These are the premieres for the week of October 6:
By Salvador Llopart
There is a long distance in style and time between Shoot the Pianist, that black film by Truffaut from 1960 – based on a sad and even blacker novel by David Goodis – to this Shot the Pianist, which marks the return of Mariscal
In the second we meet again with Trueba’s taste for music and Mariscal’s unmistakable touch. As if it were a repetition/reiteration of that one Chico
We are, therefore, facing a complaint. Before an animated true crime that combines the tribute to bossa nova with the tragedy of the missing. It is not the first time that animation takes on a documentary character. It is enough to remember Waltz with Bashir (2008), by Ari Folman, among similar proposals. The backbone of the investigation, in this case, lies in the interviews – thirty long – with real people, many of them famous, turned into cartoons: a tired resource, repeated excessively. The film’s strong point lies in the recreation of the bossa nova performance and those wonderful scenes of sweaty musicians playing jazz.
Mariscal’s uninhibited stroke has a lot to do with it. His style is not innocent, he never has been. Neither the nervous movement between planes nor a drawing that borders on ugliness in its sublime expressiveness. Animation in jumps rather than in continuity that serves – which enhances – the fragmentary sense of reality. We are facing an investigation into a musician beyond all suspicion. He served it with a lot of jazz.
By Jordi Batlle Caminal
2023 is the year of The Exorcist. On the one hand, the celebration marks fifty years since its release and is being re-released in theaters at the same time that this new manifestation of its durability arrives in theaters. On the sad side, 2023 is the year of the death of William Friedkin, the director of this fundamental (and largely foundational) classic of modern horror cinema.
The Exorcist: Believer is a sequel with temporal coherence: its events take place exactly fifty years after those of the original film and its link is the character played in 1973 by the now nonagenarian Ellen Burstyn. In fact, David Gordon Green is doing with this saga what he did in recent years with Halloween: recovering his iconic heroine (and the same actress) and perpetuating the nightmare over three titles. The Exorcist: Believer, then, will be followed by two more chapters.
Gordon Green perfectly understood the spirit of John Carpenter in his appreciable Halloween trilogy, and now we see that he also understood that of Friedkin, whose success was to subject demonic horror to the strictest realism. The film’s prologue, set in Haiti, has an attractive documentary tone, and the long first section of the story, focused on the disappearance of two girls in a forest, is equally rigorous and credible.
Unfortunately, when, once the girls have been found and possessed, the expected final part (even longer) of the crucifixes, the holy water, the spinning heads and the vomiting arrives, the film becomes predictable, tiring, with no room for originality; It would seem that, in that outcome, Gordon Green, rather than looking at Friedkin, is infected by James Wan. The Exorcist: Believer, in short, is rather disappointing, although there is no doubt that it will hook unconditional fans, who will appreciate hearing Mike Oldfield’s notes again and will applaud like crazy for the final surprise.
Por Philipp Engel
Mark, who has a documentary about Fabergé eggs to his credit (every topic has its substance), constructs his biography of the Formula 1 driver Jackie Stewart as a story of improvement, starting from the big little secret that he was forced to hide after his image of a hairy sixties icon. Very far from Senna (Asif Kapadia, 2010), Stewart wins when he recovers the texture of Kodak colors and is moving when he remembers the mortality of the drivers, but it is still a discreet contribution to the genre, mostly intended for motorsport fans.
Por Philipp Engel
On the ruins of Carthage stands a luxurious neighborhood in Tunisia, whose Dubai-style buildings were left half-finished when the revolution broke out after the immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi, which was followed by many others, immortalized with mobile phones. With these elements, Chebbi creates an unexpected supernatural thriller, with a policewoman facing the embers of the corruption of the Ben Ali regime, and makes the best of those enormous cement skeletons in which charred corpses appear.
By Salvador Llopart
The castle has an air of mystery with nothing to hide. A static thriller, surrounded by an atmosphere of imminent danger when, pay attention, hardly anything actually happens. We are facing an enigma, and even more so when we know that Justina and her daughter Alexia, the protagonists, exist, they are true. They both live in that huge house lost in the Argentine countryside: an inheritance that they cannot sustain. There is something of a Cortázar story here, where life becomes narrower as the mansion imposes itself on their lives.
By Salvador Llopart
We are faced with a comedy that is confusing in its mystification of ordinary people. A euphoric comedy, too. Where a solid cast – with Paul Dano at the helm – supports the unsustainable: the story of Keith Gill, a quirky guy, addicted to social networks, who, armed with the wave of his intuition, became a charismatic David to put knees to the Goliath that is Wall Street. In the end, only one thing that we suspect is clear: money does not exist, it is an invention of a few. But the thing has intrigued you.
Por Philipp Engel
Echevarría, with Carolina Yuste as a sweet alter ego, is on the way to the trilogy: if in Carmen y Lola (2018), her debut, she broke the taboo of a lesbian love between two gypsies from Hortaleza, now she is interested in the problems of the daughters of Chinese emigrants, and an adopted girl, in Usera, always on the outskirts of Madrid. As a suburban explorer, she is a pioneer, but the adventure, a bit of a TV movie, is uneven: very delicate with childhood, too tremendous when it comes to adolescence.
