These are the movie premieres that hit the screens starting this June 23:
By Salvador Llopart
Of course life, sooner or later, is going to trip us up and then everyone will have to get up in their own way. A not-so-simple life looks closely, with compassion and irony, at that moment of inevitable existential stumbling, when the greatest feat will consist in accepting oneself. The midlife crisis, that is.
Viscarret’s comedy -because comedy is- speaks of crisis and also of white lies. And he does it with a certain taste for ridicule, in the manner of Truffaut in his films about Antoine Doinel. It can be said that it is part of that genre that began with Ópera prima (1980), the first by Fernando Trueba, and that we could call “urban comedy”, to give it a name. And it is that one sees a certain continuity between that young Matias (Oscar Ladoire), the protagonist of Trueba’s film, lost in his dreams of greatness, and this forty-year-old Isaías who is facing maturity, played with grace and conviction by Mike Esparbé. Isaías in his hands, in the hands of Esparbé, married with two small children, an architect by profession, who has known success and is learning what daily failure is, is endearing and close.
And above, oh, the desire. Of a better life, of recognition and success; in the case of Isaías, the desire for another woman and another existence, more luminous and full. A not so simple life talks about it in a close and humorous way. The result, despite its look at prose, is not exempt from a certain poetry, like the one produced by those glittery-glittery skaters who cross the night of the nameless city where the protagonists live. That background, let’s say melancholic, makes Viscarret’s film a metaphor for confusing times (what times aren’t?) and a reflection of an existence that passes between half-truths and total lack of definition. From where you leave convinced that honesty is the last refuge we have left for a life that is not so simple. Honesty with oneself and with others.
Por Philipp Engel
Five years ago, the unprecedented Support the Girls, by Andrew Bujalski, innovated in Made in USA comedy by focusing on the world of work, from a female perspective and through a busy day in a roadside bar. It is not surprising that Stupnitsky began as a producer of the series The Office, because there is something of that in his second film as director (after Good Guys, 2019): Jennifer Lawrence is a thirty-something moonlighter struggling to keep the house (Cape model). Cod), which his mother bequeathed to him, debt included, in Montauk, a coastal town at the tip of Long Island, turned into a recreational suburb for New York elites.
Desperate to keep her home, this independent heroine of the precariat, allergic to commitment, jumps at the proposal of a wealthy couple (Laura Benanti and, above all, Mathew Broderick with long hair) to deflower their offspring (Andrew Barth Feldman), who He leads the life of a hikikomori, before entering Princeton. The plot premise may seem like a remake of any teen comedy based on the sting of male virginity; nor is there much concern about giving it a patina of sophistication, and the “incorrect” exits are fewer than those of the pilot of any series –a dog that reacts to the word “cocaine”–, in addition to the fact that some scenes only consist of seeing his double balancing on top of a car. But it’s the comedy we’ve been waiting for.
For those who still believe that comedy equals laughter, there’s no complaint here, there’s no shortage of emotional moments either, thanks to the chemistry of the uneven couple: Barth is as pale-faced as he is promising, but next to him JLaw is like Daryl Hannah of 50 feet. Big, opulent, as funny in the verbal gags as in the physical ones, and offering a devastating nude that will go down in history. The actress, who had taken a break (except for her million-dollar appearance in Don’t Look Up) to meditate on her career (ruined, that is, by superheroes), returns to the fore confirmed as a colossal comedian. A goddess.
By Jordi Batlle Caminal
This fantasy circulates on the same highway as the Harry Potter saga or its derivative Fantastic Animals, although without its means or its pretensions. It is mediocre and somewhat sleepy, but never offensive, on the contrary: it has a certain charm due to its unexpectedly anachronistic appearance, the result in large part of the participation of the company of the long-awaited Jim Henson and a design of creatures that takes us through the tunnel of the time until Dark Crystal and other craft effect models.
By S. Llopart
A woman loses her role over herself. Sophie Marceau is at the center of this descent into hell that, however, seems not to go with her, indifferent as it turns out to her own ordeal. Samurai à la Melville, cold and distant, but without intrigue or mystery. The cold superficiality of the actress, like Juliane, a writer and police officer as well as a betrayed woman, plays against revenge: crazy revenge, like the film itself.
Por Ph. Obstacle
Is it possible to say something new about the oldest trade in the world? Is there anything wrong with a woman freely becoming a sex worker? What reasons, apart from economic, can move you to it? Can it be combined with a courtship to use? Can a brothel be a safe environment? Bonnefont tries to answer such questions, based on Emma Becker’s autobiographical novel. And he does it with a certain elegance (musical nod to the masterful L’Apollonide included), humor (Philippe Rebbot learning cunnilingus), “female gaze” and impudence. But the feeling of déjà vu is inevitable.
By S. Llopart
Visually unsuccessful, it is saved, if it is saved, in the enraged eyes of Goya Toledo and at some point lost from the other protagonists. It could be said that it is a wild imitation of Daggers in the back, which in turn is already a reference to many other movies about the playful dead in a dilapidated mansion. And add a psychological note of parental child conflict. Nothing ends up sustaining, however, the mess that, more than daggers, results in a pan blow to the face.
PorPh. Obstacle
The images can be powerful, like Itsaso Arana dancing or the lights of the attractions that open this trip at the end of the night in Pamplona, ??the day before a man in a blue shirt –the H in the title– is killed by a bull. The night plunge is hypnotic and sensory. But the deliberate chaos of the voice-overs and the tenuous plot line indicates that we are closer to an art installation than a film in the most classic sense of the term, as we understand it on this page.
