These are the movie premieres that hit the screens starting this March 31:
Por Philipp Engel
If in the recently released, and also delicious, Chronicle of an Ephemeral Love, by Emmanuel Mouret, the wife of the character played by an adulterer, Vincent Macaigne, was left out of the picture, the same happens, curiously, barely a week later, with that of Melvil Poupaud when he falls into the arms of Léa Seydoux in the sunniest film by Mia Hansen-Løve. Both films speak circumstantially about men who “cheat” on their women, but not to judge them, in moral terms, but to tell of their doubts, vacillations, between irrepressible passion and respect, affection and concern, which they still feel for their partners.
If Mouret vacuum-packs the pair of lovers, examining them from all angles, in his new self-fiction Hansen-Løve splits the film in two again, and adopts, not by chance, his most carnal alter-ego to date. . The voluptuous and melancholic Léa Seydoux is the only one capable of representing, in a single body and face, an awakening in love (based on Mia’s relationship with filmmaker Laurent Perreau), and mourning for her father, a philosophy professor ( also inspired by the late father of the director) victim of a degenerative disease that is diminishing his intellectual and cognitive capacities, in the same way that his library, accumulated throughout a lifetime, is being emptied into cardboard boxes with Uncertain destiny. Powerful image, that of the lost books that survive us, as metaphorical as it is starkly real. She gives the measure of her sensitivity and intelligence, free from vain sentimentality, with which the filmmaker assimilates, analyzes and reconciles each new chapter of her own existence.
If it is once again a film built around a crossroads, between life and death, love and pain, rebirth and deterioration, here the two extremes of the contradiction harmonize more than ever. And if it is directly related to El Porvenir (his most popular work to date, with Isabelle Huppert emulating her mother), Una bonita mañana represents a peak in his filmography in terms of the representation of female desire, themes that he had already addressed more timidly in other jewels such as A Youthful Love or Maya, but here, in their most seductive film, they explode in all their radiant splendor thanks to the total dedication of Léa Seydoux.
By Salvador Llopart
This is the latest film by Agustà Villaronga, who died last January, and also the first comedy of his career. Loli Tormenta arrives, then, full of emotion (and expectation). The stated goal of it, as a comedy, is to make us laugh or, at least, smile. But what is most striking about this filmic testament is that, deep down, despite those laughs pursued and not always achieved, it is a proposal that is absolutely faithful to Villaronga’s creative universe since his debut with Behind the Glass (1987). ).
Loli Tormenta talks about childhood threatened -perverted- by ​​adults, as had already been discussed in many other previous films by the Mallorcan director. Without going any further, in the celebrated Pa negre (2010). Here he approaches some children on the border of extreme poverty and society’s indifference to their situation. Nothing new for our filmmaker, although the focus, in this case, falls on the children’s grandmother, played by the wonderful Susi Sánchez. A willful and vital grandmother, cornered by senile dementia.
The starting material for Loli Tormenta, scripted by Mario Torrecillas, is highly sensitive, as Villaronga always liked it to be. The novelty of this comedy that is more well-intentioned than achieved is something that is not always evident: the kindness and optimism that Villaronga himself exuded in the short distance. What we can define as his bonhomie. He had always been attracted to the abyss of unleashed passions, there is no doubt; one would say that he underlined them to vindicate, against them, virtue (until he is perverted). Loli Tormenta, in addition to all that, which is there, speaks to us, as a novelty, of beauty and the inalienable value that innocence represents.
By Jordi Batlle Caminal
For its good taste, cinema, like fricandó, needs a bit of salt, an ingredient that the prestigious Sam Mendes forgot to add in this evocation of memories of his English youth in the eighties, an elegant but bland, fastidious film with characters stereotyped, which proposes another praise of cinema (after Babylon and The Fabelmans) as a lifeline from harsh reality, although with dubious models invoked: the Gene Wilder tandem
By Salvador Llopart
It is not the first attempt to bring to the screen the famous Dungeons and Dragons role-playing game that one remembers above all for a cartoon adaptation from the mid-eighties. This new foray has competent interpreters; a more or less coherent story, and resulting action scenes, in which no expense has been spared. But it lacks something for which its protagonists are fighting all the time: that spark, that extra humor, that ingenuity that shines through its absence.
By Salvador Llopart
A solemn and dour proposal. Ida and her sailors sail as if hypnotized; disenchanted zombies from who knows what. With her sailboat they go from port to port, looking for the traces of the Foreign Legion in the Mediterranean. Faded proposal, without nerve, of which one would highlight the taste for emptiness, and the contemplative silence that people leave behind when they leave a place. Like Apichatpong without the dream component, or like a parched Malick, without his melancholic beauty. In the end you are left with the aftertaste left by a sad vacation.
Por Philipp Engel
As it is a stop motion children’s film, I watched it with my six-year-old daughter, who has already watched Titanic straight away: she especially appreciated the scatological jokes, which are not few in this Dutch production starring an adorable little pig who doesn’t stop laughing. release flatulence and evacuate left and right, even in the most dramatic moments. There are also emotional ones: when he learns to sit down like a dog. And there is no shortage of intergenerational nods to E.T, the alien. Especially recommended for those who want to introduce their puppies to veganism. They won’t order sausages again.
Por Philipp Engel
Something like a firefighters calendar turned into the sexual fantasy of the heir to a crown as fallen into disuse as that of Portugal, without a monarchy since 1910. In the barracks where he gets ready to put out fires, he will find the black man of his life, correcting the colonial past with homoerotic scenes as explicit as they are obviously false. A regular at the D’A festival, the director of El fantasma (2000) continues with his very colorful formal investigations, jumping from the tableau vivant to the most casual choreographies, to achieve an original, brief and highly enjoyable film.
By Salvador Llopart
It is often said that nostalgia is a mistake. in tin
Tin and Tina (Carlos González and Anastasia Russo) are like albino Zipi and Zape; although in reality they are more similar to the sinister twins of The Shining, by Kubrick, than to the mischievous characters of Escobar. After their entire lives in a convent run by Sor Asunción -a character in the hands of the recovered Teresa Rabal, also closely linked to nostalgia-, both are adopted by Lola (Milena Smit) and Adolfo (Jaime Llorente), parents who want to be despite the problems that nature puts them. Those problems will be nothing compared to what these two kids will create for them; especially her mother, played with conviction by Milena Smit.
Believe
Por Philipp Engel
The consumption of certain drugs seems limited to large cities, but even a Bear from the deepest America can get hooked on Pablo Escobar’s merchandise, and demonstrate its violent side effects in a natural park that is not Yellowstone’s, but he is not far from it. . It happened just like that in 1985. Another thing is how the director of Giving the note tells it to us
Banks had it all to score a great Tucker-style hillbilly horror comedy
Perhaps adulterated by its doses of family comedy, Cocaine Bear doesn’t just rise, it remains in the estrangement of an intermediate level, in which many things happen, without it seeming that nothing is happening. Grizzly Man (2005), that Werner Herzog documentary loaded with black humor, was much funnier than this.
By Jordi Batlle Caminal
The anecdote is famous: as a child, Alfred Hitchcock committed some misdeed and his father got him to spend five minutes in a police station cell as punishment, a childhood trauma that accompanied him throughout his life (and all his work). The protagonists of this film apply a similar method to their seven-year-old son after a bad behavior: leaving him in a lonely forest for only two minutes, enough time for the little one to disappear. Lost? Kidnaped? Or maybe he is in hiding, he is now punishing the parents? This unique premise points first to suspense, but boldly veers off into other paths.
In the first place, due to the bad conscience of the parents, forced to lie to the police who come to their aid. And then to an increasing expulsion of demons through reproaches that reaches its climax when the parents seem to transform into Liv Ullmann and Erland Josephson confessing marriage secrets. This extreme tension is accentuated by The Punishment being filmed in a single shot, a strategy that is sometimes gratuitous (and of which Hitchcock was a pioneer in The Rope) but appropriate here as it prevents us from detaching ourselves from the drama, bound inevitably to an inflexible continuity .
