These are the movie premieres that hit the screens from this July 28:
By Jordi Batlle Caminal
Haunted house movies can be intended to be scary or, on the contrary, to make people laugh. Cinema has given hundreds of examples of both options since its origins. On the comic side, two geniuses of French silent cinema, one in front of the camera (Max Linder) and the other behind (Abel Gance), perpetrated in 1924 Au secours! , a short and imaginative piece, almost experimental. De genuflection is one of the many extant versions of The cat and the canary, Paul Leni’s 1927 version, which would sow influences; for example, already in the talkies, The House of Shadows, a little gem by the illustrious James Whale.
The public had a great time with these terrifying fantasies sprinkled with humor. And with the parodies of Bud Abbott and Lou Costello or Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, couples prone to tremble like custard in gloomy and dark palaces. The spring has never stopped flowing: in more recent times, brilliant titles such as Tim Burton’s Bitelchus, or Peter Jackson’s The Frighteners (here renamed Grab Those Ghosts), have kept alive a flame that refuses to go out. Haunted Mansion perpetuates this tradition, albeit from a decidedly limited artistic level. It is a Disney product with a vocation for a blockbuster but an aspect close to a B-movie devoid of the appeal that B-movies once had, an effect that reinforces the presence of stars in low hours like Owen Wilson, Danny DeVito or Jamie Lee Curtis ( despite his Oscar this year). Inspired by a popular attraction in its theme parks (the easy and usual resource of the house, from the Pirates of the Caribbean saga to Jungle cruise, passing through Tomorrowland ), it describes the efforts of a tenant and three experts (a priest, a medium and a historian) to make the ghosts that inhabit the mansion disappear.
Elementary in all its sections, it is nevertheless not a despicable work: its festive tone, its accelerated rhythm, some clever lines of dialogue and the crazy final scene, with all the ghosts on the warpath, make it much more presentable than the original version. of the same theme sung by Eddie Murphy twenty years ago. It’s like a very lively sleepover for tweens.
Por Philipp Engel
Vicky Krieps from Luxembourg seems born to fill the screen with the most beautiful suffering. If in the remarkable Hold me tight (Mathieu Amalric, 2021) she lived the most heartbreaking of duels, here she is a young woman practically sentenced to death from lung disease. Viewing it is doubly disturbing because his fictional partner, the handsome Gaspar Ulliel, died as a result of an absurd skiing accident when the film was still in the editing room. Obviously, she is dedicated to him.
Impossible to escape the devastating mirror effect created by the crossed fate of the characters – the one who will die in fiction, and the one who will do so in reality. But beyond this inescapable reading, Emily Atef, known for reproducing Romy Schneider’s last interview in Three Days in Quiberon (2018), manages to make the viewer leave the room as peacefully as the characters in the film. A truly prodigious balance that is achieved thanks to a limpid and crystalline staging, far from any authorial whims, and a script that avoids both tear-jerking melodrama and that punch in the lower abdomen to which cinema that talks about illnesses has accustomed us. deadly.
The first scene sets the tone: shortly after the diagnosis, which has little room for hope, is known, the couple attends the typical meeting of friends in their thirties, for wine and chat. No one openly brings up the subject, though some do whisper endearing words in his ear. Everyone is inevitably clumsy, because there is simply no proper way to behave in such circumstances. More than ever, it does not intend to give life lessons, or show exemplary behavior, it does not even represent any consolation, nor is it a mere plea for a dignified death. It is nothing more than the soft chronicle of the mutual acceptance of a fatal destiny for which she, in a last gesture of luminous freedom, decides her own conditions.
By Salva Llopart
It is the animated film that one would expect to find in a Chinese bazaar. As in the Chinese, where there is everything, it refers to other similar products in a more colorful, showy and repetitive way. Even bigger, if you like, like the loving eyes of its protagonists. Everything, alas, is also more flimsy and false. A faded photocopy of other racing films, it has the good taste to include Ballroom blitz (fight in the ballroom), a great song by Sweet that some also dismissed as Chinese glam rock.
Por Philipp Engel
Shot in a single sequential shot, the more than promising debut of Thomas Hardiman takes us by the hand behind the scenes of an extravagant hairstyle contest in which a gruesome crime has been committed. More than discovering the culprit or technical feat, seduces the gallery of charismatic characters, their incessant chatter and the possibility of wandering through the corridors of an eccentric microcosm, in addition to some shot of incorruptible beauty, like that of a sinking phosphorescent galleon at night.
By Jordi Batlle Caminal
The candid relationship between two helpless souls (sad divorced, sad single) is the focus of this rather discreet dramatic comedy, but enriched by the distinguished and aromatic setting in which it takes place (a wine cellar) and by the good chemistry between the protagonists, Campan and Carré, which illuminates some moments of tenderness. And, sometimes, a good cast is a blessing: in the hands of Christian Clavier (or Franck Dubosc) and Alexandra Lamy, Wine tasting would be coarse and vulgar.
By Salva Llopart
One of the protagonists of this soap opera with hints of a thriller and an aroma of mothballs says it: “A minister who comes out of the closet is no longer a scandal: the scandal is that a bullfighter does it.” Bullfighting film, then, of a dark satchel. His spells are ordinary and the interpretations go from mechanical, the best, to histrionic. It’s meant to entertain the old-fashioned way, the way bad afternoon soap operas entertained, with a startling revelation and then a long slumber. Everything happens in a hotel.
Por Philipp Engel
The premise is simple: confront the myth of Don Juan to the era
