These are the movie premieres that hit the screens starting this June 9:
Por Philipp Engel
Paul Schrader has happily concluded the trilogy with which he pays homage to his lifelong teachers: Bresson, Dreyer and Ozu, to whom he already paid a foundational tribute with The Transcendental Style, an essay to which he dedicated two years of his youth, before move into action as a critic, screenwriter and finally a first-rate filmmaker, author of such resounding masterpieces as American Gigolo (1980). After the outstanding The Reverend. In First Reformed (2017) and The Card Counter (2020), starring Ethan Hawke and Oscar Isaac respectively, Joel Edgerton lends his tattooed muscles to another quintessential Schraderian anti-hero. He is the new heir to the Pickocket, from Bresson. A rather rigid, statuesque, declamatory type who, like his predecessors, has managed to tame anguish through repetitive and obsessive rituals. Horticulture, in this case.
As if Schrader had wanted to marry transcendentalism and transcendental cinema, most of the film takes place in a nineteenth-century garden, from when the American elites began to privatize nature with those first closed communities to, in their Emersonian way, be closer to God. , a past about which Edgerton’s character is well educated. Faced with the distant gaze of the matriarch played by Sigourney Weaver, he will try to transmit that knowledge to a young and sensual African-American (Quintesa Swindell). But the action takes place in the southern United States, an environment prone to the reappearance of the ghosts of white supremacism, thus establishing a dialogue between two eras, and further complicating relationships within the protagonist’s bizarre love triangle.
It doesn’t matter that some twists are improbable, or that information about the characters may be missing, the closing of the trilogy stands out from the two previous installments, more serious and depressive, with a certain disheveledness, excuse me, from the filmmaker who here carries the metaphor floral to its maximum consequences in a sequence worthy of The Wizard of Oz, where the most natural gives way to the most artificial special effects in an extraordinary celebration of a love that can only be read as an exercise in creative freedom. At 76, Paul Schrader proves to be as fresh as a rose with a practically unfading film
By Jordi Batlle Caminal
It is a good topic for debate and reflection: what is the ideal length of a film? Some will say that four and a half hours is an unaffordable provocation. For others, more sensible, an unassumable provocation is two minutes of Christian Clavier. It is true that, in these times, the synthesis is a value as precious as caviar and the tendency to excessive footage is our bread every Friday. But in any work that achieves excellence, the issue of duration, from the twenty minutes of An Andalusian Dog to the nine fascinating hours of Wang Bing’s West of the Tracks, is always relative.
Trenque Lauquen lasts almost four and a half hours, but not a minute is left over, not even the minute in which we see the male protagonist, alone in the kitchen, lovingly preparing a couple of fried eggs. The temporal extension is necessary here to immerse ourselves in a fabulous labyrinth of characters and stories woven by an extraordinary script (signed by Citarella and Laura Paredes, the leading actress) that, structured in two parts and twelve chapters, expands and forks, creates tributaries and enigmas, stories within stories, leaps forward and back as the pieces fit together, etc. It is elusive in the generic section: road movie, melodrama, thriller, science fiction…
And it is, above all, as was the monumental Mysteries of Lisbon, by the great Raúl Ruiz (or the more recent What do we see when we look at the sky?, by the Georgian Aleksandre Koberidze), a celebration of the pleasure of telling stories or tales, even of oral narration. There are plots of a powerful spell: the very romantic one of old books and old love letters, which is the focus of the first part, or that of the creature from the lagoon, which is the engine of the second. Do not think that it is a confusing or hermetic film: it is clear and frank, only constantly covered with the veneer of mystery. In short, a unique and incomparable film.
By Salvador Llopart
The accent falls on the side of growth and maturation, rather than the epic, even if it is the story of a migrant, young mother of color – overwhelming Annabelle Lengronne – who arrives in France in the 1990s with two young children. Serraille, with her film, look without judging. It is a quiet meditation. She crossed, although internal currents of volcanic lava cross her. The desire to adapt and live on the part of a family that observes itself and that we, in turn, observe with fascination.
By Salvador Llopart
This one yes. This one does seek the epic of migration, even if it is by force. Father and son were torn from Senegal to fight for France in World War I. A dirty war, like all wars, and even more: mud, rain and death in the trenches. But nothing makes sense, neither the fighting, few and limited, nor the drama, which begins as a critique of colonialism and ends as jingoistic glorification. The star is Omar Sy (Untouchable, 2011), who endures with his charisma whatever is thrown at him.
By Salvador Llopart
How to change everything so that everything stays the same: Tomaso di Lampedusa’s formula cast in the twisted iron of these toy cars, protagonists of a million-dollar saga. In the first Transformers (2007) the star was Megan Fox, the beauty; now she is Dominique Fishback, a shall we say non-normative beauty. The hero is Hispanic, the action takes place in Peru, and so on. The aspiration, however, is the same: to turn into gold -narrative- the scrap of a too-worn story.
Por Philipp Engel
Exquisite and exciting, this film manages to shine in a world already saturated with autobiographical female initiation stories in a family mansion. In part, thanks to the dazzling charisma of little Lua Michel, the daughter of this filmmaker who hounds any sentimentality, and the recognizable light of Rui Poças, director of photography for Miguel Gomes and Lucrecia Martel, among others. Also because her magical realism, another very busy genre, is capable of taking us down the path of a delicious surreal costumbrismo. A surprise.
Por Philipp Engel
It’s the usual macabre tale: thanks to his cybermask, a pedophile manages to meet a teenager in the most secluded area of ​​a leafy park. The most lurid moments are resolved with risky visual solutions: sometimes imagining is worse than seeing. Maqueda manages to seize a repulsive theme to turn it into a perverse game with the viewer, who falls prey to his constant script twists. The film preserves its theatrical essence –Grooming, by Paco Bezerra– while expanding it, and explores the limits of the genre, without forgetting the classics.
