Même si c’est un film d’horreur, il parle d’un divorce compliqué impliquant un enfant [à l’époque, sa première femme était entrée dans une secte avec leur fille et David Cronenberg était parti rechercher son enfant, NDLR] et révèle certains de mes sentiments, ma vie intérieure. C’était mon film le plus autobiographique jusqu’aux Linceuls. Quand ma femme est morte, j’ai voulu être enterré avec elle. Impossible de la laisser partir… »
Alter ego de Cronenberg, Vincent Cassel, habillé en full Saint Laurent (producteur du film), incarne un homme d’affaires inconsolable depuis la mort de sa femme. Pour tenter de lui survivre, il se lance dans une entreprise de pompes funèbres du troisième type, avec caméras HD dans les cercueils qui permettent d’assister à la décomposition du cadavre en temps réel sur son smartphone. Bientôt, il découvre que plusieurs tombes ont été profanées, que les caméras ont été hackées.
Et c’est parti pour un thriller d’espionnage spectral, avec complots obscurs dans un futur proche à la fois quotidien et subtilement différent. Dur à financer, le film devait à l’origine être une série produite par Netflix, qui a vite abandonné à la lecture des scripts bizarres de Cronenberg. Et le projet a été sauvé par le producteur Saïd Ben Saïd (Maps to the Stars, Elle…), avec Vincent Cassel qui a remplacé Viggo Mortensen, initialement prévu.
Malgré son petit budget, David Cronenberg prouve qu’il est toujours un maestro du cinéma et sidère avec sa science du hors-champ, ses cadrages au cordeau, la puissance de la narration, sa direction d’acteur, son ironie mordante ou son montage qui file à 200 à l’heure. Mais David Cronenberg a changé, comme son cinéma. Avec Les Linceuls, le cinéaste de la chair et du corps morcelé délaisse les visions prophétiques de Videodrome ou le sexe mécanique de Crash. Ici, il n’est question que de souvenirs, d’amours perdues, de l’impossibilité de faire son deuil, de décomposition. Avec le linceul comme métaphore du cinéma.
« D’une certaine façon, les suaires de mon héros sont des procédés cinématographiques. Ils enregistrent un cinéma d’après la mort, un cinéma de la corruption du corps. Il m’arrive souvent de regarder des films pour retrouver des morts, les voir, les entendre. Le cinéma est une machine à faire apparaître des fantômes, des êtres humains après leur mort. Le cinéma est un cimetière, il faut accepter de vivre au milieu des tombes. » Sous la forme d’un best of désenchanté, avec des références au Festin nu, à Faux-semblants, aux Crimes du futur, DavidCronenberg embarque son spectateur au pays des morts, et génère une incroyable sensation d’étrange étrangeté, où même l’apesanteur semble être différente…
D’ailleurs, le film est tellement décalé qu’il s’apparente parfois à une comédie. « J’ai été un peu déçu par la réception du film à Cannes. À Toronto ou à New York, les gens dans la salle se marraient tout le temps. La vie est absurde et il vaut mieux en rire. Je pense d’ailleurs que l’on peut envisager pas mal de mes films comme des comédies. »
Néanmoins, le metteur en scène génère l’effroi comme personne et parvient plus d’une fois à crucifier son spectateur dans son fauteuil. Mais, alors qu’il y a quelques mois il nous déclarait bientôt adapter son roman Consumés, il a annoncé fin avril au Los Angeles Times qu’il envisageait d’arrêter le cinéma. « Le monde n’a pas besoin de mon prochain film. » Même si ses fans sont bien sûr persuadés du contraire, Les Linceuls pourrait donc être l’œuvre ultime et testamentaire de cet authentique génie du 7e art.
The Guardian, 1 mai
Martin Scorsese announces film that will feature Pope Francis’s ‘final interview’
Aldeas – A New Story documentary to examine work of organisation pontiff founded to connect young people around the world
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Martin Scorsese has made a documentary with the late Pope Francis that will feature conversations between the pontiff and Scorsese, including what the film-makers say was the pope’s final in-depth on-camera interview.
Aldeas – A New Story will detail the work of Scholas Occurrentes, a non-profit, international organisation founded by the pope in 2013 to promote what it termed “Culture of Encounter” among youth.
Part of that organisation’s work has included film-making, under the Aldeas initiative. The documentary will show young people in Indonesia, Gambia and Italy taking part in the program and making short films.
Aldeas Scholas Film and Scorsese’s Sikelia Productions, which announced the film on Wednesday, said the documentary would be “a testament to the enduring belief that creativity is not only a means of expression but a path to hope and transformation”.
Before his death, Pope Francis called Aldeas “an extremely poetic and very constructive project because it goes to the roots of what human life is, human sociability, human conflicts … the essence of a life’s journey”.
No release date was announced for the film.
Scorsese said: “Now, more than ever, we need to talk to each other, listen to one another cross-culturally. One of the best ways to accomplish this is by sharing the stories of who we are, reflected from our personal lives and experiences.
“It helps us understand and value how each of us sees the world. It was important to Pope Francis for people across the globe to exchange ideas with respect while also preserving their cultural identity, and cinema is the best medium to do that.”
Scorsese met numerous times with Pope Francis over the years, and their conversations sometimes informed work undertaken by the 82-year-old film-maker of The Last Temptation of Christ and Silence.
When Francis died on 21 April, Scorsese remembered him as “in every way, a remarkable human being”.
“He acknowledged his own failings,” he said. “He radiated wisdom. He radiated goodness. He had an ironclad commitment to the good.
“He knew in his soul that ignorance was a terrible plague on humanity. So he never stopped learning. And he never stopped enlightening. And, he embraced, preached and practiced forgiveness. Universal and constant forgiveness.”
He added: “The loss for me runs deep – I was lucky enough to know him, and I will miss his presence and his warmth. The loss for the world is immense. But he left a light behind, and it can never be extinguished.”
A conclave to elect a new pope is scheduled to begin on 7 May.
The Guardian, 30 avril
Thunderbolts* review – Florence Pugh is saving grace of Marvel’s hit-and-miss mess
The Oscar nominated actor is the most impressive member of a ragtag Suicide Squad-esque team in an often charmingly unusual yet still baggy adventure
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Thunderbolts* can be messy. Not just the movie, with its clumsily forced narrative beats and whiplash tonal shifts. But also, its title characters, the broken and lonely souls who ditch the colourful costumes and wear their emotions on their sleeves, as if it’s their brand.
These reluctant heroes, led by Florence Pugh’s Yelena Belova, the troubled sister to Scarlett Johansson’s late Black Widow, are defined by how much they need therapy. They wrestle with themselves more than the bad guys, in a way that’s more pronounced than the most unstable among Marvel’s stable of wisecracking world saviors. They’re endearingly vulnerable, at times devastatingly so, and yet still fun and exciting enough to save Marvel.
The globe-dominating franchise, biding its time until the next wave of Avengers movies, has been in desperate need of saving, what with recent misfires like The Marvels and Captain America: Brave New World. And Thunderbolts, which happens to be the best thing to come from the brand since WandaVision (still the high watermark), gets the job done.
You would be forgiven if you’re wondering who the hell the Thunderbolts* even are. The title stylized with an asterisk playfully winks at the general air of uncertainty around them. In the comic books, Thunderbolts started out as a series where, in the Avengers absence, villains disguise themselves as heroes. Here they’re a Suicide Squad-like team up consisting of villains and antiheroes, repurposed supporting figures from some of Marvel’s more forgettable movies and TV shows.
David Harbour returns as Yelena’s dad Alexei Shostakov aka Red Guardian, who has been slumming it as a limo driver ever since the events in Black Widow, while readily on-call for hero duty. Wyatt Russell’s John Walker, the disgraced Captain American replacement, who was fired after he murdered an unarmed insurgent in The Falcon and The Winter Soldier, also checks in for duty. There’s also Ant-Man and The Wasp’s villain Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen) and, the most popular among them, Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan), the former Winter Soldier. He’s all too familiar with the redemption journey the Thunderbolts, all haunted by sins from their past, are embarking on. But this time, the redemption is two-fold. It belongs to Marvel too.
I would be remiss not to point out that this franchise has a pretty good track record with B-teams like this. The whole MCU (Marvel Cinematic Universe) got off the ground with leftovers like Iron Man, Captain America and Thor, after all – when more popular heroes like Spider-Man and the X-Men had been loaned out to other studios. And when these would-be Avengers became the dominant force in entertainment, the Guardians of the Galaxy, complete with a machine gun toting raccoon and a tree voiced by Vin Diesel, came out of left field to grow into fan favourites. It’s as if, when Marvel is unburdened by familiarity and the entitled demands of fans, they can approach something, dare I say, original.
OK, maybe original is too much, then and now. Thunderbolts is more like a fresh spin on the familiar Avengers formula, one that, as Pugh inferred in an interview with Empire Magazine, borrows some trendy touches from indie A24 movies. The latter studio is behind Midsommar, the gruesome thriller where Pugh came on hard with the trauma, and Oscar-winner Everything Everywhere All At Once, which casts a large shadow over the plot and climactic action in Thunderbolts.
The action, so often imbued with and even led by personality, immediately feels different from its opening frames, which actually boasts captivating aesthetics – a rarity in the Marvel universe. “There is something wrong with me,” are the first words we hear from Pugh’s Yelena, as she teeters over the edge of Merdeka 18, one of the world’s the tallest building. She takes a deep and meaningful breath, as if she’s comfortably embracing death (and this won’t be the first time she does that), before leaping off the ledge.
She’s not taking her own life, but throwing herself into combat, engaged in impressive acrobatic choreography that’s often shot from a distance or even overhead, as if disembodied, giving us the space to observe its thrills while also reflecting where she’s at emotionally. She’s talking about her feelings while throwing roundhouses. Her dry internal monologue riddled with flip gallows humour that fits the mood, as if she’s detached from those emotions she identifies in comical though not necessarily healthy ways.
Her mission is to destroy evidence, covering the tracks for Julia Louis-Dreyfus’s scheming CIA director Valentina Allegra de Fontaine, who Congress has in the hot seat for her questionable tactics. On another such mission, Yelena, along with fellow covert operators Ghost and John Walker, are themselves the targets. They’re sent to take each other out. After a nifty little brawl, they decide, despite their antisocial behaviour, to work together instead.
They also happen upon Bob, who Lewis Pullman plays as an undefined mass of anxieties and yearning. He’s a top-secret human guinea pig, genetically engineered with cataclysmic superhuman abilities, which, as you would expect, goes bad. Here, Thunderbolts borrows a little from Josh Trank’s Chronicle, which was also about giving superpowers to someone in crisis.
The eventual showdown between the Thunderbolts and Bob’s supervillain side the Void, who consumes humans in dark shadows, is ambitious if also ungainly, taking place largely in surreal internal spaces that Yelena amusingly dubs “interconnected shame rooms”. The characters battle their emotions, fighting for healing, as the movie tries Everything Everywhere-style to wrestle some theatricality out of all this. That climax makes for an admirable attempt at doing right by the movie’s mental health themes, which Thunderbolts, more often than not, doesn’t earn.
It’s already hard to take this stuff seriously in a franchise trying to earn some goodwill as it nudges our attention towards upcoming Avengers movies. Thunderbolts often irritates because the depression and trauma the movie supposedly grapples with so often lives on the surface, like easy characters traits that are spoken out loud or worn like another costume fitting.
But if it ultimately works, it’s all due to Pugh, who can wrestle sincerity out of a screenplay (and a franchise) that has so little, capturing a whole emotional arc in just her moments of silence. She’s a superhero performer, easily navigating the tricky balance between cheeky Marvel-brand humour and genuine pathos.
Thunderbolts can be messy, sure. Pugh is the kind of star who can thrive in such mess.
Thunderbolts is out in US and UK cinemas on 2 May and showing in Australian cinemas now
https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2025/apr/29/thunderbolts-review-florence-pugh-marvel
The Wall Street Journal, 29 avril
‘Sinners’ Is The Movie Film Nerds Have Been Waiting For
Ryan Coogler’s horror film about Mississippi vampires starring Michael B. Jordan is a technical feat. ‘They’re our Scorsese and De Niro combo.’
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Kory Nicholoff could have seen “Sinners” in a movie theater in his hometown of Detroit. Instead he drove nine hours round trip to see it in Indianapolis.
He wanted to watch Ryan Coogler’s horror film about vampires and blues music in the most expansive, high-fidelity version available. The IMAX theater at the Indiana State Museum was one of only eight venues in the whole country with a super deluxe film print of “Sinners” loaded in its gargantuan projector.
“If I were to go watch the movie in just a regular aspect ratio, I’d be missing out on so much image, so much detail,” Nicholoff said.
Film nerds—including new converts—are helping to power “Sinners” at the box office, where it has been No. 1 two weeks running, tallying a total $123.2 million in about 3,300 theaters in the U.S. and Canada. IMAX’s 400 screens accounted for about 23% of the film’s domestic gross this weekend, up from 20% over the Easter holiday.
The movie’s moment was created in part by superfans who are seeking out the picture in different release formats and discussing technical specs like the number of edge perforations per film frame. They’re buying premium tickets for repeat viewings, and they’re chewing over the nuances in Coogler’s imagery and the deeper meanings in his story, which deals with the ancestral power of music in the face of oppression.
Nicholoff’s experience, including $21 each for tickets plus concessions and a hotel stay, added up to “the most expensive moviegoing trip I’ve ever taken, but it was well worth it,” he said. “I personally was in tears at the end of the movie.”
Set in Mississippi in 1932, “Sinners” stars Michael B. Jordan in dual roles as twins named Smoke and Stack. They tap gifted blues musicians to pull a crowd at their new juke joint, which gets overrun by vampires drawn to the music for more sinister reasons.
Coogler is a 38-year-old director who proved himself as a franchise player with the “Rocky” spinoff “Creed” and two “Black Panther” blockbusters for Marvel.
But original stories made for the big screen have had a tougher time succeeding of late, as studios and filmmakers spar over which movies belong in theaters versus streaming. Coogler has joined a small group of directors whose releases signify cinematic events. He shot “Sinners” on film using cameras favored by such directors as Quentin Tarantino and Christopher Nolan, a mentor to Coogler.
With Warner Bros., he released “Sinners” in five different formats. For his audience, that tapped into the kind of collector mentality that drives Taylor Swift fans to buy several editions of the same album and sneaker-heads to camp overnight at stores offering rare shoe drops.
In the versions playing in IMAX theaters (until later this week), the proportions of the picture on screen change during key scenes. As characters drive through endless cotton fields or share a supernatural music experience in the juke joint, the image expands from a horizontal strip to fill the entire 100-foot-tall screen.
Coogler primed people for such cinematic bells and whistles with a 10-minute tutorial released on the internet a few weeks ago. In the video, he breaks down various picture dimensions (aka aspect ratios) and different types of film stock, from the skinny Super 8-millimeter variety once used in home movies, to the wide stuff Coogler used for the highest resolution, which he dubbed “the big-boy format.”
The goal of the Kodak-sponsored video was to promote “Sinners,” but it also turned Coogler into the internet’s cool film professor, thanks to his easy explanations and whiteboard diagrams.
As one YouTube commenter put it, “Ten minutes and I feel like I earned some college credits.”
The viral video caused Nicholoff, 38, to consider Indianapolis for his first long-distance movie destination. He’s a self-described film geek, but his fiancé, Molly Ondersma, is not. “My response after seeing the video was, so when are we leaving for Indy?” she said, adding that Coogler’s “excitement was palpable, and very contagious.”
Autumn Durald Arkapaw, the cinematographer who shot “Sinners,” said the director was the same way on set, down to the way he rallied cast and crew.
“He’ll always say, ‘Big movie, guys, big movie!’ And then we’ll roll the camera,” she said.
Durald Arkapaw, who also shot Coogler’s second “Black Panther” movie, is one of the director’s repeat collaborators. Coogler has directed five features starring Jordan.
With “Sinners,” Durald Arkapaw became the first woman to shoot with an IMAX film camera, whose heft she compares to that of a mini fridge. The gear raised the stakes for capturing anything from close-ups to a vast landscape at sunset.
“You have that camera on a crane or your shoulder, and the world just narrows into this one moment in time as you hear the film roaring through the gate,” Durald Arkapaw said. “It feels like it has its own heartbeat.”
She and Coogler shot most of the movie using more traditional cameras loaded with wide-gauge film, but for certain moments in the story, they switched to IMAX for a taller picture. (In non-IMAX theaters playing the film in a fixed aspect ratio, viewers don’t see the expanded edges of those scenes.) The first occurs in the film’s opening scenes, when a blues singer called Preacher Boy (Miles Caton) stumbles into his father’s church with a broken guitar neck clutched in his hand and bloody claw marks on his face.
Inside a white church full of Black worshippers garbed in white, Durald Arkapaw recalled, “I didn’t feel like I was shooting a movie anymore. I felt like I was there.”
The way she sees it, moviegoers are now seeking out the same kind of immersive experience in theaters from a director they’ve come to trust.
To get good seats for the only IMAX venue in New York City with the deluxe film print of “Sinners,” siblings Ralphio and Juliano Louis had to wait for a weekday showing. At 10 a.m. last Wednesday, they were among roughly 600 people filling the biggest theater at the AMC Lincoln Square 13 on the Upper West Side.
“It’s cine-MA!” 31-year-old Ralphio said after the show. “Coogler and Michael B. Jordan, they’re our Scorsese and De Niro combo. Generationally and of course for Black people.”
He dissected standout scenes with his brother and discussed their plan to see the movie again, but at an Alamo Drafthouse venue in Brooklyn that was projecting a different film format.
Then they’d be covered, as 27-year-old Juliano put it, with “the most perfect, ultimate, exquisite way to see the movie.”
Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 25 avril
Das Böse kommt mit dem Banjo: «Sinners», ein kurioser Country-Zombie-Film, begeistert die Massen
Ein neues Genre ist geboren. Nennen wir es Blood’n’Blues.
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Was ist das für ein Film? Wie nennt sich so etwas – ein Country-Zombie-Movie? Bluegrass-Horror? Dem Regisseur Ryan Coogler gelingt mit «Sinners» das Kunststück, eine Geschichte über Folkmusik in ein Vampirgemetzel umschlagen zu lassen. Das Böse kommt hier mit dem Banjo. Vorschlag für die neue Genre-Bezeichnung: Blood’n’Blues.
Es sind die frühen 1930er Jahre, Clarksdale, Mississippi: Verkörperung des Guten ist der Pastorensohn Sammie (Miles Caton). Ein «black kid», dessen liebster Besitz eine Gitarre ist, die von Charlie Patton persönlich stammen soll, der Ikone des Delta Blues. So zumindest haben es dem jungen Sammie seine Cousins erzählt, die Zwillinge Smoke und Stack (beide gespielt von Michael B. Jordan).
Diese sind zurückgekehrt aus Al-Capone-Chicago, wo sie sich einen Namen als Gangster gemacht haben. In Mississippi kaufen sie einem ekligen Ku-Klux-Klan-Boss eine alte Scheune ab, um einen «Juke Joint» zu eröffnen, eine Musikkneipe für Schwarze. Und Sammie soll zeigen, was für ein begnadeter Blues-Gitarrist in ihm steckt.
Das Problem ist: Der Junge ist zu gut. Gleich zu Beginn des Films hat eine Stimme aus dem Off davor gewarnt, dass es Musiker gäbe, die so talentiert seien, «dass sie den Schleier zwischen Leben und Tod durchstechen» würden. Ihre meisterlichen Klänge sollen die Kraft haben, die Geister der Vergangenheit und der Zukunft zu beschwören.
Dämonisches Country-Trio
Es kommt, wie es kommen muss. Am Abend der Eröffnung des Juke Joint klopfen, angelockt von der Musik, Untote an der Tür. Drei Weisse, die zunächst so tun, als wären sie ein freundliches Country-Trio. «Wir glauben an Musik und Gleichberechtigung», sagt der Banjospieler mit dem stechenden irischen Blick (Jack O’Connell). «Können wir nicht wenigstens für eine Nacht alle eine Familie sein?» Hinter dem antirassistischen Geschwätz steckt dämonische Hinterlist.
Offenbar dürsten die Weissen nach dem Blut der Schwarzen. In «Sinners» steckt ein Rassismusdrama. Aber ein komplexeres, als man auf den ersten Blick denken könnte. Denn wer zum Zombie wird, findet sich tatsächlich in einer gleichberechtigten Familie von Untoten. Die Gebissenen wollen dann den andern das Zombie-Wesen schmackhaft machen: Lohnt es sich, sich beissen zu lassen? Ist «Sinners» ein subversiver Film darüber, was man geben muss, um sich zu integrieren?
Oder handelt er von der Identitätspolitik, die sich antirassistisch gibt, aber eine Horde von hirntoten Mitläufern produziert? Ist es gleichzeitig nicht auch ein Film über kulturelle Aneignung, und die weissen Musiker wollen die schwarzen, die so viel talentierter sind, kreativ aussaugen?
Mit Knoblauch gegen die Vampire
Es lässt sich viel hineinlesen. Atypisch viel fürs amerikanische Gegenwartskino. Ryan Coogler schert sich nicht um Eindeutigkeiten. Der Genre-Mix ist das eine. Wie der Regisseur ihn dramaturgisch aufzieht, erstaunt auch. Bevor ein selbstironisches B-Movie daraus wird – inklusive Knoblauchzehen-Ausdrücken gegen die Vampire –, zieht sich die Geschichte gemächlich dahin. Nebenfiguren werden eher umständlich eingeführt, dem Cutter hat niemand Druck gemacht.
Offensichtlich durfte sich Coogler nach Grosserfolgen wie «Creed» und «Black Panther» alle Freiheiten herausnehmen. Eine gute Stunde lang liegt dieser Western auf der Lauer. Um nicht zu sagen: Er dümpelt dahin. Aber allzu schlimm ist das nicht, darin zeigt sich der Unterschied zu Netflix: Im Kino kann man nicht wegklicken, man bleibt sitzen. «Sinners» («deutscher» Titel: «Blood & Sinners») begeistert jedenfalls die Massen. Seit 2019 ist kein Film, der nicht auf einem Comic oder etwa einer Barbiepuppe basiert, erfolgreicher in den Kinos gestartet. Hollywood wird garantiert darauf aufbauen. Auf dieses neue Genre namens Blood’n’Blues.
The Wall Street Journal, 24 avril
‘The Wedding Banquet’ Review: A Farce With Feelings
Bowen Yang, Kelly Marie Tran, Lily Gladstone, Han Gi-chan and Youn Yuh-jung star in a sentimental remake of Ang Lee’s 1993 comedy about tangled relationships and a green-card marriage.
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Ang Lee’s 1993 film “The Wedding Banquet” starts from a gag premise. A Taiwanese man living in New York is in a gay relationship but still closeted to his parents, who are pressuring him to marry; to appease them and help a poor Chinese woman get a green card, he agrees to legally binding (if romantically fraudulent) nuptials. But when his parents arrive from Asia they expect a real ceremony, and so the farce—and the drama woven into it—escalates. Though not among Mr. Lee’s very best films, it’s impressive for how it wrings something genuine out of what might, in other hands, have felt like little more than a sitcom.
If “The Wedding Banquet” has now not fallen into those hands, exactly, it has nonetheless suffered a degeneration, courtesy of director Andrew Ahn’s present-day remake of the same name. While it arrives at a time when retreads and resurrections are all the rage, reviving this particular plot doesn’t seem like the worst idea—see how another story of love and deception, the Miklós László play “Parfumerie,” became Ernst Lubitsch’s classic “The Shop Around the Corner,” then the jewel of a musical “She Loves Me,” and finally Nora Ephron’s AOL-era rom-com “You’ve Got Mail.” Yet “The Wedding Banquet” has been awkwardly contorted to fit the world of today, with flat direction and a cast that largely flounders in a muddled middle ground between antic comedy and sentimental drama.
That cast is led by two couples: Bowen Yang and Han Gi-chan as Chris and Min, and Lily Gladstone and Kelly Marie Tran as Lee and Angela. The former couple lives in a ramshackle backyard residence that’s part of the latter’s Seattle home, with the four of them a loose-knit family, principally linked by the longtime friendship of Chris and Angela.
The quartet becomes ensnared in a farcical fix vaguely resembling the original’s when Min, the scion of a wealthy Korean business dynasty who has rejected his inherited path in favor of a career as an artist, is told by his grandmother (Youn Yuh-jung) that he must return to Korea. He wishes instead to stay in the U.S., and soon proposes to Chris, who says no—he thinks he’s being used, despite Min’s protestations of true love, and is afraid of being the reason Min’s family will learn of their child’s sexuality, of which they would almost certainly disapprove. Lee and Angela, meanwhile, are trying to have a baby through in vitro fertilization, but the process has repeatedly failed them and they can’t afford another attempt. So Min proposes instead to Angela; he’ll get a green card and, in return, pay for Lee and Angela’s IVF.
The logic of all this is a bit strained, partially because in updating the 1990s premise Mr. Ahn and his co-writer, James Schamus (a longtime collaborator of Mr. Lee’s who worked on the original), have had to account for the new reality of same-sex marriage. The refurbished concept thus heavily depends on Chris’s ambivalence, here shallowly performed by Mr. Yang. Funny enough on “Saturday Night Live,” where he has been a cast member since 2019, he hasn’t noticeably improved as an actor since his previous collaboration with Mr. Ahn, the feeble comedy “Fire Island.” This leaves the drama’s central dilemma without much power.
The film glimmers with signs of life upon the arrival of Min’s grandmother, Ja-young, who flies in from Korea to investigate Min’s bride and plan the ceremony—which will happen whether the young “lovers” want it to or not. Ms. Youn, who won an Oscar for 2020’s “Minari,” brings a wise, wonderful naturalism to the role; she’s an actor who can elevate a scene by virtue of her quiet attentiveness alone, though she can be slyly comic, too, and often in the same breath. She also shares some lovely scenes with Joan Chen in the part of Angela’s enthusiastically gay-friendly mother, May, who in an amusing inversion of the norm is horrified by the idea of her daughter marrying a man.
The younger members of the cast are unfortunately done in by the plot’s histrionics, which entail lots of plainly emotional conversations about relationships in which one person usually ends up saying something hurtful and then yelling “Wait!” after the other storms off. It’s never very persuasive, and surprisingly lachrymose for a film being sold as a rom-com.
That’s not to say that a comedy like this should shy away from weightier emotions. Here, though, they are dully meted out for some 100 minutes amid half-baked attempts at hilarity, with little evident art to the coherent construction of the whole. And so “The Wedding Banquet” is at times mildly funny, at others mildly moving, and throughout yet another case of a reboot gone awry.
The Wall Street Journal, 19 avril
How ‘A Minecraft Movie’ Won With Memes and Deliberate Stupidity
The video-game adaptation succeeded at what cinema struggles to do consistently: sell gobs of tickets and get young people into theatersFull text:
In its second weekend in theaters, “A Minecraft Movie” passed $550 million in global ticket sales to officially become the second-biggest video-game movie ever and Hollywood’s top-grossing release of 2025.
Unofficially, it’s the crowning of cinema’s meme era. Fueled by a barrage of inside jokes shared by the masses who play Minecraft or at least live online, the movie succeeded at what Hollywood struggles to do consistently: sell gobs of tickets and get young people into theaters.
For Generations Z and Alpha, to whom the virtual world of Minecraft belongs, the movie adaptation will be remembered as the thing that united them in real life to shout the words “chicken jockey” together.
Among them: 20-year-old Davian Rodriguez, wearing a slime-green Minecraft blanket over his shoulders, superhero style, at a Regal multiplex in Secaucus, N.J., on Sunday afternoon. With six family members stocked with concessions, he was preparing to see Jack Black and Jason Momoa run around a realm of blocky pigs and sheep and zombies for a second time.
His first viewing was a wilder scene. At night at a nearby theater on opening weekend, popcorn flew as people screamed out lines of the characters’ dialogue—which the audience already knew from videos recorded by other moviegoers for social media.
The most viral of those videos were chaotic, showing groups of teens and tweens leaping up and chucking food. Other videos offered rankings of the movie scenes that triggered these responses, topped by the big-screen appearance of the chicken jockey: a marauding zombie baby mounted on a chicken, a fan favorite in the Minecraft game. Some videos showed police responding to theaters and a live chicken reportedly smuggled in by moviegoers in Utah.
All this drove more people to theaters so they could experience and document the memes for themselves.
“We all recorded it,” Rodriguez said.
Minecraft, developed in 2009 by a Swedish game designer, puts players in a geometric landscape where they roam freely while building and excavating, constructing whatever they can imagine with stockpiled tools and materials. They avoid green assailants called creepers and other threats. Other than that, the point is to make stuff and hang out with other players.
Rodriguez got into Minecraft around age 7. He will turn 21 in June (“but I look like I’m 12,” he said) and still re-immerses himself in the game for stretches of a month or more.
“We grew up with this,” Rodriguez said. “Now the little kids understand, too.”
“The Super Mario Bros. Movie” from 2023 holds the record for the highest-grossing video-game adaptation. But that Nintendo game had decades-worth of fans and a built-in adventure plot. As intellectual property, Minecraft has more in common with Barbie, a doll synonymous with childhood but with a blank slate in terms of story. Director Greta Gerwig’s “Barbie” movie was a smash hit in 2023 and had smart things to say about gender roles and beauty standards.
“A Minecraft Movie” won by being knowingly stupid. That’s because director Jared Hess, who made a goofy touchstone movie for millennials with 2004’s “Napoleon Dynamite,” understood the assignment.
Hess built the movie around Black, who delivers every line full tilt. He plays Steve, the normally silent character players use in the game, and sings a catchy song about cooking poultry with hot lava. Momoa, wearing a fringed pink jacket, plays a gamer who peaked in the ’80s. The movie establishes a parallel reality with a few minutes of voice-over explanation by Black—“Turns out, we opened a portal to another dimension…”—before setting its characters loose.
Older viewers, including parents accompanying their young kids, have found themselves baffled when audiences recite (and, in some theaters, freak out over) seemingly random lines. Like when Black declares, “I…am Steeeve.”
“It’s not for them. It’s for us,” said 13-year-old Jackson Hamilton, who was with four friends and free of parental supervision at the Secaucus theater, where there were 22 showtimes scheduled on Sunday.
The film has become a generational referendum on how to behave in public. Plenty of people have gotten frustrated and annoyed by audiences hurling popcorn at screens. But owners say that’s been rare, and pointed to the upside: cinemas packed with the young people who don’t show up with any regularity.
“If we have to pop more popcorn and sweep up more of that popcorn at the end of every showtime, man, it’s a small price to pay for sold-out houses,” said Paul Farnsworth, executive director of communications and content at B&B Theatres, an independent chain in 16 states.
After a sleepy start to the year, theater owners and Hollywood studios—especially Warner Bros., which released “A Minecraft Movie”—still get to say that films create communal experiences. Even as young audiences are probably already moving on to the next trend.
“The shelf life on these memes, it’s short,” Farnsworth said. “But in the meantime, we’re just along for the ride.”
The Guardian, 18 avril
‘The grief takes your breath away’: how death transformed a loving family – and shaped a remarkable film
Nik and Maria Payne were raising their ‘wild and free’ children in the Norwegian countryside when cancer turned their lives upside down. The reluctant stars of A New Kind of Wilderness talk about a world without Maria
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Peace hangs over a farm in rural Norway. The last of the melting snow lingers in hummocks and bikes are strewn outside the Payne family’s small rented cottage. Nik Payne materialises from behind the barn where he has been feeding the cows. One of his three children, Falk, 12, is lying on the sofa with a fever and a Biggles novel; later, Freja, 15, and Ulv, nine (known as Wolf or Wolfie), return from school. Their home is as warm and chaotic as any family’s – boots and coats strewn in the hallway, a fridge covered in photos, shelves of books – but with a few differences: there is no television and behind the living room door is an unobtrusive, very personal shrine.
The Paynes find themselves the reluctant stars of a film, A New Kind of Wilderness, which has won awards at Sundance and other festivals around the world. This documentary begins, deceptively, as Variety put it, “like Swiss Family Robinson updated for the era of Instagram cottagecore”. The children, with their older half-sister Ronja, are being raised by Nik, an Englishman, and his Norwegian wife Maria to be “wild and free”: home-schooled, creative, growing their own food, living closely and gently with nature.
Then tragedy strikes. In 2019, Maria falls ill with cancer and dies, aged 41. With sensitivity and intimacy, film-maker Silje Evensmo Jacobsen follows what happens next as the grief-stricken Nik tries to stay true to the beliefs and daily patterns of living he created with Maria, home schooling his bereft children and trying to protect his family. I defy anyone to watch it dry-eyed.
Now the Paynes are travelling the world, attending Q&As at film festivals where the documentary has been rapturously received. At their first festival, they all watched the film again with the audience. “That was a mistake, because it still affects us in many ways and we’re fighting back the tears,” says Nik. “Now we sometimes go in for the last 10 minutes.” Is it traumatic to relive their tragedy? “I see it as good, a cathartic process, bringing it up again,” he says. “Grief is an ongoing thing. Grief changes you for ever. It’s part of you for ever but it’s not the defining part.”
The film is so intensely moving perhaps because the people at its heart are not showy or spectacular. Nik, who makes yoghurt and bakes bread as we chat in his kitchen, is a private, deep-thinking man who radiates self-sufficiency. Watching him grieve on film is agonising.
“At the start, the grief takes your breath away. You’re left gasping for the next breath. The only thing you can do is just breathe. It’s the contemplation of having to endure things for a long time that becomes unbearable, not the thing itself,” he says. “It was so important for me that I had the kids. You haven’t any choice but to get up. It’s impossible to be miserable all the time because they come up with spontaneous joy. They are in their grief in a different way, for shorter periods. They don’t sit in it, like we do.”
He and Maria met through a mutual friend when Nik, who had grown up on a dairy farm near Chester, worked as a flying instructor in Portugal. “We really hit it off,” he says. Soon after, he visited her in Norway. “Within six weeks, I’d moved over.” Maria’s daughter from an earlier relationship, Ronja, was four at the time, and the three of them chose to live in the countryside; 364 days after Nik moved to Norway, Freja was born. They bought a smallholding and Maria taught photography and film-making, and then started a blog about their life. “I was the one who did the farm and grew the food,” says Nik.
Jacobsen saw Maria’s blog and in 2014 made a pilot film about the family living close to nature. No broadcasters picked it up, but when Jacobsen got back in touch after Maria’s death, Nik decided to let her into the family’s shattered life because Maria would have wanted it. “For me, it was a completely unnatural thing. Maria was more extroverted, more into film-making, and had wanted to start this project,” he says. “In her blog, she shared everything about our lives – the good stuff but also the hard stuff, including her own illness. She was very honest, so I decided to go for it as a kind of legacy for her. Maybe it will help someone out there.”
What emerges is a series of dilemmas as harsh reality challenges Nik’s pure ideals, particularly his quest for self-sufficiency and a creative education for his children. In the absence of Maria, he tries so hard to provide everything for them: he grows food, cooks, brushes Wolfie’s long blond hair and teaches them at home even when he knows his Norwegian is not quite up to scratch. But he must also earn a living. Did he reach a point where he was overwhelmed by trying to do it all? “Probably every day, and then I had to start again the next day. That’s why I had to send them to school.”
This is a climactic moment in the film. Did sending them to school feel like a defeat? Or doing the right thing? “It’s a continuous feeling of defeat or disappointment. They really did enjoy the home schooling and they would have liked to continue. I had hoped that I could give them that, but I couldn’t see a way to do it.”
Despite their initial fears, the children settle into mainstream education, although this forces another uncomfortable confrontation with reality when Freja brings home a school iPad (all Norwegian children are issued them). Many tech-sceptic parents will recognise the grimace on Nik’s face when his children huddle round the iPad in rapture as Freja plays a game.
It’s heartbreaking how alone Nik appears at this time. He had some counselling while Maria was dying but it was halted rather abruptly and, as stubbornly self-reliant as ever, Nik vowed to become his own therapist. “Maria always talked about ‘doing the inner work’. For years, I didn’t know what she was talking about, but I started to, slowly but surely.” What about friends? Talking wouldn’t have helped, he says. “I was just alone. It’s the loneliness of the last speaker of a dead language. That’s how I felt.”
It was sometimes comforting having the film-maker in their home. “Silje was very good – she came and hung out with us without filming and became a friend I could talk to off camera,” he says. But Nik worried about exposing the children. “She wanted to film how Freja was feeling, and I had to put my foot down and say, ‘I don’t want you to do any more now.’ There’s a scene where Freja has read a letter from Ronja and I came in because I just wanted to check Freja was all right. Often I’d be hiding outside the bedroom if she was being talked to by Silje, just to …” He tails off. “We all enjoyed having Silje around most of the time, but there were definitely times when it was, ‘Ohhhft, I could do without that.’”
Being filmed selling their dream farm was one of those moments. Nik’s labouring and tree surgery couldn’t pay their mortgage. All this pain is leavened by beauty and humour, much of the latter provided by Wolf. When Falk mourns their farm for having everything, Wolfie chips in: “But not pet whales.”
While Freja and Falk are cautious and thoughtful, like their dad, Wolfie is a bundle of energy, arriving home from school on his bike like a whirlwind before performing multiple somersaults on the trampoline.
“You need some comedic relief in a movie like that, I think,” says Freja of her little brother, who has, according to Nik, “been eating his weight in pancakes and jam” at festival hotel buffets. “The fun part [of the festivals] is when they call up your name if you’ve won something,” says Wolfie, who points to a gold starfish-shaped gong from Egypt and another award from Hungary on their windowsill. The film has been shown on Norwegian television and is now being released in Japan, where their chic Nordic knitwear (all knitted by Granny – Maria’s mother) has proved particularly popular.
For much of the two years Silje filmed the family, Nik assumed that if the project was ever finished it would play at some obscure eastern European film festival “watched by three people, one of whom is asleep”. He first saw it at home by himself and “blubbed all the way through. It was difficult to be objective, to see what sort of film it really is, but I was happy there wasn’t anything in there I couldn’t stand behind.” He had no clue it would be so well received until Sundance, when the audience whooped and whistled, giving a standing ovation when they realised the family were in the auditorium.
At home, the Sundance world cinema grand jury prize is placed in the shrine beside Maria’s photograph, plus two peacock feathers and other precious objects they remember her by. Maria would be so delighted by the award, thinks Nik. “She studied film and some of the guys that she studied with have said she dreamed of winning something at Sundance.”
They still remember Maria at dinner. “We light a candle before each meal and hold hands. We’re not religious as such but we give thanks for the food, the day we’ve had and each other, and we send love up to Maria,” says Nik.
The Paynes are perhaps closer than many families – with more chat at mealtimes – but they don’t want to be defined by their grief. Freja is happy at school; Nik rolls his eyes about her smartphone-time but she also raises and sells chickens for pocket money. Nik hopes to home-school Falk and Wolf again for a year before they start secondary. He is also writing a book about his experiences and aiming to buy a modest smallholding to pursue farming and self-sufficiency. The film may be successful but documentaries don’t tend to make much money; Nik says he hasn’t received any revenue from it. “I’m fortunate enough not to be a money-oriented person. I would actually feel uncomfortable if I was making money out of that. I like the fact that it’s something I can give.”
In the film, Nik shrugs off his dad’s suggestion that he find a new partner, but now says he enjoyed a brief relationship last year – “It was good to realise that I’m still alive” – before realising they had different visions for their lives. Does he feel lonely? He pauses for a longer-than-usual thought. “Sometimes, maybe. I’m somebody who is naturally good with his own company. I read a lot, I think a lot, there are plenty of people around I can talk to, if I want to. Sometimes, at dinner time when the kids are bickering or talking about fart humour, I think, oh God, I wish there was an adult to talk to.”
The children aren’t having that.
“No!” says Wolf. “He wants to talk about farts. We don’t.”
“It’s like being at a chimpanzee’s tea party with him,” says Freja, and the sunny Norwegian spring day is brightened by their laughter.
A New Kind of Wilderness is out on 16 May. The Paynes will be at select cinemas around the UK for Q&As at preview screenings. Find one near you here
The Economist, 17 avril
The six best films about financial turmoil
Watch these titles when you can no longer watch the ticker
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FINANCE IS NOT an obvious subject for dramatists. Interest rates, term sheets, mark-to-market accounting: these are phrases to make the average viewer’s eyes glaze over. But when markets plunge—dragging down Main Street along with Wall Street—screenwriters’ interest surges. Perhaps viewers can expect some terrific films about the tariff-induced chaos in years to come. Until then, here are the best films made about financial turmoil.
“The Big Short” (2015)
The financial crisis of 2007-09 was decidedly serious, but this film—about a group of outsiders and hustlers who bet on the housing bubble bursting, and hence foresaw the crisis—is very funny. (It is adapted from a book of the same name by Michael Lewis.) Various celebrities make cameos to explain financial concepts directly to viewers, while Steve Carell, Christian Bale (pictured below) and a frighteningly tanned and venal Ryan Gosling play three of the men who profit from the crisis. This film is morally complex and gripping; it informs and outrages.
“Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room” (2005)
This documentary is about financiers who ended up in prison because they thought they were cleverer than everyone else. Greedy and hubristic, Enron’s executives used dodgy accounting and aggressive PR tactics to make their energy-trading firm seem more profitable than it was. Investors lost billions and the top executives were convicted of fraud, though the boss, Kenneth Lay, died shortly before his sentencing. Based on an equally enjoyable book by Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind.
“The Grapes of Wrath” (1940)
The Joad family, kicked off their land in Oklahoma during the Great Depression, head west to California to make a better life. The story could easily have been leaden, but Henry Fonda’s spiky lead performance as Tom Joad, and the extraordinary cinematography of Gregg Toland (who also filmed “Citizen Kane”), make it a work of art. John Steinbeck’s novel is an American masterpiece; this film is better.
“Margin Call” (2011)
A young analyst at an investment bank finds out that the firm is overexposed to risky mortgage-backed securities. This film (pictured below), set in 2008, focuses on the next 24 hours, as the firm sells everything and panic spreads across Wall Street. The ensemble cast is terrific, in particular Paul Bettany as a shark with a well-hidden heart of gold. But watch it for its portrayal of the rituals and culture of high finance: how people dress and defer to superiors, what they talk about outside the office and how they cut each other’s throats.
“Too Big to Fail” (2011)
Another film about the crisis of 2007-09, this time about the headliners. After the collapse of Lehman Brothers, Hank Paulson, America’s treasury secretary (William Hurt), Ben Bernanke, the chair of the Federal Reserve (Paul Giamatti), and the leaders of the biggest banks gather. They negotiate the Troubled Asset Relief Programme, the government’s purchase of bad assets from banks to unfreeze credit. The script is instructive—characters explain things to each other for the viewer’s benefit—so you’ll finish the film having learned something as well as having been entertained.
“The Wolf of Wall Street” (2013)
Leonardo DiCaprio plays Jordan Belfort, a smooth-talking huckster who, in real life, made millions in penny-stock scams before going to prison. Martin Scorsese may have intended to make a morality tale about the dangers of filthy lucre, but Belfort and his buddies are clearly having more fun than the honest lawmen who eventually do them in. Jonah Hill offers a grotesque supporting performance aided by a gargantuan set of false teeth. ■
https://www.economist.com/culture/2025/04/11/the-six-best-films-about-financial-turmoil
The Economist, 14 avril
Back Story : “G20”, a rollicking new film, evokes an old ideal of America
It is outlandish in more ways than intended
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The president of the United States, Danielle Sutton, has a plan to end world hunger. Played by Viola Davis, she flies to a G20 summit in South Africa to persuade other leaders to sign up. A gang of extortionists takes the bigwigs hostage, using their voices in deepfake videos for a vast cryptocurrency heist. Amid the mayhem President Sutton, an Iraq-war veteran, fights back, rescuing the captives and the global economy.
Whoever dreamed up “G20”, a rollicking action film out on Amazon Prime Video on April 10th, knew that bits of it were outlandish. After all, it has been a while since a president shot, thwacked or throttled baddies. Joltingly, though, parts of the plot that in the past would have seemed bland suddenly look fanciful. Inadvertently, the film measures the widening gap between a classic idea of America and the new reality.
A black woman serving as president is one of the more plausible elements. Before last November’s presidential election, it must have appeared to the producers that life might mimic their art; American voters decided otherwise. In the movie President Sutton brings her sassy teenage children along for the ride and worries about her parenting—a distraction that fictional male presidents tend to be spared while saving the world.
But another basic premise of the story—her attendance at the summit—now seems speculative too. As it happens, there really was a G20 pow-wow in South Africa in February (for foreign ministers, not leaders). Marco Rubio, America’s secretary of state, complained that the host country was “using G20 to promote ‘solidarity, equality & sustainability’. In other words: DEI and climate change”. He didn’t turn up.
Even without the stunts and explosions, A-list summits lend themselves to drama: the high stakes, the mammoth egos, the ticking clock. In “G20” President Sutton is no pushover. “If they want to remain allies,” she says of countries she means to cajole, “they have to fall in line.” All the same, her approach to diplomacy is distinctly collegial. She and her aides bandy about terms such as “co-operation” and “consensus” approvingly.
Coming from an American president, these days that argot sounds quaint. By contrast, the criminals’ rhetoric is uncomfortably contemporary. They spout paranoid conspiracy theories (and sport the hipsterish beards that seem as de rigueur for screen gunmen as for bartenders). One claims Sutton betrayed her country “when she decided farmers in Africa were more important than Americans”.
The film’s bedrock assumption is that America is the good guy. Rather than shaking down the fearful leaders for minerals deals, Sutton risks her life for them. The group includes the buffoonish British prime minister, nicely played by Douglas Hodge (making a getaway in her armoured car, he whines that the steering wheel is on the wrong side). “An evening spent following your president”, he says to an American, “has left me optimistic.”
You can tell a lot about a culture from the leaders it elects—and from the leaders it invents. Movies and TV shows that depict fictional American presidents are often distorted mirrors of their eras, reflecting their politics and neuroses. Sometimes the commander-in-chief is dastardly (as in “House of Cards”), lecherous (“Primary Colours”) or bumbling (“Dr Strangelove”). More often he, and sometimes she, is impossibly heroic, fending off nuclear strikes, alien invasions or apocalyptic comets.
The unusual aspect of “G20” is not that its heroine is a fantasy. So was Harrison Ford’s president in “Air Force One”, another post-cold-war adventure that enlists rogue states or terrorists as foes. The striking thing is that, for all the talk of crypto and artificial intelligence, the fantasy is a relic of a bygone age.
The America on show is brash, glamorous, generous and brave. This is a version of Uncle Sam that generations of audiences at home and abroad wanted to believe in. European admiration for American swagger runs back through the arrival of GIs in the second world war to early Hollywood; at a publicity screening of “G20” in London, ushers dressed as Secret Service agents evoked the old thrill of Americana. As the film attests, that ideal hasn’t quite expired.
But today it feels like an afterglow. For viewers who cherish it, “G20” may leave a mixed impression. It is a blast and a laugh, full of punch-ups, shoot-outs and winking humour. Ms Davis makes a smashing president. Yet it is also oddly melancholy: haunted by something precious being lost. ■
The Economist, Book Review, 9 avril
Reading the entrails : Hungry for more “Hunger Games”? There is plenty in store
Behind the franchise’s success—and the draw of dystopias
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There is, one character says, “no way to pretty up what follows”. Indeed. Nor is there any attempt to, as that might spoil the fun. By the end of the first chapter, a shot has rung out, causing one boy’s head to “explode”. A little later, a girl’s head cracks open on the floor (blood leaks onto her plait); then another is poisoned (“blood begins running from her eyes, her nose, her mouth”); a third girl’s eye is gouged from its socket (blood is everywhere). For the dramatic climax, the hero is disembowelled; for the romantic one, his beloved is poisoned and “blood-flecked foam bubbles up over her lips”.
Welcome to the latest serving of “The Hunger Games”, the dystopian young-adult (YA) franchise for which the world seems to have an almost insatiable appetite. Suzanne Collins’s new instalment, “Sunrise on the Reaping”, is the bestselling book on Amazon and has shifted more copies than any other fiction title on the e-commerce site in 2025. A film version of “Sunrise” will come out in November 2026. It is likely to do well: the books have sold over 100m copies worldwide, and the five previous films grossed a combined $4.4bn globally after adjusting for inflation. In October a stage adaptation of “The Hunger Games” will open in Canary Wharf in London, in a custom-built theatre that can seat 1,200 people. It turns out that the market for dead children and sentences such as “I felt my intestines sliding out” is big.
It is also very old. When the first book in “The Hunger Games” series was published in 2008, there was hand-wringing about its violent plot. Every year each of the 12 districts of Panem sends two children to fight to the death in games, while the nation watches enthusiastically on all-revealing screens. Winning depends on brute force but also on-screen magnetism, since the contestants who are “liked” by the audience (in both the social sense and the social-media one) get more perks. This is survival of the fittest in every way.
But as Theseus—a young man from ancient Athens sent to Crete as part of an annual tribute of youths to feed a mythical man-eating Minotaur—could attest, stories about innocent youngsters being sent to their doom have always done well. And as the fate of Aegeus, his father (who kills himself when he thinks Theseus has died), proves, adults have always found this sort of stuff harder to stomach than children, who don’t seem to find it hard at all. “Sunrise on the Reaping” is at the top of Amazon’s list of “Books on Death for Young Adults”, which is surprisingly long.
A red thread of gore winds from the Minotaur’s maze through all books for youngsters. One of the earliest of all was a 17th-century Puritan manual titled “A Token for Children”, which, as its subtitle explained, offered “an exact account of the conversion, holy and exemplary lives and joyful deaths of several young children”. (They catch various incurable diseases, then expire piously, promptly and—between bouts of blood-spitting—full of happiness at the thought that they are off to “enjoy the embraces of [our] Saviour”.) The overall tone is, as Sam Leith, author of “The Haunted Wood”, a book about children’s literature, has put it, your “basic snuff-fiction anthology”.
Corpses, then, are a constant in literature for the young; what changes is how this gore is rationalised. “A Token” justified it with Satan. By contrast, “The Hunger Games” seasons its violence with politics, rather than piety. Panem’s capital, the “Capitol”, is plastered with posters whose slogans (“NO PEACE, NO BREAD! NO PEACE, NO SECURITY!”) might have come straight from George Orwell’s Oceania; Orwell also inspired the Big Brother-style cameras that watch the contestants everywhere they go. “Sunrise” comes with epigraphs from Orwell (on truth) and David Hume (on government). This is death with dystopian pretensions.
This, too, is typical. If you currently think the world feels a little dystopian, that is nothing compared with the mood of YA bookshelves, which are packed with glum titles like “Plague” and even glummer covers. YA dystopias are “immensely” popular, says Gregory Claeys, a professor at Royal Holloway, University of London, which he puts down to a “seeping anxiety” about the world.
Many dystopias come to be seen as prescient; far more often they are a portrait of present fears. Stalinism helped inspire Orwell’s “1984”; the Stasi influenced “The Handmaid’s Tale” by Margaret Atwood. She had a rule that she would “not put any events into the book that had not already happened”, because, if she were to create an imaginative garden, she “wanted the toads in it to be real”. Ms Collins’s strongest inspiration for “The Hunger Games” was her “unsettling” experience of channel-hopping between reality-TV shows and coverage of the Iraq war and finding that the two started to blur.
It has been said that the tense of dystopia is not “now” but “not yet”. Dystopias usually avoid painting precise political portraits; they are political parables, and like parables, can be widely applied and reinterpreted. In 2018, more than 30 years after “The Handmaid’s Tale” was published and a year after the first season of the TV version aired, women across the world dressed in red robes and white bonnets as they rallied in favour of women’s rights. Many will project today’s problems, from a hot war waged by Russia to political wars in the West, onto “Sunrise on the Reaping”: it bottles the sombreness of the moment, even if it was not expressly intended to. When the film comes out next year, interpretations could change again.
Until then, the most sinister Big Brother in “The Hunger Games” feels less Orwellian than televisual: this is a social-media dystopia, in which you are always being watched and being “liked” can change your life. Another Amazon bestseller list that “The Hunger Games” tops is called “Books on Being a Teen for Young Adults”. This list is rich with titles such as “The Teenager’s Guide to Burnout”, which advises readers to “consider taking a social-media break”. “The Hunger Games”, by contrast, offers advice on how to attack the problems of social media with an axe. And it is outselling them all. ■
https://www.economist.com/culture/2025/04/03/hungry-for-more-hunger-games-there-is-plenty-in-store
Le Figaro, 2 avril
Pour dépasser le « sexisme » de James Bond, Helen Mirren plaide pour un autre regard sur les films d’espionnage
L’actrice de 79 ans affirme n’avoir « jamais aimé » les films de la franchise et aimerait que les studios produisent des films d’espionnes plutôt que d’imaginer Bond en femme.
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« Je n’ai jamais aimé James Bond », confie l’actrice britannique Helen Mirren dans les colonnes du Standard . Bientôt à l’affiche de la série Mobland avec Pierce Brosnan, l’interprète des James Bond entre 1995 et 2002, l’actrice de 79 ans n’a pas été tendre envers la saga qui fait la fierté de tout un pays.
« Je n’ai jamais aimé la façon dont les femmes étaient représentées dans James Bond », explique Helen Mirren. « Le concept de James Bond est né d’un profond sexisme qui l’imprègne », insiste-t-elle. Depuis le rachat de la franchise par Amazon MGM, l’éventualité d’un Bond féminin continue d’alimenter les discussions. Mais pour l’actrice, qui a reçu l’Oscar de la meilleure actrice pour sa prestation dans The Queen (2006) de Stephen Frears, cette question est secondaire : plutôt que de transformer 007, elle estime l’industrie du cinéma devrait s’intéresser aux vraies espionnes qui ont marqué l’Histoire. « Les femmes ont toujours occupé une place importante dans les services secrets, souligne-t-elle. Regardez ce qu’ont fait les résistantes françaises. Elles sont remarquables, incroyablement courageuses. Je raconterais plutôt cette histoire. »
Dans la dernière aventure de James Bond, Mourir peut attendre, le fameux matricule 007 n’était plus porté par James Bond, mais par une femme, interprétée par l’actrice britannique Lashana Lynche. L’idée avait enflammé les réseaux sociaux et les talk-shows. Élisabeth Moreno, ministre de l’Égalité entre les femmes et les hommes du gouvernement Castex, s’était emparée du sujet à l’époque, jusqu’à débattre de la féminisation de 007 avec l’actrice Agnès Jaoui, l’animatrice Énora Malagré et la chanteuse Barbara Pravi.
Selon une note interne d’Amazon MGM relayée par le Daily Mail le 8 mars, 007 ne changerait ni de sexe, ni de nationalité. Si les producteurs historiques, Barbara Broccoli et Michael G Wilson, avaient déjà soufflé cette idée, ils se sont mis en retrait de la production du film en février 2025. Le 25 mars 2025, ils ont annoncé sur les réseaux sociaux que David Heyman, le producteur de Harry Potter et Amy Pascal, la productrice des Spider-Man avec Tom Holland, prenaient les commandes du nouveau James Bond. « Nous sommes honorés et très excités à l’idée de conserver l’esprit de Bond alors qu’il commence sa prochaine aventure ». Pour le moment, aucun acteur n’a été annoncé par Amazon.
Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 1 avril
«Ein Nazi-Film, in dem die Judenvernichtung nicht vorkommt? Ich finde das falsch», sagt Martin Moszkowicz über «Der Untergang» oder «The Zone of Interest»
Der erfolgreichste deutsche Filmproduzent stösst sich auch an Tilda Swinton, die an der Berlinale Werbung für BDS machen durfte. Als Sohn eines Auschwitz-Überlebenden äussert sich Moszkowicz deutlich über die Israel-Verachtung in der Branche.
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Zwei Gesprächsthemen drängen sich auf: Kino und Israel. Martin Moszkowicz, den international erfolgreichsten deutschen Filmproduzenten, treibt das Schicksal des jüdischen Staats um. Als Sohn eines Holocaust-Überlebenden wuchs Moszkowicz in München auf, wo er als Teenager das palästinensische Terrorattentat auf die israelische Olympiadelegation aus nächster Nähe miterlebt hat. In Tim Fehlbaums fulminantem, von Moszkowicz produziertem Film «September 5» wird der Anschlag aus der Sicht von amerikanischen Sportjournalisten nacherzählt.
Zusammen mit seiner Frau, der Autorin und Filmemacherin Doris Dörrie, lebt der Produzent auch heute noch in München. Moszkowicz’ Zweitwohnsitz in Los Angeles ist dem Feuer zum Opfer gefallen. Er habe etwas Neues gefunden und sich «übergangsweise etabliert», sagt er bei einem Besuch in Zürich. «Da muss man mal sehen, wie das jetzt weitergeht.»
Herr Moszkowicz, wollen wir über Filme reden oder über Israel?
Ich bin ja ein grosser Freund davon, dass man überhaupt redet. Aber es ist schwer geworden, über Israel ein vernünftiges Gespräch zu führen. Ich bekomme immer wieder ekelhafte Schreiben. Auch nach unserem Interview wird das so sein. Leute fühlen sich bemüssigt, mich zu beleidigen oder zu bedrohen. Der Unterschied zu früher ist, dass die Leute heute dazu stehen, mit ihrem richtigen Namen.
Was es nicht besser macht.
Im Gegenteil, das ist sehr besorgniserregend. Die Leute haben keine Hemmungen mehr, ihren Hass öffentlich und direkt zu äussern ohne Angst vor Strafverfolgung. In den Diskussionen hört man immer wieder: Man dürfte dies nicht mehr sagen, jenes nicht mehr sagen. Dabei wird alles gesagt. Israel wird ununterbrochen kritisiert. Und es gibt natürlich auch unter Juden eine Bandbreite von Meinungen. Warum sollte es die auch nicht geben? Unverhandelbar ist für mich einzig, dass es einen israelischen Staat gibt.
Was bedeutet Ihnen Israel?
Das Thema Israel treibt mich schon mein Leben lang um. Mein Vater hat Auschwitz überlebt. Er war ein grosser Versöhner und hat immer versucht, die Menschen zusammenzubringen. In Buenos Aires, wo er meine Mutter kennengelernt hat, lebten auf der einen Seite viele jüdische Migranten und auf der anderen Seite auch geflüchtete Nazi-Grössen.
Ihre Mutter war die Tochter eines SS-Offiziers.
Ja, wobei sie sich früh von den politischen Ansichten ihres Vaters gelöst hatte. In der deutschen Community von Buenos Aires haben sich meine Eltern kennengelernt. Die Fügung ist kaum zu glauben.
Wer war Ihr Vater, der Regisseur Imo Moszkowicz?
Imo war ein deutscher Jude, der eigentlich Rabbiner hätte werden sollen. Dann kamen die Verfolgung und der Krieg. Mein Grossvater konnte nach Argentinien auswandern und wollte die Familie nachholen, was durch die «Reichskristallnacht» unmöglich wurde. Die Familie ist zunächst in Essen in ein Arbeitslager gesteckt worden. Dort ging ein Bruder von Imo trotz Judenstern ins Kino. Er wurde verhaftet und nach Auschwitz deportiert.
Wurde er umgebracht?
Direkt an der Rampe erschossen. Ein SS-Mann hatte ihn geschlagen, er schlug zurück, worauf er auf der Stelle getötet wurde. Bis auf Imo und seinen Vater wurde die gesamte Familie ermordet. Imo hat vielleicht auch deshalb überlebt, weil er in Auschwitz angefangen hat zu schauspielern.
Wie meinen Sie das, in Auschwitz mit der Schauspielerei begonnen?
In einer Theatergruppe, die den anderen Häftlingen etwas Unterhaltung bot.
Als Überlebensstrategie?
Ja, es war ein Weg, gedanklich aus der Situation rauszukommen. Der andere Weg wäre gewesen, sich auf den Rücken zu legen und nach oben zu schauen. Dann sah man auch keine Baracken und keinen Stacheldraht mehr. Imo war gerade achtzehn Jahre alt, als er befreit wurde. Beim Todesmarsch, wo die SS die überlebenden Häftlinge nach Deutschland zurückgeführt hat, ist er an der heutigen tschechischen Grenze befreit worden. Die Amerikaner, die ihn retteten – zwei GI, die ich Jahrzehnte später sogar noch ausfindig machen konnte –, haben zu Imo gesagt: Wir nehmen dich mit nach Amerika. Er müsse nur zu einem bestimmten Zeitpunkt in Paris sein, da gehe der Flieger. Imo wollte mit dem Zug nach Paris fahren, aber die Strecken waren zerbombt, der Zug wurde umgeleitet. Und er fand sich in Ahlen wieder, in Westfalen. Er sagte: «Da komme ich ja her!», und ist ausgestiegen.
Er blieb in Deutschland?
Später ist er nach Südamerika gegangen, auf der Suche nach seinem Vater. Aber er liebte die deutsche Sprache und die deutschen Dichter. Zwar sprach er auch Hebräisch und Jiddisch, aber ganz nach Israel zu ziehen, wäre nichts für ihn gewesen. Wie Friedrich Torberg gesagt hat: «Das sind Bodybuilder, die da leben.» Die brauchten Pflugscharen und Traktoren, um das Land aufzubauen, und nicht Theater. Er kam zurück nach Deutschland, war dann Regieassistent bei Gründgens in Düsseldorf.
Ausgerechnet bei dem früheren Nazi?
Darüber kann man sicher diskutieren, aber das ist letztlich auch ein Beispiel dafür, wie mein Vater versucht hat, in Deutschland die Menschen wieder zusammenzubringen. In der deutschen Theaterlandschaft war Gründgens – auch nach dem Krieg – eine der wichtigsten Persönlichkeiten. Ich kann mich nicht erinnern, dass mein Vater schlecht über ihn gesprochen hat.
Sagen Sie, wie alt waren Sie 1972?
Ich war vierzehn Jahre alt.
Wie erinnern Sie sich an das Attentat von palästinensischen Terroristen auf die israelische Olympiadelegation in München?
Wir waren sehr nahe an den Geschehnissen dran. Am Gärtnerplatz gab es zunächst eine grosse Veranstaltung, wo meine Mutter die Sportler kennengelernt hat. Vor Beginn der Spiele waren auch Israeli aus dem Umfeld der Delegation bei uns zu Hause. Wir hatten häufig Besuch aus Israel. Es war ein offenes Haus, fast ein Hippie-Haus. Viele Jahre lang hat da etwa Esther Ofarim gewohnt, die israelische Sängerin.
Als der Schweizer Regisseur Tim Fehlbaum mit der Idee zum Spielfilm «September 5» an Sie herangetreten ist . . .
. . . da fand ich die Geschichte natürlich gleich sehr interessant. Und als ich den fertigen Film dann gesehen habe, hat es mich erwischt wie noch nie. Ich mache den Job ja doch schon ein paar Jahre, da ist man eigentlich abgebrüht. Aber nach dieser Vorführung musste ich erst einmal raus aus dem Saal. Zehn Minuten tief Luft holen.
Weil es Erinnerungen geweckt hat?
Es war wie ein Hieb in die Magengrube. Normalerweise gibt man als Produzent nach der ersten Vorführung Anmerkungen, man sagt: Dies oder jenes geht nicht, das müsst ihr ändern, dann gibt es eine Testvorführung mit Publikum. Ich habe nur gesagt: Wir bringen den Film so raus.
Hatten Sie keine Bedenken wegen der antiisraelischen Stimmung nach dem 7. Oktober?
Nein.
Stimmt es, dass der Film bei der Berlinale 2024 abgelehnt wurde?
Ich weiss es nicht und kann deshalb dazu nichts sagen.
Bei dem Israel-Hass im vergangenen Jahr auf der Berlinale kann man es sich allerdings vorstellen.
Darum bin ich dieses Jahr auch nicht zur Eröffnung gegangen. Ich halte die Auszeichnung von Tilda Swinton für extrem ungeschickt. Die Kunst ist frei, und Künstler sollen auch seltsame Positionen haben dürfen. Warum man aber jemanden, der bekanntermassen erklärte BDS-Unterstützerin ist, in der momentanen Weltlage in den Vordergrund stellen muss, hat sich mir nicht erschlossen.
Ein Film über israelische Opfer passt nicht in den propalästinensischen Zeitgeist. Denken Sie, dass «September 5» deswegen keine Oscars bekommen hat?
Nein. Ich weiss, wie schwer man es bei den Oscars mit Nicht-Hollywood-Filmen hat. Ich glaube nicht, dass es da eine politische Komponente gab.
Allerdings werden die Oscars nicht verschont von antiisraelischen Tendenzen. Dieses Jahr «No Other Land», letztes Jahr sorgte Jonathan Glazers israelkritische Dankesrede anlässlich von «The Zone of Interest» für Irritation.
Glazers Film finde ich, von seinen formalen Gekonntheiten abgesehen, fragwürdig: wie er mit dem Holocaust umgeht und die Juden nur auf der Tonspur vorkommen . . . Aber ich habe dieses Thema damals auch bei unserem Constantin-Film «Der Untergang» mit dem Produzenten Bernd Eichinger lange diskutiert. Ein Film über das Ende des «Dritten Reiches», in dem das Thema Holocaust und Judenvernichtung nicht vorkommt? Ich fand das falsch. Aber wahrscheinlich hatte Bernd recht, der Film war ein riesiger Erfolg in der ganzen Welt.
Womit hatte er recht?
Seine Position war: «Nein, das muss so sein, weil das ein Film über die Täter ist.» Und auch wenn es schmerzhaft ist: Täterfilme sind immer erfolgreicher als Opferfilme. Wenn man von Ausnahmen wie «Schindler’s List» absieht, sind die meisten Filme, die sich mit den Opfern beschäftigen, kommerziell irrelevant.
Die Constantin Film hat sich oft für den kommerziellen Zugang zu einem Thema entschieden. Zu oft?
Ich kann nicht für die Constantin sprechen, weil ich seit letztem Jahr nicht mehr Vorstandsvorsitzender bin und jetzt als Produzent für die Firma arbeite. Aber klar ist: Damit man Filme wie «September 5» machen kann, braucht es auch die grossen kommerziellen Erfolge wie «Fack ju Göhte» und «Resident Evil» . . .
. . . die aber immer seltener werden. Hat das Kino noch Zukunft?
Wir müssen uns am Schlafittchen nehmen und uns fragen, warum es in Deutschland so selten gelingt, kommerziell erfolgreiche Filme zu machen, die weltweit eine Relevanz haben.
Liegt es an der Förderung?
Grundsätzlich ist in der deutschen Infrastruktur vieles im Argen, und dazu gehört auch die kreative Infrastruktur. Aber insgesamt ist die Kreativbranche in Deutschland sehr stark, mit einem Volumen von über 200 Milliarden Euro. Und wir haben mit 123 Milliarden Euro einen grossen Wertschöpfungsanteil, höher als der Maschinenbau oder die chemische Industrie.
Verdient die Branche also mehr Geld?
Wir brauchen Produktionsunterstützungen wie steuerliche Anreize und Investitionsverpflichtungen für die Streamer. Auf der anderen Seite sehe ich die Situation für das Kino gar nicht so negativ. Global haben wir einen Rückgang von 35 Prozent bis 40 Prozent in den Produktionsvolumina für Fernsehen und Streaming, aber nur etwa 5 bis 10 Prozent im Kinobereich. Ich kann allen Marktteilnehmern nur raten, sich nicht nur auf die Forderung nach mehr Unterstützung zu konzentrieren, sondern auch selbst entsprechend zu investieren. Die Märkte der Zukunft werden heute – in der Krise – verteilt.
Aber mit Kino lässt sich doch kein Geld mehr verdienen.
Doch, gerade mit Kino und weil man dort eine entsprechende «Upside» hat. Das grosse Problem bei den Streamern, aber auch beim klassischen Fernsehen und Pay-TV ist, dass man die erfolgreichste Produktion der Welt realisieren kann, aber als Hersteller verdient man deswegen kaum mehr daran. Ich erkenne eine Hinwendung wieder zum Kino. Kurz vor den PGA Awards, dem amerikanischen Filmpreis der Produzenten, sass Tim Fehlbaum gerade im Uber auf dem Weg zur Preisverleihung, als er eine SMS bekam: «Steven Spielberg will call you in five minutes.» Spielberg hat ihn dann angerufen und ihm zwanzig Minuten lang erzählt, wie toll es sei, dass es heute noch solche Kinofilme gebe.
Ein Ritterschlag.
Das ist, wie wenn Gott auf die Erde kommt und das Telefon in die Hand nimmt. Da weiss man, dass man das Richtige macht. Ich verrate Ihnen jetzt etwas: In den achtziger Jahren habe ich einen meiner allerersten Filme koproduziert – einen deutsch-ungarischen Spielfilm namens «Hiobs Revolte», der nominiert war als bester ausländischer Film –, und wissen Sie, wer mich damals angerufen hat . . . Steven Spielberg.
The Economist, March 24
Unhappily ever after : What the controversial new “Snow White” can teach Hollywood
Remakes are a riskier business than studios realise
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“Snow White”, Disney’s live-action remake of a beloved animated film, had an icy reception before its release in cinemas on March 21st. A trailer posted three months ago has earned just 60,000 likes and over 1m dislikes. “If I saw this movie on a plane I would still walk out,” grumbled one YouTube user. “We thankfully have the technology nowadays to make the animation look worse than the original from 1937,” groaned another.
Among the remake’s many sins are seven in particular: the dwarves, who have been cheesily rendered with computer-generated imagery (CGI), after a row over whether it was politically correct to have actors with dwarfism in the roles. (In the face of criticism, Disney recast the film’s dwarves as “magical creatures”—whatever that means.) There is also the issue of Rachel Zegler, the actress chosen to play Snow White, who panned the original film as “extremely dated” and said that the prince “literally stalks” the princess. It turns out fans do not like it when a remake’s heroine villainises the classic film that inspired it.
By respinning familiar tales, remakes can offer studios a surer path towards commercial riches. In the amount of pushback and controversy it has faced, “Snow White” is unusual. But in another way the film reflects a current trend, which is for studios to reach further back in history for source material. From 2020 to 2024 the average age of the source films that new remakes were based on was 35. That is about 13 years older than from 2011 to 2015, according to our analysis based on data from The Numbers, a film website.
What makes for a great remake? It is a question on the minds of many Hollywood executives, as well as cinephiles. To answer it, The Economist analysed 200 remakes released since 1995; each had a minimum of 5,000 ratings on IMDb, an online movie database. (Our analysis only includes remakes of films, not adaptations of books.) Three lessons stand out.
First, it is not enough to use state-of-the-art special effects; computer-generated imagery needs to be handled carefully. Of the 20 worst remakes (as measured by IMDb audience ratings), half are horror films, in part because of their use of unconvincing special effects. In the fifth worst-rated, a remake in 2005 of John Carpenter’s cult classic “The Fog” from 1980, a supernatural, vengeful fog descends on an island town off the coast of Oregon. Cheap shocks substitute for tension: viewers have complained that the fog moves too quickly and that ghosts in the fog (never clearly visible in the original) are hokey, a complaint also made by viewers about the dwarves in the new “Snow White”.
Second, comedies come with grave risks. This is the worst-performing genre for remakes, earning an average IMDb rating 1.5 points (out of ten) lower than the originals. Comedy remakes also tend to make the least at the box office. Not a single one significantly outshines the original film it was based on, according to viewers’ ratings. It may be that viewers of comedies and horrors crave an element of surprise, which is hard to offer in a faithful remake, because audiences already know which gags and gasps to expect.
The best remakes get their inspiration from abroad. Since 1995 about a third of the top remakes have been based on foreign source material, including six of the top ten. So are the only two remakes to have won Academy Awards for Best Picture: “The Departed”(2006) and “CODA” (2021).
Unfamiliarity with the originals may mean that audiences come in with lower expectations and without any attachment to the original. Take “Bugonia”, a science-fiction comedy starring Emma Stone, set to be released in November. It is an English-language remake of a South Korean film; instead of a male chief executive, the new story centres on a female one. However, audiences, lacking knowledge of the original, are unlikely to kick up a fuss about the change. The same cannot be said of the new “Snow White”, which seems destined for an unhappily-ever-after ending. ■
Le Point, 13 mars
Pourquoi il faut absolument voir « The Last Showgirl » avec Pamela Anderson
L’ex-héroïne d’« Alerte à Malibu » fait son retour en meneuse de revue qui voit le Las Vegas de sa jeunesse disparaître dans un film au charme singulier.
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Pamela Anderson dans un Coppola, voilà qui est inattendu ! Depuis sa présentation au Festival de Toronto en septembre 2024, on n’en finit plus de parler de The Last Showgirl, qui marque l’arrivée sur grand écran de la star d’Alerte à Malibu et la révélation d’un nouveau talent dans la famille Coppola.
Le film n’est en effet signé ni Francis Ford ni Sofia mais Gia – la fille de Gian-Carlo Coppola, le frère aîné de Sofia disparu à seulement 22 ans en 1986 dans un accident de bateau. Or, si Gia Coppola avait déjà signé deux longs-métrages, c’est la première fois qu’un tel buzz accompagne l’un de ses films.
C’est d’abord un coup de casting : il fallait penser à aller chercher la Canadienne Pamela Anderson, immense star de la télévision grâce à Alerte à Malibu (elle jouait une sauveteuse en maillot rouge très décolleté) et playmate des années 1990, quand le magazine Playboy avait encore de l’importance… Désormais présentatrice d’émissions sur le jardinage et adepte d’un look minimaliste sans maquillage, l’ex-héroïne se révèle ici une parfaite héroïne de cinéma, attachante et cinégénique.
Une voix enfantine empruntée à Marilyn Monroe
Le film raconte l’histoire de son personnage, Shelly, qui vit à Las Vegas où elle danse depuis plusieurs décennies dans une revue à l’ancienne – autrement dit seins nus, avec costumes en strass et paillettes à foison. La revue s’appelle « Le Razzle Dazzle », et la petite pointe de français dans ce titre est censée donner du chic et du chien au spectacle – qui reste pour l’essentiel hors champ.
Dès le premier quart d’heure, Shelly apprend en même temps que ses collègues plus jeunes (Kiernan Shipka, Brenda Song) que « Le Razzle Dazzle » va être supprimé. Ambiance de fin du monde… Que va devenir Shelly, qui a consacré toute sa vie à la revue, au point de délaisser sa fille (Billie Lourd), élevée par une autre famille loin des casinos et de leurs coulisses peu reluisantes ?
Ce point de départ pourrait amener à une tragédie, ou en tout cas à un drame familial, d’autant que la solitude affective et la précarité matérielle de ces danseuses est fortement suggérée. Ce n’est toutefois pas la voie qu’emprunte The Last Showgirl : le film avance sans structure forte, préférant l’évocation impressionniste d’ambiances et de personnages. Avant tout, il s’agit du portrait de Shelly qui parle avec une voix enfantine empruntée à la Marilyn Monroe de Certains l’aiment chaud (Billy Wilder, 1959) et touche par son mélange d’innocence et de naïveté.
Une petite société féminine en coulisses
Sa romance manquée avec Eddie (David Bautista), qui supervise la revue, est l’occasion de scènes émouvantes, chacun se réfugiant dans une caricature – pour l’un du protecteur viril, pour l’autre de la demoiselle en détresse – et ratant de ce fait la vraie rencontre.
Quand Shelly se décide à chercher du travail et passe une audition, les propos que tient le producteur (joué par Jason Schwartzman, cousin de Gia et Sofia Coppola) sont cruels – il la renvoie à ses 50 ans passés et à son manque de talent –, mais la scène ne l’est pas : le regard que la réalisatrice pose sur son personnage reste tendre et respectueux.
De la même façon, alors que les spectateurs du « Razzle Dazzle » s’intéressent sans doute au spectacle pour les corps qui s’y dénudent, Gia Coppola élude le sujet et s’attarde sur la petite société féminine qui œuvre en coulisses. Il y a, parmi les jeunes danseuses, Jodie (Kiernan Shipka, qui fut jadis la fille de Don Draper dans Mad Men) : elle tente à toute force de transformer Shelly en mère adoptive mais n’y parvient pas… Et puis Annette (Jamie Lee Curtis), la meilleure amie de Shelly, une addict au jeu qui a perdu sa maison et dort dans sa voiture.
Ces personnages secondaires révèlent, sans le surligner, le visage sinistre de Las Vegas alors même que les images – très inspirées du travail des photographes Lisa Eisner et David Hickey – magnifient le romantisme décati de la cité du Nevada. Tout ceci a un vrai charme singulier et entêtant, et il y a fort à parier que d’autres réalisateurs proposeront dans les années qui viennent des rôles inattendus à Pamela Anderson, loin, très loin des plages de Malibu.
« The Last Showgirl », drame de Gia Coppola (États-Unis, 2024), 1 h 29, avec Pamela Anderson, Dave Bautista, Jamie Lee Curtis… en salle le 12 mars.
The Economist, March 8
Demon child on the silver screen : A new film is breaking box-office records in China
“Ne Zha 2” shows how the mood inside the country is changing
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Film-makers in China have long tried to find the secret sauce for movies that wow audiences while pleasing the Communist Party. The epics that evolved became known as zhuxuanlu, or “main melody” films, because they are in tune with the party line. But the heavy doses of patriotism that they usually involve have fallen out of favour. Instead, one Beijing studio has struck gold with a cartoon reimagining the tale of a “demon child” from a 16th-century novel.
The film, “Ne Zha 2”, is a sequel, in which the eponymous child battles monsters and immortals on a quest to save his friend and protect his family’s fortress. Launched over the Chinese New Year holiday, it has taken more than $2bn and become the most successful animated feature ever made anywhere. It has overtaken “Spider-Man: No Way Home” as the seventh-highest-grossing film ever. And it has done so by tapping deep into China’s cultural roots.
By the mid-2010s, film-makers were nailing the main melody of the patriotic blockbuster. Before “Ne Zha 2”, the two most popular films were “The Battle at Lake Changjin” from 2021 and “Wolf Warrior 2” from 2017. Both were action flicks involving the defeat of dastardly foreigners. Such films topped China’s charts from 2017 to 2023 (except 2019), according to data from Maoyan, a movie-ticketing service. The state invested in their rise. A law passed in 2016 to support the film industry listed “promoting core socialist values” as one key theme. But their popularity peaked in 2020, when they accounted for more than half of box-office receipts of the 20 highest-grossing films. This year, that share fell below 2%. Triumphant narratives of national strength seem detached from reality, with Chinese viewers now struggling in a depressed economy.
Enter the demon child. “Ne Zha 2” has perhaps caught on because it is not forcing anything on anyone. Chinese people know the character from folklore. The film is packed with humour delivered by endearing characters, and it resonates because of its messages of self-determination, the unconditional love of family and the pursuit of justice. The technical sophistication has amazed viewers and pitched domestic animation studios as serious competitors to their Hollywood counterparts.
At a cinema in the eastern city of Hangzhou Ms Zheng, a 20-year-old student, is watching the film with her friends. She says she found the hero epics too heavy—“They force-feed patriotism”—and has already seen “Ne Zha 2” three times. Like many young people disillusioned by the current paucity of job opportunities, Ms Zheng says she finds hope in the rebellious and righteous Ne Zha. “Nowadays we are overwhelmed by social pressure, but he tells you that you can define the type of person you want to be.”
To boost consumption during the holiday, local governments gave out cinema vouchers to attract more moviegoers. Once it was clear the film could break records, more people rallied to see it. Schools took students, and firms stopped production so employees could attend. One cinema in Sichuan province said that it would hold off screening the recently released “Captain America: Brave New World” in order to boost “Ne Zha 2” sales. “Our Chinese animation deserves to be seen by the world,” it said.
The world has not yet been won over, though. So far, less than 2% of ticket sales have come from abroad. That could be the next melody Chinese film-makers learn to play.■
https://www.economist.com/china/2025/03/06/a-new-film-is-breaking-box-office-records-in-china
The Economist, March 4
Don’t mention it : This year’s Oscars were notably apolitical
Hollywood has ditched resistance in favour of toeing the line
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IT WAS a throwaway quip, delivered deep in the ceremony’s long flabby middle, just before the award for Best Original Score. “‘Anora’ is doing well tonight,” observed the host of the Oscars, Conan O’Brien (pictured below). “I guess Americans are excited to see someone finally stand up to a powerful Russian.” Mr O’Brien often gives his jokes a second wind by mugging after he tells them. This time he moved on quickly. So did the show.
Things were different the last time Donald Trump took office. In 2017 Jimmy Kimmel, the host, needled Mr Trump mercilessly, mocking his cabinet members, daughter, policies and addiction to X (then still called Twitter). Stars wore blue ribbons in support of the American Civil Liberties Union, a watchdog group fighting Mr Trump’s nascent agenda. Gael García Bernal, a Mexican actor, declared himself “against any form of wall that wants to separate us” (Mr Trump had campaigned on building a southern-border wall that Mexico would pay for).
Though 2017 may have been unusually raw, stars have long used the Oscars to make political statements. Winners have used their speeches to protest against America’s wars in Vietnam and Iraq and express support for immigrants and climate-change legislation. In the early 1990s actors wore red ribbons to support people with AIDS.
The gruel was thinner this year. Bill Kramer, boss of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which organises the Oscars, had said he “absolutely” wanted the show to steer clear of politics. The stars obliged. “Emilia Pérez”, a musical about a Mexican cartel boss who undergoes a sex-change operation to become a woman, led the field with 13 nominations; it took home just two awards, for Best Original Song and Best Supporting Actress, won by Zoe Saldaña. She acknowledged her immigrant background, but said nothing about the current administration. “The Apprentice”, a film critical of Mr Trump that had struggled to find a distributor in America for fear of retribution from the (then former) president, had been nominated for two awards but won none.
A handful of winners made oblique references to “the chaos we’re living through” (the orchestra swiftly played her off the stage) and the importance of “not letting hate go unchecked”. But even the two charming Iranians who took the stage to claim their statues for Best Animated Short Film were gracious and anodyne. The Palestinians and Israelis who made “No Other Land”, about Israel seizing land in a West Bank community, politely disagreed with American and Israeli policy, but that should be expected from makers of a political documentary.
The night’s most sustained applause came not in response to a political statement, as was common eight years ago, but to a red-meat defence of seeing film in theatres offered by Sean Baker, who made “Anora” and took home Oscars including Best Picture, Director and Original Screenplay. Mikey Madison (pictured above), the film’s 25-year-old lead, deservedly won Best Actress.
The awards in 2017 presaged an era of socially conscious film-making. This year’s awards seem to herald something more akin to the shift that greeted Ronald Reagan’s ascendancy 45 years ago. American voters made their views clear at the ballot box: Reagan won 44 states in 1980 and 49 in 1984. Studios obliged. The critical, conspiratorial films of the 1970s such as “Chinatown”, “The Conversation”, “The Deer Hunter” and “Three Days of the Condor” gave way to the uncomplicated patriotism of “Rambo” and “Top Gun”.
This time there may be something darker at work: fear. One veteran media executive predicts: “The enormity of hostility that Hollywood evinced toward Trump and Trumpism from 2016 to 2020 and 2020 to 2024: will that be mitigated because people perceive their business interests are at stake? Absolutely. You can intimidate people who have responsibilities and shareholders.”
Nobody wants to be audited, or see their merger get scuppered. Some stories will simply not get told. As one longtime producer mused, “If someone came to me with a personal story about an American family that came here 35 years ago from Venezuela, and the mother…won’t answer the door any more because she thinks Trump will send her home…that’s an interesting story to me. But I wouldn’t go near it, because nobody will make it.” ■
https://www.economist.com/culture/2025/03/03/this-years-oscars-were-notably-apolitical
New York Times, March 3
‘Anora’ Wins Best Picture During a Dominant Night at the Oscars
For his movie about an exotic dancer who weds a Russian heir, Sean Baker won awards for best director, original screenplay and editing.
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“Anora,” a comedy-drama about an exotic dancer who weds a flighty Russian, won best picture at the Oscars on Sunday night, capping a dominant performance for a movie that was far from a box-office smash.
In addition to winning the top award as a producer, Sean Baker won Oscars for directing, original screenplay and editing, tying Walt Disney’s record with four competitive Oscars in one year. Mikey Madison also won the award for best actress. (The only category that “Anora” was nominated for but did not win was best supporting actor, in which Yura Borisov lost to Kieran Culkin, who starred in “A Real Pain.”)
“Anora” established its award-season bona fides last May, when it won the prestigious Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival. Still, it did not dominate this season in the manner of the recent best picture winners “Oppenheimer” and “Everything Everywhere All at Once.”
Although “Anora” earned impressive wins with Hollywood’s producers, directors and writers guilds, it was shut out for top awards at the Golden Globes, the Screen Actors Guild Awards and the BAFTAs.
In the best picture category, “Anora” defeated “The Brutalist,” which won three Oscars for best actor (Adrien Brody), cinematography and score. Several other movies in the category earned two Oscars: “Dune: Part Two” (visual effects, sound), “Emilia Pérez” (supporting actress, song) and “Wicked” (production design, costume design).
Discounting the pandemic years of 2020 and 2021, “Anora” becomes the lowest-earning film to take home the night’s biggest prize.
It has collected only $15.6 million since arriving in theaters in October, according to Comscore, which compiles ticketing data. Last year’s best picture winner, “Oppenheimer,” sailed past the $300 million mark.
Kyle Buchanan is a pop culture reporter and also serves as The Projectionist, the awards season columnist for The Times. More about Kyle Buchanan
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/02/movies/anora-oscars-best-picture.html
New York Times, March 1
‘A Complete Unknown’ Review:
Timothée Chalamet Goes Electric : The actor stars as a young Bob Dylan, who woos folk followers only to betray them later at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival.
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Every so often in “A Complete Unknown,” an enjoyably easy-listening and -watching fiction about Bob Dylan’s early road to immortality, Timothée Chalamet lowers his gaze and sends a shiver up your spine. It’s as startling as it is welcome because Chalamet has never seemed especially threatening, even in his more darkly messianic moments in the “Dune” series. He seems too anodyne to play a disruptive trickster like Dylan, yet Chalamet proves an ideal conduit in “A Complete Unknown” because the music and its maker have such power. As with any great cover band, it’s the original material that carries you through the night.
There are so many Dylans — poet, prophet, lost-and-born-again genius — that choosing just one feels futile. True to its title, “A Complete Unknown” shrewdly doesn’t try. Instead, anchored by Chalamet, who like the other principals, does his own (fine) singing, it offers Bob the Enigma, a seer who’s mysteriously delivered from beyond, a.k.a. Minnesota, to a needy world. Awkwardly charming, sometimes cruel and altogether confounding, this Bob writes like an angel, with rhythms that move bodies, choruses that worm into ears and lyrics that seem like urgent questions. He becomes the rasp of a generation, but he isn’t “alright.”
Directed by James Mangold, the movie takes place over an eventful four years, culminating with him shocking the 1965 Newport Folk Festival by going electric, a seismic music event. In Dylan catalog terms, it begins around the time he writes “Song to Woody” (“Walkin’ a road other men have gone down”). It continues amid romances, drama, record deals and youth-quakers like “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” (“Where the executioner’s face is always well hidden”). Then the plugged-in Bob goes loud and hard at Newport with “Maggie’s Farm,” and that’s a wrap (“Well, I try my best / To be just like I am / But everybody wants you / To be just like them”).
Dylan arrives in New York on a gray, wintry day, and is soon strolling through the bohemian fantasy known as Greenwich Village, that creative Valhalla where artists, dilettantes, tourists and would-be saviors are rubbing elbows. It’s an inauspicious introduction in part because the whole scene looks and feels overly tidy and art-directed. It gets worse when Bob passes a busker hitting a tambourine (hey, mister!), if only because the image evokes Twyla Tharp’s 2006 Broadway fiasco “The Times They Are A-Changin’,” which literalized Dylan lyrics with performers rolling, yes, stones. Hagiography can be perilous.
Things improve considerably once Bob starts finding his place in the city’s bustling folk scene, and he and the movie get into a fluid groove. He’s been traveling light for a future heavyweight, with just a rucksack and an acoustic guitar with a sticker that reads, “this machine kills fascists,” the same words that his idol, Woody Guthrie, had on his. Bob has come to New York, among other things, to visit a now-mute Woody (Scoot McNairy), who’s dying in a New Jersey hospital. There, Woody’s only other regular visitor is the saintly Pete, as in Seeger (Edward Norton), a true folk believer who takes an early shine to Bob.
A Complete Unknown” is based on Elijah Wald’s 2015 nonfiction page-turner “Dylan Goes Electric!,” which is helpfully subtitled “Newport, Seeger, Dylan, and the Night That Split the Sixties.” The movie, written by Mangold and Jay Cocks, touches on these biographical fundamentals, shaping them into a smoothly streamlined and familiar heroic journey of towering ambition and predictably bittersweet success. It’s an ascension that, as Bob hits the folk scene — which welcomes him as a savior only to later condemn him as a traitor — surges with a series of oppositional forces: authenticity versus fabulation, artistic truth versus commercial imperatives, a humble banjo versus a solid-body Stratocaster.
Much of the movie is given over to a less satisfying opposition that effectively sets a watery-eyed blond activist, Sylvie Russo (Elle Fanning), a veritable our Lady of Suffering, against the cool, honey-voiced brunette sensation who’s already famous when Bob meets her and will soon be on the cover of Time magazine. That would be Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro), one of the marquee names who move in and out of his orbit, happily and not. From the way that Bob looks at Joan, it’s obvious he desires her, but as Chalamet’s shivery, ice-pick gaze suggests, he also seems to want her success. (Russo is a stand-in for Dylan’s ex, Suze Rotolo, who’s arm in arm with him on the cover of his galvanic second album, “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan.”)
Mangold, whose movies include “Ford v Ferrari,” is good with actors, but Fanning is ill-served here by a character who torturously morphs into a martyr to Bob’s genius. The problem isn’t Sylvie’s tears, which are well earned, especially when Bob and Joan’s duetting turns intimate and then humiliatingly public; it’s that Sylvie and her pain primarily reflect the wily, elusive, at times callous Bob. Worse, she and Joan — who’s better rounded partly because she is a music great in her own right — spend a lot of time looking at Bob with the kind of awe that suggests they’re witnesses to a miracle (if one who doesn’t know how to make his own coffee).
“A Complete Unknown” probably won’t please Dylan purists or anyone, really, who’s a stickler for documentary facticity in fiction. The movie blurs and plays with years and events, creating a generally seamless narrative out of a messy life as it glances at the larger world (the Cuban missile crisis, the civil rights movement). Some of these global affairs affect the characters more directly than others. Yet while the world’s sorrows and outrages help fuel the folk scene, its finger-pointing (Dylan’s term) protest songs, its politics and concerns, are subsumed by vague notions of authenticity, which are embodied by the suffocatingly sincere Pete and the more openly strident musicologist Alan Lomax (Norbert Leo Butz).
It’s no wonder that Bob rebels against the folkies, whose purity in the movie finally feels more tangible and important than the righteous causes they’re advocating for. Notably, they come off as more square than even the uptown squares who discover Bob after his second album takes off and want a piece of him, as he finds in a Fellini-esque party full of clawing rich gargoyles. Those admirers are bad, but Pete and the folkies can seem worse because they’re dogmatic and because, well, they’re not cool. That seems the point of a scene in which Pete is performing on a low-rent TV show, his wife, Toshi (Eriko Hatsune), supportively, quietly hovering nearby, when Bob walks in looking like the rock star he’s about to become.
Chalamet does look cool, if not as otherworldly as Cate Blanchett in Todd Haynes’s 2007 film “I’m Not There,” in which she also plays Dylan around the same transformational era. Neither look, sound, feel as cool as Dylan once did. One of the hurdles in biographical movies about contemporary idols is that we know them from the get-go (or think we do) because, like Dylan, they’ve been in mass circulation. And Dylan has been in a lot of movies, including documentaries from D.A. Pennebaker (“Dont Look Back,” 1967) and Martin Scorsese (“No Direction Home,” 2005). I imagine that Chalamet has made a close study of these great films; he looks and sounds as if he has, even if he never appears pharmaceutically assisted.
The most pleasant surprise in “A Complete Unknown,” and why it works as well as it does, is that even as it builds a realistic world with sweep and detail — the sickly institutional gray-green paint in Woody’s hospital alone will teleport older viewers straight back to the 1960s — it doesn’t try to make Bob palatable, nice or, finally, comprehensible in the usual dreary biopic fashion. For the most part, his genius remains unknowable as does his back story, which is hinted at only in a nod to the surname Zimmerman and a glimpse of a scrapbook. Bob may be a Jesus or a Judas (or both). As this movie underscores, he is very much a beautiful dissimulation, and sometimes there is nothing more authentic than an entertaining con.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/25/movies/a-complete-unknown-review.html
The Economist, February 22
Paiving the way : An Oscar-nominated film sparks a reckoning with Brazil’s dictatorship
“I’m Still Here” is as much about the country’s present as its past
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Towards the end of “I’m Still Here”, a Brazilian film set during the country’s military dictatorship, a photographer tells his subjects—a woman and her five children—not to smile. The father of the family, Rubens Paiva, has been “disappeared” by the dictatorship, and the photographer’s editor wants a suitably sad image. They defy the editor and flash toothy grins.
The scene captures Brazil’s approach to the legacy of its dictatorship, which ruled from 1964 to 1985. Unlike in Argentina, Chile and Uruguay, no one has been sent to jail for crimes committed by the regime. Brazil has, so far, been content to move on in the name of stability and democracy.
“I’m Still Here” came out in November and is already one of the most-watched films in Brazilian history. It is also the first South American film to be nominated for best picture at the Oscars. Fernanda Torres, who plays the stoical lead, is in the running for best actress. Walter Salles, the director, says he wanted to “tell a story that felt essential” at a time of democratic backsliding, to bring Brazil out of its “amnesia”. It seems to be working; the film is spurring a new reckoning with Brazil’s violent past.
The film follows Paiva’s family as they deal with his disappearance. The left-wing congressman was ousted after the coup in 1964. In 1971 regime thugs hauled him away from his home in Rio de Janeiro for questioning. He never came back. For decades the army pushed a story that Paiva had escaped them and joined a guerrilla group. In 2014 a national truth commission published evidence that he had been tortured to death under interrogation. Five retired officers were charged with killing him and hiding his body. None of the officers have been tried. Three have died of old age.
Across South America, military leaders accepted the transition to democracy only after securing amnesties for themselves, amnesties which also protected their often-violent opponents. In Argentina, Chile and Uruguay pardons for the dictatorship were eventually annulled, or exceptions made to try the worst offenders. Brazil’s Supreme Court upheld its amnesty in 2010.
The differences, says Marina Franco of the National University of San Martín in Buenos Aires, are down to the relative brutality of the regimes, and their power at the point of transition to democracy. Argentina’s dictatorship was particularly violent and disorderly; over seven years the junta “disappeared” as many as 30,000 people, oversaw economic chaos and lost the Falklands war. This spurred Argentina’s human-rights movement, the region’s strongest. Over 1,000 people have been sentenced for the junta’s crimes.
Chile’s regime was also bloody, but the success of Augusto Pinochet’s economic reforms helped him keep power for 17 years and shape the constitution. Justice there has been slower. Uruguayans have rejected referendums on overturning their amnesty, but the courts have sent those involved in the worst crimes to jail.
Brazil’s regime was the least savage, though at least 434 people were killed and thousands tortured. After 1985 the army let a budding left-wing movement thrive. Winning the football World Cup in 1970 boosted the mood of the country overall, as did the booming economy in that decade. For years, civil society accepted the amnesty.
Justice revisited
The success of “I’m Still Here” is leading Brazilians to rethink their clemency. Registry offices have begun updating death certificates for those disappeared by the state to reflect the real causes of their death. On February 14th the official commission which looks into political killings and disappearances said it might re-examine the death of Juscelino Kubitschek, a former president who died in suspicious circumstances in 1976. On the same day, Brazil’s Supreme Court started deliberating on whether the amnesty should apply in Paiva’s case and that of two other disappeared dissidents, or whether this conflicts with human-rights treaties Brazil has signed.
Brazil’s attitude to dictatorship is newly relevant. On January 8th 2023 supporters of Jair Bolsonaro, then Brazil’s outgoing president, attacked government buildings in an attempt to keep him in power after he lost an election that he falsely claimed was rigged against him. Mr Bolsonaro’s allies in Congress are now trying to pass an amnesty for all involved. Police reports released in November describe alleged plans by confidants of Mr Bolsonaro to murder the current president and vice-president before they could assume office, plus a Supreme Court judge. The reports state that Mr Bolsonaro, who has long praised the dictatorship, edited a draft decree declaring a state of emergency and annulling the election. The effort failed after two of the armed forces’ three commanders rejected it. On February 18th Brazil’s attorney-general officially charged Mr Bolsonaro with plotting a coup to remain in power. Mr Bolsonaro denies wrongdoing and says he is suffering political persecution.
Mr Bolsonaro also has personal beef with the Paiva family (pictured). He grew up in the same town as Paiva, whose father was a wealthy landowner. When a bust of Paiva was installed in Congress in 2014, Mr Bolsonaro, then a representative, spat on it in front of the family. Marcelo Rubens Paiva, Paiva’s son, claims the resentment stems from “class hatred”. A biography of Mr Bolsonaro written by one of his children lists grudges against the family, such as never being invited to swim in their pool and that the children ate expensive ice lollies. “I’m Still Here” is a rebuke not only to Brazil’s past, but also to the leading demagogue of its present.
The Guardian, February 15
Das Licht (The Light) review – mystical satirical romp channels German anxiety over refugees
Veteran director Tom Tykwer sends a magical Syrian cleaner into a bohemian yet unhappy family, bringing with her a flashing-light treatment for depression
Full text :
Here is a weirdly incoherent and very long aria of semi-comic dismay from white-liberal Europe, and from a Germany whose bold “Wir schaffen das” – or “We can handle this” – Angela Merkel-era attitude to refugees has turned to anxiety. Veteran German director Tom Tykwer has created a heavy-footed magical-realist romp lasting two hours and 40 minutes about a complicated extended family in Berlin whose painful lives are turned around by a magic refugee whose purpose is to salvage their happiness. The film twice uses Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody to provide a jukebox blast of energy – the second time at the very end, worryingly indicating that the classic track is being brought on to save the day because the film is out of ideas.
Lars Eidinger gives a muscular, unselfconscious performance as Tim, a thoroughly modern cool dad who writes advertising copy for environmentally conscious brands, cycles everywhere in the driving rain and has a disconcerting habit of stripping naked when he gets back to his bohemian apartment. Nicolette Krebitz plays his wife, Milena, who is trying to establish a community theatre in Africa with a German government grant. But their teen children, eco-protester Frieda (Elke Biesendorfer), who has just had an abortion, and VR gamer nerd Jon (Julius Gause) are unhappy. There is also Dio (Elyas Eldridge), Milena’s son by Godfrey (Toby Onwumere), with whom she co-parents.
When their cleaning lady drops dead one day in their kitchen, a very peculiar thigh-slapper of a comic moment that is evidently intended to satirise (and yet also ultimately forgive) their entitled prosperous arrogance, the family has to get someone else in; this is Syrian refugee Farrah (Tala Al Deen), who is wise and all-knowing, with a private grief in her own life.Farrah turns the family on to an experimental treatment for depression: a throbbing, flashing light you gaze into that helps your body to release endorphins. Tim’s family are coming into mystic alignment with Farrah’s …
There is quite a bit of energy in this film, but it’s shapeless and undirected, and seems to be making an unearned claim on our affectionate regard for how chaotically adorable and yet meaningful the whole thing is. The final sequence, though initially very striking, raises serious ideas and moods which the film itself is unable to absorb.
Das Licht (The Light) screened at the Berlin film festival.
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2025/feb/14/das-licht-the-light-review-tom-tykwer-german
The Guardian, February 11
With a new hit film, Netflix has reduced disabled lives to feelgood fodder – and got the facts shockingly wrong
This story about a child with cerebral palsy is badly misleading – and a slap in the face for families like ours
Article intégral :
Amazing news from Netflix: there is an extraordinary treatment available for children with very severe neurological disabilities, one that, given the appropriate level of parental gumption, will grant kids written off as hopeless cases the ability to walk and talk. The medical establishment, populated as it is with hopeless dinosaurs, hasn’t yet absorbed its full significance, and you won’t find it on the NHS, or through mainstream providers in the United States or Europe. But quietly, almost magically, it is already changing lives.
Lucca’s World with (l-r) Danish Hussain as Dr Kumar, Juan Pablo Medina as Andrés, Bárbara Mori as Bárbara and Julián Aguilar Tello as Lucca. Photograph: Maria Medina/Netflix
The device that provides this treatment, the Cytotron, is the subject of the Mexican movie Lucca’s World, the No 1 non-English-language film on the world’s biggest streaming platform last week. It follows one family – led by a remarkable mother, Bárbara Anderson, on whose memoir the movie is based – as they turn every stone in pursuit of a better life for their little boy. And as soon as Anderson learns about the Cytotron, there is very little room for doubt about its remarkable properties. By “stimulating the damaged brain cells in order for them to become more active and create new connections”, the device can apparentlyrestore the functions that have been destroyed by Lucca’s severe cerebral palsy. “The Cytotron will mark a before and after in the history of medicine,” we learn. It’s “scientifically supported”. Yes, it’s eye-wateringly expensive – $50,000 for a single course of treatment in the movie– but that’s because it’s unprecedented.
An old-school doctor in the filmobjects that the inventors of the device – basically a pimped-out MRI machine that directs radio waves at the patient – would “already have the Nobel prize for medicine” if their claims stacked up. He quickly realises that he is hopelessly wrong. After the machine works its magic, Lucca takes some hesitant supported steps, and says “mama”; a postscript tells us that he has “started walking and talking”. The viewer is left with the same lesson as Anderson: failing to pursue such a prospect is “surrender”, or “giving up”. The only worthwhile imperative is in the promise she makes her son: “I promise I won’t rest until you get better.”
As parents of a toddler with cerebral palsy, we understand that resolution better than most. In the year and a half since our son suffered a significant brain injury after he stopped breathing in his sleep, we have read countless research papers, consulted every expert who will talk to us and paid through the nose for treatments whose efficacy we will never know definitively.
The parts of the movie that deal with that desperate search will be instantly recognisable to any family in the same boat. So, too, is the depiction of how alarming it is to find that the science is much more ambiguous than you would hope, that the most rigorous specialists in the field will tell you that this is more often a world of “worth trying” than “definitely do”. Through all of this, we have also learned that if you aren’t your child’s most reliable advocate, you can’t expect anyone else to be.
But another lesson we have learned is the crucial importance of keeping a foot in the reality-based community. The more we watched Lucca’s World, and the more we read, the more astonished we were that Netflix would release this movie, and spread its fantastical message to many millions of viewers. While the film begins with a disclaimer saying that some scenes have been altered for dramatic purposes, the average viewer would surely expect a film based on a true story to have at least a passing relationship to the truth; and the truth is that for the vast majority of parents who long for something similar for their own children, Lucca’s World is an unattainable one.
In publicity for the film, Anderson told Infobae Mexico: “I never recommend … nor promote [the treatment]. I only describe the journey of taking an experimental treatment that, in the case of my son, worked.” You can decide for yourself how that statement squares with the movie’s postscript, which tells us that “Bárbara, Andrés and a group of investors bought two Cytotrons and opened the first clinic outside India”. One of these devices was provided to the Federico Gómez Children’s Hospital of Mexico, which briefly ran a study into the Cytotron’s use. Last week, the hospital said that the study was discontinued after a year because of a lack of progress.
If you are looking for the vaunted “scientific support” for the Cytotron, you might look at a rival enterprise in Mexico, Neurocytonix, which markets the device as the Neurocytotron. They conducted the only visible study on its efficacy as a treatment for cerebral palsy, completed in 2021. Neurocytonix has used the completion of this “gold standard” randomised clinical trial in marketing communications. But almost four years after the study’s completion, the results still have not been published. A generous description of that hiatus would be “highly unusual”. The experts who have helped us with our own son’s care have a pithier description. Last week, the Mexican Society of Pediatric Neurology issued a statement warning that no clinical trials have demonstrated the efficacy of the Cytotron.
When we asked Neurocytonix for comment, they distanced themselves from the film and told us that a second phase of the study was completed last year, saying that “multiple manuscripts are in preparation for publication” without addressing why it has taken so long. They emphasised that the treatment remains unproven, and said that Bárbara Anderson’s lack of scientific training “may have led to misinterpretations of scientific evidence”. (Netflix declined to comment.)
As for another of the movie’s heroes, Rajah Vijay Kumar, the Indian doctor and serial inventor who came up with the Cytotron: he previously drew attention when he launched Shycocan, an electron-producing device which claimed to stop the spread of coronavirus in closed spaces “by photon mediation”. That was approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), it was reported. But it wasn’t, and many reputable scientists say that it has never been backed up by evidence.
Then there’s Lucca himself. The film is a dramatisation, and we don’t know exactly what his life post-treatment looks like. But we can say this: the actor in the movie “walked” with the soles of his feet squarely on the ground, not something that Lucca appears able to do in videos of him using a supportive device on his mother’s Instagram feed. Lovely though those moments are – we’ve had them ourselves – credible physiotherapists do not see them as a reliable predictor of functional walking in children with severe cerebral palsy. And several years after he said “mama” on his own, a recent update shows Lucca undergoing treatment where a speech therapist opens and closes his mouth to form consonants on his behalf.
If Lucca has seen any benefits, that’s wonderful. But there is no available scientific evidence that they are replicable for anyone else. Nonetheless, parents are flocking to Neurocytonix, and trying to come up with tens of thousands of dollars for a “research donation” that the company asks for, since it would be illegal to charge for a treatment not approved by Mexico’s medical regulators: the page after page of Google results for “gofundme neurocytonix” are a portrait of undaunted hope. For everyone else, the Netflix movie provides, as one reviewer says, a “feelgood note to end on”. A better phrase for this is “inspiration porn”: the designation of disabled lives as a handy pick-me-up when you’ve got a case of the Mondays, to be quietly set aside if the messier truth threatens to intervene.
Above all: Lucca’s World perpetuates the idea that children like our son are broken and must be repaired, rather than whole people who deserve every chance to live full and happy lives. It divides parents into those who make their children better, and those who surrender. It tells its audience that stories like Lucca’s have a simple, happy ending. But these stories don’t conclude with a bow around them. They are much more complicated and beautiful than that.
That isn’t how Lucca’s World sees the little boy without whom it would not exist, though. The very last shot Netflix gives us is of the real Lucca, smiling at the camera, perfectly himself. Over the top, Coldplay sing us out with the moral: “I will try to fix you.”
Archie Bland is the editor of the Guardian’s First Edition newsletter. Ruth Spencer is a former editor at Guardian US
The Economist, January 31, pay wall
Split screen : Why “Emilia Pérez” is loved by Hollywood and hated by everyone else
And the Oscar for Worst Picture goes to…
Article intégral :
Lockdown has a lot to answer for. As many were baking sourdough at home, Jacques Audiard, a French film-maker, was writing an opera libretto about a Mexican cartel boss who fakes his own death, undergoes gender-transition surgery and campaigns for the missing victims of the drug war. The resulting film, a trans-narco-musical fever dream called “Emilia Pérez”, has earned 13 Oscar nominations. Since the Academy Awards began in 1929, only three films have received more. No other foreign-language film ever has.
Hollywood is besotted, but audiences are not. Movie-goers’ reviews have been savage. On the Internet Movie Database (IMDb) it is the lowest-rated Best Picture nominee since 1935, earning a six out of ten. On Rotten Tomatoes, which aggregates critic and audience opinions, the public approval rating is just 23%. The nine other Best Picture nominees score between 75% and 99%.
The film’s Rotten Tomatoes rating is down from 75% in December, before it opened in Mexico, where viewers were unimpressed (see chart). Some of this decline is explained by “review bombing”. This can happen when films take on heated subjects. “The Promise” (2016), about the Armenian genocide, saw its IMDb page mobbed with thousands of one-out-of-ten ratings from users in Turkey; in response, most Armenians gave it full marks, resulting in a middling overall score.
But socially conservative Mexicans objecting to a trans woman starring in a film is not the full picture. “Emilia Pérez” is, objectively, poor. The dialogue sounds as if it has been hastily translated from French to English to Spanish, leading to jarring phrases like, “Hasta me duele la pinche vulva nada más de acordarme de ti” (“Even my fucking vulva still hurts as soon as I think of you”). The lyrics have been lost in translation, too. Consider the opening line of one song: “Hello, very nice to meet you. I’d like to know about sex-change operations.” (Somehow “hello” gets one syllable and “change” gets two.) “I see, I see, I see,” is the reply, as perfunctory an iambic trimeter as you will ever hear.
Botched pronunciations have angered Mexicans. Karla Sofía Gascón, who plays Emilia, was born in Madrid and cannot always hide her Spanish accent. Emilia’s wife with the sore vulva (played by pop star Selena Gomez) sounds robotic in Spanish and slips into English halfway through a line. Adriana Paz, Emilia’s love interest, is the only Mexican in the main cast. She has less than 12 minutes of screen time.
Some also feel the film trivialises the drug war. They accuse it of focusing on one person’s story while ignoring how devastating the cartels continue to be; some 100,000 Mexicans have disappeared or are missing since record-keeping began. Even some trans people are critical. GLAAD, an LGBT+ advocacy group, has called the film a “profoundly retrograde portrayal of a trans woman”, relying on tired tropes.
Why, given the film’s flaws, does Hollywood celebrate it? Two factors are at work. One is money. Netflix, which bought the film for $12m, has reportedly invested tens of millions of dollars in its awards campaign. This is its tenth attempt at a Best Picture win since “Roma” became the first film on a streamer to be nominated in 2019. (Apple TV+ was the first streaming service to win the top prize with “CODA” in 2022.)
The other explanation is Hollywood’s liberal self-image. Members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, who vote on Oscar winners, put a high premium on diversity. Both “Crash” (2004) and “Green Book” (2018) won Best Picture, despite what critics saw as mawkish takes on America’s race problems. The ostensibly inclusive credentials of “Emilia Pérez”, including a trans lead, probably contributed to its nomination haul. Hollywood’s top brass may want to send a message to Donald Trump and his socially conservative administration. But even Oscar wins are not going to be enough to persuade audiences to sing the film’s praises. ■
Le Point, 28 janvier, article payant
« 5 septembre », un film incroyable sur la tragédie des JO de Munich
À travers un thriller haletant, Tim Fehlbaum filme la prise d’otages des Jeux olympiques de Munich, en 1972, et la naissance de l’information en continu.
Article intégral : https://kinzler.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/28-janvier-2.pdf
New York Times, January 25, pay wall
The Movies the Oscars Are Too Scared to Celebrate
Extraits:
For fans of scary movies, 2024 was an extraordinary year. Vital and thrilling horror films, such as “Nosferatu,” “Red Rooms,” “I Saw the TV Glow” and “Longlegs,” all earned critical respect and box office success. Yet you’d barely know this from the Oscar nominations, which were announced Thursday morning.
With the exception of “The Substance,” that rare Academy-approved gore-fest that scored five nominations including best picture, very few of last year’s notable horror films were recognized in the major categories — a continuation of a long-running snubbing by the Oscars that’s gone from curious to downright shameful.
This refusal to acknowledge an entire genre feels especially out of touch at a time when horror is not only critically ascendant but especially attuned to our feelings of ambient dread. We’re living in an age of real-life terrors — climate catastrophe, political unrest, tech-driven dehumanization — so it’s no wonder that many of the most exciting filmmakers working today are using the vocabulary of horror to reflect our moment’s anxieties back to us, and maybe help us process them.
If the 1940s was a decade defined by film noir, the ’50s by westerns and the ’70s by paranoid conspiracy thrillers, then the current era is a golden age for frightening films. The genre has long deserved to be treated as real cinema, with the Oscar recognition to match.
Not all horror movies are created equal, as the term can plausibly encompass everything from the most brazen teensploitation flicks to “The Silence of the Lambs,” the only horror film to win best picture. For my purposes, I’m including any film that’s primarily designed to frighten or unnerve its audience through dark and disturbing subject matter. Even given that relatively narrow definition, only seven horror films have been nominated for best picture since the Academy Awards began in 1929 — including, this year, “The Substance,” an unholy fusion of art-house ambition and B-movie gore from the French filmmaker Coralie Fargeat.
This year’s best picture nomination for “The Substance” might seem like a positive step. (…)
Yet “The Substance” continues a tradition in which the Academy embraces horror only when voters can focus on everything but the horror: a pointed social message, an obvious allegorical lesson, an actor’s overdue comeback narrative. (…)
Why the lack of respect? Horror has a holdover lowbrow reputation that dates from the trashy thrills and lurid appeal of midcentury B movies. (…)
The continued snubbing is confounding. Horror’s appeal now extends well beyond the weirdos who once flocked to double features and midnight madness screenings. The genre has proved to be one of the few that can reliably lure audiences to see original, non-franchise fare on the big screen. Consider the success last year of “Longlegs,” a chillingly inventive “Silence of the Lambs” homage, which rode an ingenious marketing campaign and a flamboyant performance from Nicolas Cage to a box office return of over $125 million worldwide, making it the year’s highest grossing independent film.
Last year also solidified the rise of a new generation of auteur horror filmmakers, such as Robert Eggers, whose darkly erotic “Nosferatu” remake earned four Oscar nominations, but in the technical categories of cinematography, costume design, makeup and hairstyling and production design. (…)
Thankfully, the genre is thriving globally. The dark Danish period piece “The Girl With the Needle” earned an Oscar nomination for best international feature, the riveting French Canadian thriller “Red Rooms” won critical praise and South Korea’s “Exhuma” became a box office smash. And Ms. Moore’s welcome acting nomination for “The Substance” is an overdue acknowledgment that horror is a genre where many of the most memorable, and memorably unhinged, performances can be found. (…)
As horror fans — an increasingly expansive and inclusive group — already understand, the thrill of a great scare comes from a deep and primal place. Horror has already staked its claim as the pre-eminent genre of our moment. It’s time for Academy voters to stop covering their eyes.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/24/opinion/oscars-nominations-academy-awards-horror.html
The Economist, January 23, pay wall
What lies behind curtains : David Lynch mesmerised filmgoers with mystery, beauty and horror
America’s strangest and most surreal film-maker died on January 16th, aged 78
Full article:
The first long, proper kiss David Lynch had with a girl took place in a ponderosa pine forest in America’s north-west. Pine needles, incredibly soft, covered the floor to a depth of about two feet. High treetops pierced the blue sky. The feel of the woods he knew as a boy stayed with him all his life: the smell of them, their dim lost interiors, the crispness of the air. “Twin Peaks”, the mysterious TV series that made him wildly famous in the early 1990s, opened with a shot of pines, mountains and mist. The mist too lingered, drifting in deep bass notes across the face of Laura Palmer, the high-school homecoming queen whose dead body, wrapped up in plastic, lay at the heart of the story. Beneath the surface ordinariness, violent disturbance was going on.
That seemed true of most small towns. He grew up in them, especially in Boise, Idaho, and sometimes felt romantic for those neat yards and white picket fences, the scrubbed children and Sunday excursions. Yet under those lawns (as under the pine needles), insects were tangling and devouring each other. Entropy ate away at every new thing. As a boy he liked to walk the streets at night, curious not about the brightly lit windows but the low-lit, curtained ones. Curtains hid secrets. Behind them, a man and a woman might be sitting in silence in an atmosphere of coiled-up menace. Should he stay silent himself? Should he speak? What would happen next? In his film “Blue Velvet” (1986), one small-town field produced a newly severed ear, evidence, eventually, of a psychopath’s sexual rampages. A woman also appeared out of the dark at the end of a street, naked, with a bloodied mouth. That was something he had witnessed himself—in Boise. It was in such a tender state, all this flesh, in an imperfect world.
His view of what was ugly or grotesque was not like other people’s. Textures obsessed him, the very look and feel of mud, dust, scales and slime. Sores and wounds could be beautiful. He tried to concoct by himself the gruesome growths on the face of Joseph Merrick in “The Elephant Man”. And he loved abandoned factories in their full grime and ruination. As a young man, hoping to live “the art life”, he went to study painting in then-run-down Philadelphia. His enchantment with its smoky walls, stark shadows, broken windows and wailing trains was poured into “Eraserhead” (1977), a black-and-white film he produced while on a fellowship at the American Film Institute. Its very weirdness made critics notice him. The hero, Henry Spencer, the new father of a mutant-fetus baby, was an innocent whose wedge-shaped hair seemed to explode with confusion. He moved wide-eyed through the horror, beauty and mystery of the world, trying to figure out how everything could be the way it was, as did the straight-arrow-cherry-pie detectives of “Blue Velvet” and “Twin Peaks”. Their director saw himself in all of them.
It did not bother him that audiences were often left completely at sea. It was good to ask questions and compare interpretations. He himself knew exactly what he wanted; his task was to transfer his dreams and intuitions perfectly to the screen, turning fragile glass to steel. No detail—the placing of a cup, the dirt beneath a radiator, the precise orange hue of a lipstick—could escape his attention. But the plots, he felt, were simple. “Mulholland Drive”, the mesmerising tale of one aspiring actress unwisely befriending another, was a film that attacked the power structures of Hollywood. “Inland Empire”, which came later and did less well, was the story of an actress increasingly terrified by the death of the woman who had played the part before. At their simplest, almost all his films involved characters confronting the dark sides of themselves. And those were so dark that his lighting man struggled to produce a black that was black enough.
He himself, however, displayed no dark side. He seemed to come straight out of the 1950s, with his khakis, blazers and shirts buttoned right to the top because he didn’t like air on his collarbone. Male friends were “buster” and good things “peachy-keen”. For months and years he would eat the same breakfast every day, coffee and a chocolate milkshake at Bob’s Big Boy in LA, and the same lunch, a grilled-cheese sandwich. He smoked as though the practice had never been outlawed, getting emphysema in the end. With his actors he was no yeller, but gentle, indicating what he wanted with just a word or a touch on an arm. This went right to them. His aspect was so serene—the result of the meditations he had done twice daily since 1973—and he asked so nicely, that his actors would strive to do whatever he wanted, even when it involved ceremonial rape and sado-masochism (in “Blue Velvet”) or rolling in the dirt and masturbation (in “Mulholland Drive”).
The only thing that maddened him was loss of control of the work. In 1983 he agreed to direct “Dune”, a science-fiction epic based on a bestselling novel. Its scale and its setting, in the empty desert, did not suit him at all. He was a man of interiors, details and harrowing close-ups; this was a Hollywood production for the extra-wide screen. Besides, he was an artist, who could no more collaborate on directing than on doing his lumpy, child-like paintings. Consequently, neither Hollywood nor the TV companies really took to him. He won no Oscars. Another director got the final cut on “Dune”, producing a version he refused to recognise.
Worse was what happened to “Twin Peaks”, when halfway through the second series ABC thought it was going too slowly, and forced him to reveal who the killer of Laura Palmer was. All the narrative tension leaked out of it then, and ABC killed it off. That was Fate, perhaps. He made further visits to the town, a prequel film and in 2017 a hugely popular third series, because he seemed to love Laura too much to leave her. Her face was still appearing and disappearing in the mist. And it gave him an excuse to go to the forest again, braving the haunted depths, to celebrate what a strange, beautiful trip life was. ■
The Economist, January 22, pay wall
Back Story : Witty and wise, “A Real Pain” is a masterpiece in a minor key
Jesse Eisenberg’s deceptively slight film asks big moral questions
Extraits:
The bathetic scene will be familiar to many Jews who have traced their roots in eastern Europe. You go in search of der heim, your family’s cradle and the fulcrum of its lore, and discover there is nothing left to see. Amid the vacant lots and communist architecture, there is little even to feel. “It’s so unremarkable,” says Benji (Kieran Culkin) when, in “A Real Pain”, he and his cousin David find their grandmother’s house in Poland.
Out in British cinemas now and streaming on Hulu in America, “A Real Pain” is a stealth contender for the Oscars. With a running time of 90 minutes, it shows how a seemingly modest film can encompass grand philosophical themes. Amid the zigzagging mood, it deftly raises moral quandaries at once specific to its characters and universal.
Played by Jesse Eisenberg (also the writer and director), David is a tense New Yorker with a wife, a child and a job peddling advertising banners; or, as his cousin puts it, “selling shit online”. In his Golden Globe-winning turn as Benji, Mr Culkin reprises the manic charisma of his role in “Succession”, but with added pathos. Where David’s feelings are withheld, Benji’s emerge unfiltered. His is the sort of antic life that is fun to watch but punishing inside. “I love him, and I hate him,” David summarises, “and I want to kill him, and I want to be him.” (…)
Since 2002, when Jonathan Safran Foer published “Everything is Illuminated”, a madcap quest into a Jewish family’s past, the third generation’s perspective has been a dominant lens on the Holocaust. This cohort grew up in the shadow of persecution but didn’t experience it; it knows the heart-wrenching stories but doesn’t feature in them. As James (Will Sharpe), the tour guide in “A Real Pain”, notes, the likes of Benji and David find themselves, with unsettling irony, “staying in fancy hotels [and] eating posh food” while pondering their forebears’ agony.
Focusing on the descendants’ angst, rather than the ancestral horror, might seem self-indulgent. But an indirect approach can be more respectful than trying to confront a tragedy head-on. The power of tact was demonstrated recently by “The Zone of Interest”, a film about the domestic life of the commandant of Auschwitz, which declined to cross the barbed wire and enter the concentration camp itself. (…)
In “A Real Pain”, the third-generation ironies are mixed with a reverential awe. When David, Benji and the rest of the group visit Majdanek, another Nazi camp, the wisecracks stop; the trilling Chopin soundtrack falls silent. As the visitors peer into a gas chamber, the camera does not follow their gaze but looks back at their expressions, as if acknowledging that today’s audiences can know this hell only at a remove.
Suffering is always personal. “A Real Pain” is a tale of idiosyncratic characters, set in the wake of a specifically Jewish catastrophe. (…)
Then there is the bedrock challenge of living alongside evil and disaster. “People can’t walk around the world being happy all the time,” Benji rages. Eloge, the Rwandan, is baffled by how “the world seems to carry on like there aren’t a million reasons to be shocked.” This is a conundrum, even for philosophers. One way or another, though, life does carry on—and, after their miniature, tragicomic odyssey, in a film both slight and deep, so do David and Benji. ■
Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 21. Januar, nur für Abonnenten
Vergangenheitsbewältigung ist ein deutsches Unwort. Der Holocaust kann nicht bewältigt werden. Jesse Eisenbergs Film «A Real Pain» erzählt vom jüdischen Schmerz, der nie verschwinden wird
Zwei Amerikaner unternehmen eine Holocaust-Tour durch Polen. Ein kluger, überraschend leichtfüssiger Kinofilm.
Extraits:
Im Zug nach Lublin, auf dem Weg zur Besichtigung des KZ Majdanek, flippt Benji aus. Er erträgt es nicht länger. Die Holocaust-Tour durch Polen, die sein Cousin David (Jesse Eisenberg) gebucht hat, kommt Benji (Kieran Culkin) verlogen vor.
Dass die Reisegruppe in der ersten Klasse unterwegs ist, findet Benji bezeichnend. Das sei pietätlos. Ob denn niemand die Ironie sehe, schreit er durch den Waggon. Vor 80 Jahren seien die Juden wie Vieh in den Zügen eingepfercht gewesen. Jetzt mache man komfortables Sightseeing.
Der Tour-Guide will ihn beruhigen. Es sei ganz normal, dass man als Nachfahre von Überlebenden Schuld empfinde. Vielen gehe es so. Sie würden sich fragen, ob sie ihr angenehmes Leben verdient hätten, während die Vorfahren unermessliches Leid erfuhren. Aber darum geht es Benji nicht.
Benji, Anfang vierzig, hat kein angenehmes Leben. Nach allem, was David weiss, wohnt der Cousin in einem prekären New Yorker Vorort bei seiner Mutter im Keller. Womöglich ist er sogar obdachlos. Er hat nie etwas auf die Reihe gekriegt.
David und Benji wuchsen zusammen auf, die Väter sind Brüder. Doch mittlerweile hat David eine Familie, führt eine verhältnismässig bürgerliche Existenz in New York. Ein verstockter Grossstadtneurotiker zwar, der seine Spleens aber weitgehend im Griff hat. Benji hingegen ist ein impulsgetriebener Sozialfall. Ein Mann ohne Filter. Er sagt, was er denkt. Seine Direktheit stösst die Leute vor den Kopf. Sie kann aber auch entwaffnend wirken.
Wenn er auf der Holocaust-Tour austickt, mag man sich mit ihm identifizieren. Die Mitreisenden machen einen distanzierten Eindruck. Sympathische Leute, die aber zu keinen echten Emotionen fähig scheinen. Benji bringt seine Gefühle ganz unverhohlen zum Ausdruck. Seine Ergriffenheit ist nicht religiös motiviert, aber das Leid der jüdischen Geschichte geht ihm menschlich nahe. Er legt sich deswegen auch mit dem Tour-Guide an. (…)
Der Film heisst «A Real Pain», ein schlüssiger Titel. Benji und David sind Menschen, die einen Schmerz mit sich tragen. Und lernen müssen, mit ihm umzugehen. Denn weggehen wird er nicht.
Man kann das ahistorisch lesen, die Geschichte legt niemanden auf die Couch. Gleichzeitig liegt der Schluss nahe, die Protagonisten als Stellvertreter der dritten Generation von Holocaust-Überlebenden zu verstehen: Von ihren Vorfahren haben sie ein Trauma vererbt bekommen, aus Benji bricht es unkontrolliert hervor. David dagegen verdrängt es. Seine Neurosen sind verschluckte Tränen. (…)
Zwei urbane New Yorker machen eine Holocaust-Tour in Polen. Maximal unterschiedliche Charaktere auf fremdem Terrain: Dramaturgisch ist es die klassische Buddy-Komödie. Das Genre schwebte dem Schauspieler Jesse Eisenberg vor für seine zweite Regiearbeit nach «When You Finish Saving the World» (2022). Allerdings schrieb der säkulare Jude aus Queens, New York, ursprünglich an einem Film, der nichts mit der Shoah zu tun hat. Aber er kam nicht weiter. Dann, eines Tages, ploppte beim Surfen im Internet eine seltsame Werbung auf; angeboten wurde ihm eine «Holocaust-Tour mit Lunch». (…)
Denn jeder Versuch einer Vergegenwärtigung der Shoah muss unbeholfen bleiben. Die Reisegruppe könnte auch zusammengepfercht in einem Viehwaggon reisen, die Erfahrung würde deswegen nicht authentischer. Trotzdem hat der Störenfried Benji nicht unrecht: Man muss ehrlich etwas fühlen. Und das Gefühl auch zulassen. Sonst wird ein Gedächtnistheater draus.
Auf Deutsch gibt es ein unsägliches Wort: Vergangenheitsbewältigung. Der Völkermord an den Juden lässt sich nicht bewältigen. In dem Begriff versteckt sich der Wunsch, mit der Geschichte abzuschliessen. Der Amerikaner Eisenberg lässt seinen klugen, bemerkenswert leichtfüssigen Film nicht darauf hinauslaufen, dass die beiden Amerikaner erlöst vom Schmerz aus Polen zurückkehren würden.
Die Erzählung hört am New Yorker Flughafen auf, wo sie auch begonnen hat. Mit der Ellipse betont «A Real Pain», dass das Gedenken nie abgeschlossen ist. Keine Holocaust-Tour mit Lunch lässt das Trauma verschwinden. Aber zwischendurch etwas essen ist auch nicht verkehrt. Oder wie man sich in jüdischen Familien gerne zu den Feiertage hin sagt: Wenn man schon überlebt hat, darf man jetzt auch gut speisen. «They tried to kill us, we won, let’s eat!»
The Economist, 12 janvier, article payant
Not the same old stories : The best films of 2024, as chosen by The Economist
They feature nuns and cardinals, robots and strippers
“All of Us Strangers”
In the year’s most tender and intimate film, a lonely screenwriter (Andrew Scott) visits his childhood home and meets the ghosts of his parents (Claire Foy and Jamie Bell). They were killed when he was a boy, but now he has one last chance to talk to them about their brief time together.
“All We Imagine as Light”
A sensitive study of three women (Kani Kusruti, Divya Prabha, Chhaya Kadam) who work together in a bustling Mumbai hospital. By night, the city offers enchanting glimmers of freedom, but the reality of life with little money or independence returns in the morning.
“Anora”
A frenzied farce about a dancer in a strip club (Mikey Madison) who is paid to be the girlfriend of a Russian oligarch’s brattish son. The winner of the Palme d’Or, the top prize at Cannes Film Festival, this is a more complex “Pretty Woman” for a new generation.
Read more of our guides to the cultural treats of 2024—and previous years
“Babygirl”
A married boss of a robotics firm (Nicole Kidman, at her daring best) has an affair with a manipulative young intern (Harris Dickinson). It could be the premise of a glossy erotic thriller, but “Babygirl” is an edgier proposition, which pays more attention to raw emotion than naked flesh.
“La Chimera”
A rumpled English archaeologist (Josh O’Connor) slouches around Tuscany in the 1980s, dreaming of being reunited with a lost love. He helps a rollicking band of grave robbers unearth Etruscan artefacts to sell on the black market. But should some treasures—and some relationships—be left in the past?
“Conclave”
Adapted from Robert Harris’s novel, this superbly controlled and slyly funny thriller stars Ralph Fiennes as a cardinal overseeing the election of a new pope. He soon learns that the front-runners have more secrets than he bargained for.
“Green Border”
Belarus has lured refugees onto its territory, pretending to offer an easy route into the European Union. Polish border guards bar the way; Belarusian guards will not let the migrants turn back. A touching, infuriating tale of how families seeking a better life become pawns of a despot.
“Immaculate”
An American nun (Sydney Sweeney) moves to an Italian convent, only to find that a geneticist-turned-priest is planning to clone Jesus Christ. As exploitative as it sounds, “Immaculate” is one of the most beautifully shot and cleverly constructed horror films in years.
“Love Lies Bleeding”
Kristen Stewart and Katy O’Brian play a small-town gym manager and a bodybuilder who team up against a murderous gun-runner (Ed Harris). This darkly comic crime thriller gets more and more violent, hallucinatory and sensual as it goes along. Be warned, however: it is not for the faint-hearted.
“Monster”
A Japanese widow (Ando Sakura) is frightened by the strange behaviour of her son (Kurokawa Soya). His actions are explained from three angles in three sections, the first a mystery, the second a satirical farce and the third a wistful drama. A deeply humane film.
“Nickel Boys”
A dreamlike, impressionistic account of two boys (Ethan Herisse, Brandon Wilson) experiencing a brutally racist reform school in Florida in the 1960s and the aftermath. The period drama is adapted from the Pulitzer-prizewinning novel by Colson Whitehead, which is based on real events.
“Perfect Days”
Wim Wenders’s lyrical drama chronicles a few days in the life of Hirayama (Yakusho Koji), a loner who cleans public toilets in Tokyo. As modest as his life might be, Hirayama approaches his work and his hobbies with such dedication that his days do seem close to perfect.
“Robot Dreams”
This adaptation of Sara Varon’s graphic novel is set in New York in the 1980s, where an anthropomorphised dog befriends a rusty robot. Every frame is crammed with ingenious jokes, but the film does not have a word of dialogue. Insightful and heartrending.
“Sasquatch Sunset”
Four shaggy Bigfoots roam around a seemingly unspoilt wilderness. The actors (including Jesse Eisenberg and Riley Keough) are unrecognisable, but the creatures are distinctive, lovable characters all the same. Both a wonderfully inventive comedy and a haunting eco-fable.
“The Substance”
A Hollywood has-been (Demi Moore) pays to have herself cloned, so that her younger, perkier self (Margaret Qualley) can relive her glory days. A colourful lampoon of sexism and ageism in the entertainment industry that mutates into an uproariously gory monster movie. ■
All films were released in America or Britain this year
https://www.economist.com/culture/2024/11/08/the-best-films-of-2024-as-chosen-by-the-economist
New York Times, 26 décembre, article payant
The Surprising Sexual Politics of Nicole Kidman’s Kinky ‘Babygirl’
Extraits:
(…) But perhaps the most unlikely feminist film of the year is the much-hyped, extremely kinky “Babygirl,” starring Nicole Kidman, which opens on Dec. 25. It’s a movie that satirizes the archetype of the girlboss but ultimately affirms it. On the cusp of our terrible new era, it felt, for all its darkness and perversity, like an artifact of a more optimistic moment, when equality seemed close enough at hand that the orgasm gap between men and women — something the movie’s director, Halina Reijn, often talks about in interviews — could be a subject of serious concern. (…)
The film centers on Kidman’s Romy, an icy executive with an outwardly perfect life — big job, loving family, multiple homes — who suffers over her unrealized desire to be sexually dominated. It comes out at a moment of misogynist retrenchment both politically and in parts of popular culture. (No one who read “Backlash” should be surprised by the rise of tradwives.) So despite Reijn’s politics, I wondered if her film would be an augur of a new, postfeminist Hollywood moment. It’s not. If anything, the problem with “Babygirl” — and here’s the place to stop reading if you want to avoid spoilers — is that, for all its psychodrama, it lands on a message of female empowerment that feels a little trite.
Though it’s billed as a thriller, “Babygirl” is really more of a black comedy about middle-aged self-discovery. As Reijn said when she introduced the movie at a screening this week, she was animated by a very personal question when making it: “Is it possible to love all the different layers of myself, not just the ones that I like to present to the outside world?”
Romy is a woman who tightly controls her self-presentation. She’s the C.E.O. of a robotics company with the highly suggestive name Tensile. In bed she performs porn-style fake orgasms for her husband. An early scene has her badgering her queer daughter to change out of her baggy clothes for a family Christmas photo. We see Romy getting Botox and standing naked in a cryotherapy chamber — a welcome acknowledgment, rare in Hollywood, that beauty, especially after a certain age, can be its own kind of grueling labor. Rehearsing a corporate presentation, she speaks of the need to “look up, smile and never show your weakness.” A media trainer corrects her, arguing that showing vulnerability can help win over an audience.
That trainer, however, doesn’t recognize just how vulnerable Romy is, both because of an unstable childhood that’s vaguely alluded to and, more urgently, because of her secret fetish, which fills her with corrosive shame. Somehow Samuel, an impudent intern played by Harris Dickinson, recognizes this in her. “I think you like to be told what to do,” he tells her in one of their first meetings. They begin a tempestuous affair in which he degrades her, and thus satisfies her, in a way that her uxorious husband does not. Especially in a post-#MeToo world, the affair could blow up her impeccable life. And there are moments when it seems that Samuel, who displays some stalkerish behavior, might try to do just that.
But Reijn, aiming to make a movie about female sexual liberation, is determined not to punish her characters for their transgressions. It’s a choice I sympathize with but one that lowers the narrative stakes a bit. Ultimately, the drama in “Babygirl” is about Romy’s coming to terms with her desires and integrating them into her life in a way that’s not self-destructive. At one point, a powerful man she works with who has somehow figured out her secret tries to use it to sexually harass and possibly extort her. “Don’t ever talk to me like that again,” she hisses. “If I want to be humiliated, I’m going to pay someone to do it.” At least in the cinema, women can have it all.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/20/opinion/babygirl-kidman-feminism-politics.html
The Economist, 23 décembre
Back Story : “Babygirl” and the trouble with equality
In Nicole Kidman’s new film, a female CEO has an affair with an intern. Boo or bravo?
Extraits:
Played ELECTRICALLY by Nicole Kidman, the protagonist of “Babygirl” is a glamorous high-flyer with a secret woe: sexual frustration. But “at the end of the movie, that problem is fixed,” observed Antonio Banderas, who plays her husband, at the Venice Film Festival, where the erotic thriller had its premiere. “Maybe,” Ms Kidman shot back.
Which goes to show that responses to “Babygirl”, out on Christmas Day in America and elsewhere in January, may vary between the sexes, and, probably, between generations. Back Story is a middle-aged man with Gen-X ideas about feminism and fairness. For him, a provocative film that aspires to be radical winds up seeming oddly reactionary.
Ms Kidman is Romy Mathis, the boss of a logistics firm with a glitzy headquarters in Manhattan. The company does something with warehouses, though exactly what is unclear: those are not the sort of logistics this movie is most interested in. Romy is glimpsed in a lift, surrounded by men, like Margaret Thatcher with her cabinet. She has a palatial apartment and a swish country house, which she shares with her two teenage daughters and Jacob, her handsome nice-guy spouse.
Alas, there is a wrinkle in superwoman paradise (even if there are none on Romy’s Botoxed face). In bed with Jacob, she fakes every climax, then puts on one of her deluxe camisoles, scoots down a marbled corridor, cranks up her laptop and gets her kicks from brutal porn. (…)
Enter Samuel (Harris Dickinson), a swaggering and impertinent intern. As well as being Romy’s underling, Samuel is a bit of rough. You can tell by the chain he wears and, when he gets his kit off, his tattoos. On brief acquaintance he spots a proclivity that, despite their decades-long relationship, Romy’s doting husband has missed. “I think you like to be told what to do,” Samuel says. Chalk it up to his male intuition. Or maybe it’s a lucky guess.
Fleetingly Romy clings to the human-resources argot of “inappropriate” and “unacceptable” behaviour. But soon the pair are rendezvousing in seedy hotel rooms and toilet cubicles. She crawls around on the floor, eats from Samuel’s hand like a dog and laps milk from a saucer on all fours. “You know things,” she purrs. “You sense things.” “Sometimes I scare myself,” Samuel replies modestly. (…)
“We all have a beast living inside of ourselves,” Halina Reijn, the writer and director, said in Venice. If, like Jacob, you are inclined to think that “female masochism is nothing but a male fantasy”, her film will try to persuade you that your ideas about sex and desire are outdated. (…)
“Babygirl” grants Romy another licence which, in the past, was overwhelmingly a male preserve. A powerful woman has a fling with a striving subordinate—and the audience is invited to cheer her liberation. You might call that role-swap a kind of equality or rough justice. You wouldn’t call it progress. ■
https://www.economist.com/culture/2024/12/19/babygirl-and-the-trouble-with-equality