Reviews

Delicious remains a film without stakes or intrigue. What is presented to us is an improbable reconstitution, to which we find it difficult to adhere as everything seems anachronistic. The only thing we find on the bread is that it is dripping with good conscience. The dish is bland and cold. It's a bit like watching a nice Gordon Ramsayt: it's quickly lost interest.

Montana looks very beautiful, but one wonders what everyone is doing there. Jane Campion only succeeds in deploying the frustration of her story without story, caricature, in the form of a long disembodied lethargy. One yawns with boredom!

Del Toro knows how to create strong, stifling atmospheres. Between Freaks and Thriller, he has a lot of fun here in a plot that is however too diluted and a little disembodied, as if the form had taken precedence over the substance. One could take this fable on swindling as a mise en abîme of the American dream turned nightmare. But del Toro's perfectionism, as always, leaves the viewer at a distance.

It's hard to get hooked on this disjointed narrative, a bit headless, around two characters without much depth. Licorice turns out to be endless, and slides little by little into its own caricature. We would have liked to adore it, but we didn't find anything to hang on to. Big disappointment.

Surprisingly, the good surprise of Copland is Stallone. It's a pity that the film remains a bit like his character, silent and in the background. We would have loved this summit meeting to be so. Unfortunately, Mangold is not Scorsese. Copland could have been a great film. It is not.

Mann signs a grandiloquent film, but rather hollow. An action film without action, a psychological film without psychology... Apart from the careful and applied direction, the long awaited meeting turns out to be without flavor or surprise. De Niro and Pacino ham it up without having anything to say. Incoherence and implausible tracks finish ruining the whole.

Comedy has never suited De Niro. McNaughton's lazy direction, the heavy jokes of the 80's, the emptiness of the whole... finish revealing to this strange apparatus, its own emptiness.

Each shot is a work of art, but the whole thing is an interminable turnip... This batman is neither more nor less twilight than the previous ones, it is their decal, in a story that does not stop being endless, because it is constantly restarted, to produce nothing more than the previous one.

Illustrator Raymond Brigg's linear account of his parents' lives shows the ordinary story of a family as it moves through the century. While the animation is decent, these characters who speak while describing the world quickly become unbearable. One has the impression of being in the head of old people who are attached to the smallest material details. The story suffocates under its description.

Is this satyr of bourgeois America really a satyr after all? Despite a few moments of acidity, everyone's neuroses come full circle. The politically incorrectness quickly turns out to be terribly sanctimonious. This mid-life crisis is futile. Over the years, American Beauty has lost its cynicism.

Drôle de drame/ Bizarre, Bizarre is however only an abracadabrantesque boulevard comedy, where the excess and the sweet madness often hit the bull's eye. The film keeps real qualities with the years: actors, sweet madness, dialogues... But in the end, we think that we are in front of the ancestor of "Santa Claus is a stinker" (famous french comedy) than in front of a great movie.

The complexity and richness of Quai des Orfèvres is not only due to its devious plot, nor to its characters, who are moving, nor to its remarkable direction or photography, nor to its powerful dialogues, but to the emotion that nails each stage and each character and that weaves an unprecedented tangle to create a true French crime thriller. A success that Allégret will take up in Manèges.

The aftermath of 9/11 has generated a number of rather rancid films. Scott's is not the most reactive. The action is pretty good and Scott is pretty good at taking apart the dirty work of the basic spy, even if it's without finesse. All that doesn't make the dirty work exciting though. The sequences are lined up to the point of indigestion.

In spite of its sublime photography, its unbearable violence, the strength of its incarnation, its density, its dreamlike power, this dystopian series turns out to be of a heavy slowness. A slowness reinforced by multiple slow motion, endless shots, interminable silences... The lyricism of Underground Railroad is certainly bewitching, too much perhaps.

With its flashy dialogues, its mockery, Christian-Jaque's bourgeois drama could still have some assets. But this revenge remains cold, theatrical, despite its disillusioned depths. The film doesn't tip over into a detective story and almost remains an easy and disenchanted vaudeville.

This little detective comedy, sparkling and lively, relies heavily on Jouvet's great transformist act. But it would remain rather ham-fisted without Jeanson's truculent dialogues and the atmosphere created by Dréville, between vaudeville and intrigue. In the end, Copie conforme, despite its patina, retains a rather picturesque charm.

Unnecessarily complex and perfectly flat, The Paradine Trial is a deadly bore. Certainly Hitchcock masters his direction, but she quickly loses us with characters of approximate psychology.

"One never touches something great without being grown up oneself". This melancholic praise of the theater, as if it had more reality than life, is superbly put in abyss by Duvivier, who has fun revealing to us its pretenses, its sad and pathetic narcissism. A tender, crepuscular and dark ode to a world that is unraveling at the same time as it is being filmed. A last tribute, an ultimate remorse.

Bouzgarrou and Jenkoe sign a beautiful documentary, elegiac, an ode to the last hillbillies. But this portrait, in spite of its bewitching, poetic sides, this frenzy of childish freedom as in its moments when the rancid morality of a dying world is asserted, does not really manage to discover the world it tracks... As if finally, there was already nothing left to chase in the hills of Kentucky.

The youth and beauty of Delon and Ronet, more than their performances, the suave warmth of 1950s Italy, still give Clément's film a certain flavor, a disturbance, that Highsmith's twisted novel heightens. But Clément treats the atmosphere better than the plot. Quite the opposite of Minghella's American remake.

Trachtenberg unfolds his Z series worthy of a Twilight Zone, while keeping the rhythm of his plot more or less. Strangely enough, the film never really manages to distill a real anxiety when everything is ready for it, as if something was not right.

Billie August always has this talent for the melo, between family drama and intimate epic. This lucky man fits the canon, while drawing its strength from an originality of characters and situations where nothing conventional really happens.

Ma Rainey's Black Bottom is a rather powerful eight clos, between generational reckoning and racial tension. Behind the musical confrontation between the trumpeter and the blues diva that enhances the play, Wolfe summons a world, that of racism in the 1920s, in a universe, jazz, where everything seems possible while nothing changes except on the surface.

Deluc's film certainly captures Gauguin's wild and lonely character, his impossible love, his material distress in an island that gave him everything and took everything away from him. Yet Gauguin is nonetheless flattened by the scholastic academicism of the biopic, which has little to say about the art, to give us only a flavorless artist.

"How I Became a Superhero" is not as pathetic as one might think. The scenario is well held and rather compensates for the weaknesses of the characters and the plot. It can be seen without displeasure, it's a little better than the banal TV movie, more original... but the whole is still a little bit clumsy, as if stuck in its own parody.