“Humanist vampire seeks suicide volunteer”

It is one of the most original and successful vampire films of recent times, in the vein of titles like let me in and A girl returns home aloneand the upcoming debut of Canadian Ariane Louis-Seize. Sasha (the charming Sara Montpetit) is a young, shy and sensitive 62-year-old vampire who cannot kill humans for food and depends on the bags of blood that her worried family keeps in the refrigerator. When she meets Paul (Félix Antoine-Bénard), a lonely teenager, tormented at school by his classmates and suicidal, and who offers to be his first victim, Sasha believes that her problem is solved. But so good outsiders They are, they become friends and the girl refuses to bite him. Ariane Louis-Seize writes a film that is much more affectionate and melancholic than terrifying, and has more dark humor than bloodshed. The director subtly replaces the theme of adolescent discomfort with the awakening of sexuality with that of Sasha’s discomfort with her inability to be a vampire, and that of Paul’s difficulties with sociability, playing with the codes of the genre films and rationalizing vampire behaviors and reactions (see Sasha’s logical responses when Paul questions her about her condition and her reaction to the sun and crosses). Humanist vampire seeks suicide volunteer It is a small black diamond that stands out in the current and bleak panorama of fantasy and horror films.

“Emilia Pérez”

If there’s a trophy for the most unfathomably implausible movie of the year, it goes straight to Emilia Perezmade in Mexico by the Frenchman Jacques Audiard. A bloodthirsty leader of a Mexican drug cartel called Manitas del Monte secretly hires a lawyer, Rita Moro (Zoe Saldaña), frustrated with the state of justice in her country, so she can handle his transition from man to woman. simulate his death and protect his wife and two young children, who cannot know anything. Manitas thus becomes the Emilia Pérez of the title (both are played by trans actress Karla Sofía Gascón), and now a woman and more “sensitive”, she realizes all the evil and suffering she caused when she was a man, and creates, with Rita, an NGO to recover the bodies of victims of barbaric cartel violence. However, the paternal instinct did not disappear with the change of sex and Emilia wants to be with her children who live with her mother in Switzerland. Emilia Perez It is an unimaginable, indigestible and disastrous amalgam of narcosMexican soap opera, anarchic musical film and booklet I woke up HE The Cannes Festival decided to award the Jury Prize and the Female Performance Prize to all actresses.

“Saturn Bowling”

A police inspector inherits a bowling of his deceased father, and hands over the management of the house to his half-brother, whom he barely knew, an unstable guy who until then worked as a security guard and lived precariously. At the same time, several corpses of murdered women begin to appear. Directed by the French Patricia Mazuy, of which only one film was released in Portugal, Saint-Cyr (2000) and which will be honored at LEFFEST with a retrospective, Saturn Bowling presents a rather careless police intrigue with “psychological” pretensions, which serves as the basis for a primary anti-violence discourse aimed especially at men, since almost all the male characters in the film, main or secondary, are characterized by the use of same. , either against animals (the group of hunters who are friends of the father of the two protagonists), or against women. Mazuy’s apathetic performance and the mediocrely sleazy performances of the actors playing the cop and his half-brother, Arieh Worthalter and Achille Regianni, don’t help the film at all either. To forget and quickly.

“Gladiator II”

Almost 25 years after the Oscar-winning debut starring Russell Crowe in the title role, Ridley Scott directs this sequel, set two decades after the events of Gladiatorand that had a budget that exceeded 300 million dollars. Maximus’s son Lucius, who fled Rome to avoid being murdered, is now an adult and lives peacefully with his wife in Numidia. After an attack by the Romans and a bloody battle, Lucius is turned into a slave, taken to Rome and bought by the rich Macrinus, who recognizes his qualities as a gladiator and makes him fight in the arena of the Colosseum, where he distinguishes himself. Lucius will then face a past and a heritage that, at first, he does not want to recognize or accept, and will find himself involved in not one but two conspiracies against the twin emperors, the evil and cruel Geta and Caracalla. The main performances are by Paul Mescal, Denzel Washington, Pedro Pascal and Connie Nielsen. Gladiator II It was chosen movie of the week by Observador and you can read the review here.