These are the premieres that hit theaters this March 22:
By Salvador Llopart
Better to abandon any expectations that a title like The Abbess, a horror movie, and a wrong poster, of chiaroscuros without nuances, may generate. And yet it is exactly that: a chiaroscuro story, but with nuances, about a 9th century abbess. In times of war between Moors and Christians.
Where there is no more terror than the terror of life typical of a frontier abbey, in disputed lands. A life marked by pain, misery and the command of obedience. We are, to be specific, looking at the past with eyes of the present. Where attention to historical detail does not undermine dramatic ambition. Which arises from the desire to reflect a time so different from ours.
Thus, The Abbess is surprising. Unexpected, too. Directed and written by Antonio Chavarrías, a veteran director without genre and with a high sense of cinema; a meaning increasingly evident as he matures in his craft.
It tells the story of Emma (Daniela Brown), still a teenager when she is appointed abbess. She is based on a real figure about whom, in reality, very little is known. Emma comes to office with a mandate: to put order in the abbey and repopulate the lands that surround it. That young woman, still a child, clings to her-her duty and her-her faith despite the conflicting interests. The abbeys, at that time, were a place for nuns of noble origin, sent there by their families to maintain the fiction of honorability or, simply, to get them off their backs.
There is no religious vocation in them: there is surrender. And yet Emma, ??the abbess, played with trembling confidence by Daniela Brown, is different. She is not eloquent as we can imagine Saint Teresa, nor is she a rebel. She is respectful of the rules, very tenacious and she shows it.
The framework of social, political and religious power of the moment is essential, and Chavarrías knows how to show the complexity of the time with light and accurate brushstrokes. The rhythm is appropriate, necessarily parsimonious. The staging is superb. Especially the natural lighting, with candles, which makes the lights and shadows of the castle of Loarre (Huesca), where the drama takes place, another character in the story.
By Jordi Batlle Caminal
We discovered Xavier Legrand about five years ago thanks to Shared Custody, a remarkable film about the relationships between a violent father and his underage son, who boldly moved from drama to terror. The successor, Legrand’s second feature film, develops a different plot, but is based on very similar foundations.
The protagonist is a famous fashion designer from Paris who has been experiencing chest pains for some time, in addition to suffering from stress and asthma, which he combats with anxiolytics and an inhaler. Precisely when, to discover possible hereditary illnesses, he sets out to investigate the medical history of his father, who lives in Canada and with whom he has not been in contact in recent years, he receives the news of his death.
Already in Canada to empty his father’s house and take care of the funeral and cremation procedures, the protagonist discovers something ignominious, if not monstrous, that should not be revealed here. Something that changes the film’s skin, the register: after about forty minutes in which nothing dramatically intense happens, a crucial and forceful scene transforms The Successor into a kind of tense suspense thriller, of constant concern.
The figure of the father, whom we only see in photos, begins to grow and cast shadows on the son, on the viewer, until reaching an outcome (and a new revelation) that makes your hair stand on end. Legrand films this devastating story with as much formal elegance as expository coldness and less effectiveness than what he exhibited in Shared Custody. And, giving life to the protagonist, present from the first to the last minute, Quebec actor Marc-André Grondin is extraordinary.
And his role was not exactly an easy one, quite the opposite: his behavior defies logic and baffles us. And pay attention to the other essential (living) character of the show: the dead father’s friend, who is the key that opens many doors.
Por Philipp Engel
Tearful afternoon session about the 669 children saved by “Nicky” Winton in a Prague about to fall into the hands of the Nazis, after the annexation of the Sudetenland. Told in two parts, it features a moving and impeccable, as always, Sir Anthony Hopkins who will end up reuniting with his “children” in That’s Life!, a highly rated television program – the most interesting part –, and with his version youthful, played by an effective Johnny Flynn.
Although very, very classic, not to say carrinclona, ??with the aroma of what it really is, a luxurious BBC television film, it manages to move us with one of those humanitarian initiatives that, for the space of two hours, redeems the rest of humanity for standing idly by. A life lesson that goes no further than reminding us that any change begins with oneself.
By S. Llopart
This new installment of the Ghostbusters is tiresome and indifferent, as is Bill Murray himself, one of the original Ghostbusters, who appears – very little – as a guest star. Dan Aykroyd, another veteran of the story, does much the same thing: nothing. What is the thing about? Of doing grace with the ghosts and then putting them in the trap.
The big ghost, the ghost on duty, plays with the ice and hence the title. In short, history is lacking here and there are plenty of occurrences. Franchise of sick nostalgia, in which no more changes can be introduced so that everything remains the same. The ghosts are scattered and you have to catch them. Okay, we get it. I highlight, to highlight, the work of the teenager Mckenna Grace, in love – or seduced – by a ghost. The rest is forgotten before hastily leaving the room.
Por P. Engel
The Austrian who had Léa Seydoux sing Felicità dressed as a nurse at the end of Lourdes (2009) – a memorable performance, the culmination of an extraordinary film – now turns Mia Wasikowska into a “conscious eating” teacher who convinces her uniformed students, in an exclusive boarding school, that you can live without eating.
Once again, as in Lourdes, it is a matter of faith, although the psychotic minimalism of the staging, of static shots and radioactive colors, as if Wes Anderson and Michael Haneke were the same person, is more in line with his Little Joe (2019). An interesting film, but above all very uncomfortable, both for its claustrophobic form and for its way of approaching anorexia as if it were a cult, remembering that if children are terrible it is because their parents are also terrible.
Por P. Engel
An essential film to understand the family and cultural background of Mariano Llinás, director of monuments of new Argentine cinema such as La flor (2018) or Historiasextraordinares (2008), characterized by their long length and constant narrative digressions. In this much shorter piece, we see him neurotically lost, somewhere between hilarious and irritating, engrossed in what is supposed to be the filming of a documentary about the architect and artist Clorindo Testa, to whom his father, Julio Llinás, dedicated a book, that no one can find anywhere in the small apartment in Barrio Norte, Buenos Aires, where the filmmaker’s elderly mother, the adorable painter Martha Peluffo, resides. A festival of playful narcissism, very much for fans of the production company El Pampero, from which wonders such as Trenque Lauquen (2022) have also come out.
