New movies in three lines: the best and worst of the week EP7
You can find a lot of more or less interesting films in theaters and on streaming platforms. Each week we will select a few to write very short reviews on them in a humorous and lighthearted tone. A useful and practical binder complete with quotes that will stick in Google’s memory. If you missed episode six, you can catch up with it here.
As Bestas by Rodrigo Sorogoyen
In our first year-end ranking, published last December at the end of a 12-month period packed with unforgettable titles, we ranked it eighth among the best 20 films of 2022, and now it has arrived in Italian theaters.
Sorogoyen, hands down the best director we have in Europe for a few years now, signs another imploded thriller, taut from minute zero, with the tension that as always in his cinema also here arises from the feelings of his characters. As Bestas looks like the culmination of a career so far made up only of great films (and an incredible TV series, Antidisturbios, which debuted in Italy a few years ago at the Turin Film Festival and which is available today on Disney+), makes one think a lot of A Quiet Weekend of Fear or better yet Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dog, but Sorogoyen’s style is too personal, too unique to resemble anything else.
Overwhelming in its telling of this isolated country setting, this tame protagonist who just wants to stay out of trouble, and especially In enacting the most bestial human nature possible – hence the title, in Italian Le bestie-which seems destined to come out from the very first glance the rival characters exchange.
65 – Escape from the Land by Scott Beck and Bryan Woods.
There is a great misunderstanding of the mythological twist from The Planet of the Apes in ’68, which stuck in history because it came at a specific point in the narrative and certainly not from the promotional trailers, but in fact how you carry it on the marketing campaign of A film titled only ’65’?
In general it flows along helplessly, but the same ‘ticking time bomb’ script mechanism of A Quiet Place should be noted: there was Emily Blunt pregnant in a world where humans had to keep quiet so as not to be devoured by aliens with super-developed hearing, and from minute zero it was clear that sooner or later that baby would be born with all the complications involved; here, in a film where Adam Driver ends up on 65-million-year-old Earth amidst dinosaurs, there’s meteor…
Not coincidentally, the directors are the screenwriters of A Quiet Place: what do you know.
The Three Musketeers – D’Artagnan by Martin Bourboulon
To say the least, galvanizing.
Perhaps, for the budget he boasts, he still lacks a certain breadth-he almost always stays indoors, which is wonderful anyway, and even when he does go out he often does so inside alleys or woods so he seems to stay indoors-but on the other hand he has a great sense of action and characters. Not to mention the cast, it sets back all the much-acclaimed recent Italian blockbusters by several notches.
First part of a double production shot back-to-back, with The Three Musketeers – Milady to be released in December 2023. We are looking forward to it.
On the Run for Hong Kong by Vincent Kok
A classic Hong Kong action-romantic comedy originally released in 1999, with the mammoth Jackie Chan at the height of his artistic verve as an actor-stuntman and the beautiful Taiwanese actress Shu Qi, still a rising star in Asian cinema a few years before the worldwide success of the masterpiece Millennium Mambo by Hou Hsiao-hsien, released in 2001.
The film, which includes. Tony Leung is also in the cast, is back in a stunning home-video edition edited by 88Films, which includes both the 99-minute international edit and the original 120-minute Hong Kong edit: far from the pure action gems of previous years, From Project A to the sensational (still) Police Story trilogy., a film full of sweetness and comedy…with a few healthy doses of bats, which never hurt.
The Pope’s Exorcist by Julius Avery
As the filming of Gladiator 2, again directed by Ridley Scott, the legendary Russell Crowe returns to his beloved Rome for a horror film of demonic possessions like so many and inspired by the ‘true’ writings of Father Gabriele Amorth, the Vatican’s chief exorcist (to whom William Friedkin, director of the masterpiece The Exorcist, dedicated a documentary) here played by the Oscar-winning actor.
Julius Avery is a great connoisseur of genre cinema, but every new film he has brought out (sequentially from 2014 to the present Son of a gun, Overlord, Samaritan and this one) always seemed to me to be a step backward from its predecessor: like its older brothers, The Pope’s Exorcist also generally works, but it really adds nothing at all to the genre. While I’m at it, I would also like to recommend another recent Russell Crowe film, Poker Face, released in March on home video thanks to Plaion Pictures.
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