These are the movie premieres that hit the screens starting this June 16:
By Jordi Batlle Caminal
They landed in the last decade of the last century and continue to maintain their strength even today, at very high levels, although some are not particularly prolific. We are talking about Shyamalan or Tarantino, Alexander Payne or Wes Anderson, a batch of highly talented American filmmakers, very personal, with identifiable universes and stylistic resources that make the moviegoer’s hypothalamus stiff. You can recognize an image of Wes Anderson before you blink twice, because his cinema is eminently visual, where symmetry, geometry, horizontality, aggressive chromatic treatment, the arrangement of characters in the frame, the frequently naive tone of the space and scenes.
True to himself and his genotype to the last consequences (first consequence: being labeled as repetitive), it would seem that Anderson took his style to its maximum expression in his previous feature film, The French Chronicle. But in Asteroid City he once again squeezes the visual and conceptual constants out of him to pure delirium. The title alludes to a town of 82 inhabitants located in the middle of the desert in the fifties, an authentic American pie (and those are its colors: pastel) and an indescribable decoration that recreates the most significant of the time (cars, gas station , bar, bungalows…), summoning a multitude of characters (and famous faces: more than twenty) and themes: science, astrology, atomic tests, tourism (the area’s attraction is the crater that caused the meteorite fall) and theater, because, in fact, everything on display, which has a certain prehistoric sitcom flavor, is the result of a work whose creation process we see in parallel in black and white sequences and square format.
There is also an alien ship and a very nice alien. Asteroid City will disappoint anyone looking for an ounce of realism or verisimilitude. But for Anderson’s stalwarts it will be another sumptuous banquet: a deluge of hilarious cartoons that overflows imagination in every shot. And each shot contains as much richness of detail as those of Jacques Tati or Roy Andersson and such a perception of the human being as an absurd and ridiculous species.
Por Philipp Engel
Bruna Cusí, who this week also repeats the orders of the Burnin’ Barnacles in The Fantastic Case of the Golem (a comedy between hooligans and absurd, à la Quentin Dupieux, but in a brutalist key), once again demonstrates, throughout this tense claustrophobic thriller, who is one of the best Catalan actresses of her generation. Here she takes off for the United States, accompanied by an anguished Alberto Amman with a false Venezuelan accent, to start a new life in the land of opportunities. Who has not noticed at least a slight shudder when landing in New York, especially after filling out a questionnaire where they ask, for example, “if you have been involved in espionage, genocide, terrorism, or if you were part of the allies? of Nazi Germany during World War II”?
Let’s say that the Venezuelans Alejandro Rojas and Juan Sebastián Vazquez –both established in Barcelona and linked to the cinema of Carles Torras (El practicante, Cashback), who appears here as a producer– stretch that shudder until turning it into the backbone of a film that really goes to the bone Not a gram of fat in these 77 minutes of tight footage. We cannot reveal much more, because Upon Entry is part of those films whose tension increases as the plot gets knotted (in the stomach). By way of clues, we will let go that the long waiting rooms, the peaks of uncertainty and the bad lighting are as key elements to feed the tension as the secrets of a couple, the contrast between first and third world problems, or the anxiety that we feel. It produces seeing us separated from those phones that are already smarter than us. We can also add that, in the North American welcome committee, two other wonderful actors (Laura Gómez and Ben Temple) participate who fulfill their role perfectly. A small, minimalist film, nothing flashy. But who knows how to make the viewer share the beads of sweat with the protagonists.
By Salvador Llopart
The circus of “supers” in action and pranks (Guardians of the Galaxy school) hardly leaves a mark. You don’t feel like anything really is at stake. The temptation to play with time, to manipulate it, leads to the consequences of modifying it and the result is the same as in the multiverse, so fashionable in Marvel. I mean, a mess. And it is that when everything is possible, hardly anything matters. No sense. Formally correct, even spectacular at times. The soundtrack adds a plus.
Por Ph. Obstacle
Perhaps it is nothing more than a guilty pleasure as distinguished as a Ferrero Rocher ad, with those drone shots of the French Riviera, of tacky mansions and yachts. But this amoral comedy about the rich being duped by their young lovers for hire keeps a good pace, isn’t badly written, and makes the most of its golden cast: François Cluzet, the perfect con man; Isabelle Adjani, in self-parody mode a la Sunset Boulevard; Pierre Niney, a sentimental gigolo, and above all a Marine Vacth who gives character to her character beyond the mystery of her beauty.
By S. Llopart
The story – of love, heartbreak, search and mystery – sweeps you away like a torrent as it rushes mightily like the Suzhou River through Shanghai. The camera moves freely, as Godard moved it -how he looked- in À bout de soufflé. Although the obsessions are more typical of Vertigo or any Cortázar story. It actually spirals like an Escher ladder, where at some point logic breaks. It has no beginning or end: it is circular. It is beautiful and mysterious: a challenge.
PorPh. Obstacle
No wonder Kawamura has produced gorgeous Makoto Shinkai anime like Your Name and Time With You. His first feature as a director, based on his own novel, has many of those animated melodramas that move you to tears: on the one hand we have an old woman with Alzheimer’s, a dramatic example of human deterioration, and on the other an artificial intelligence still to be perfected; a mother who doesn’t remember that she misbehaved in the past and a son who doesn’t know how to forget it. To cry.
Por S. Llopart
Gerard Butler, as an actor, is a genre unto himself: that of action with meaning. The dramatic framework in Kandahar is set by the dirty war between intelligence agencies and the sewers of the state, of all states. The action falls on the desperate manhunt (Butler), nuanced, on this occasion, by some pertinent reflection on a senseless war: Afghanistan seen as a victim more than as an executioner. But what he gains in depth, on the side of consciousness, he loses on the side of emotion.
