“Back to Seoul”

French-Cambodian Davy Chou writes this film about Frankie (Park Ji-min), a girl from South Korea who was given up for adoption by her parents when she was little and was raised by a couple in France. Frankie, now 25 years old, returns to the country where she was born to contact her father and her mother. Telling the story of her for almost 10 years, “Return to Seoul” is far from an ordinary melodrama about a family reunion. Chou prefers to highlight, delicately and truthfully, Frankie’s problems and her reluctance to integrate into a culture that is completely foreign to her (she doesn’t even speak the language), the confused feeling of belonging, the resentment she harbors towards her parents who abandoned her , and the evolution of his personality, from the moment he returns to South Korea. And the movie doesn’t even offer a final, comforting resolution for Frankie or the viewer.

“Sons of Ramses”

Ramses (Karim Leklou) is a con artist and manipulative psychic who practices from his home in the chaotic, multi-ethnic Goutte d’Or neighborhood of Paris, and is angering his fellow competitors of various races and creeds by taking away their clientele. Business is booming, but things will change when members of a dangerous “gang” of street children, originally from North Africa, like him, but who have no respect for anyone or anything, threaten him to find someone else. one of them, who disappeared with everyone. the money. Directed by Clément Cogitore, “The Children of Ramses” presents a strong component of documentary realism in a tenuous, somewhat confusing and unattractive story. The condescension with which the film treats youthful marginality doesn’t help either.

“Shazam! fury of the gods”

The second film, starring orphaned teenager Billy Batson, who becomes an adult superhero named Shazam by saying this magic word, pits him, along with his foster siblings, against a new threat, which takes the form of the fearsome Daughters. of Atlas. . They return to Earth to regain their powers and are in possession of a weapon that can destroy the world and annihilate humanity. After “Shazam!” original (2019), David F. Sandberg returns to direct this continuation of the adventures of the DC superhero. With Asher Angel, Zachary Levi, Jack Dylan Grazer, Adam Brody, Djimon Hounson and, as the three Daughters of Atlas, Helen Mirren, Lucy Liu and Rachel Zegler.

“Great Yarmouth: provisional figures”

The new film by Marco Martins is based on a show by the Arena Ensemble company that the director founded with Beatriz Batarda, and takes place before Brexit, in Great Yarmouth, among the Portuguese immigrants who come there to work in the factories processing birds, to kill, pluck, and pack turkeys (Martins did extensive prior research work with her). Batarda plays Tânia, married to an Englishman. She used to work in the poultry industry, but now she negotiates with the factories to hire her compatriots (the “provisional figures” in the title), guiding us through the bureaucracy and putting them up in the decadent hotels of the husband of she. “Great Yarmouth: Provisional Figures” was voted Movie of the Week by the Observer and you can read the review here.