On December 7, a number of films were released, including the Russian New Year comedy “Yolki 10” and Hayao Miyazaki’s cartoon “The Boy and the Bird.” What to watch in the cinema this weekend – in the “Kommersant” selection.
Forbidden passion Moon Man Yolki 10 The Boy and the Bird The Sleepwalkers The Canterville Ghost The Kingdom of the Beasts The Mother-in-Law Silent Fury The Curse of the Piper
Forbidden Passion
- Director: Catherine Breillat
- Starring: Lea Drucker, Samuel Kircher, Olivier Rabourdin, Clotilde Coureau, Serena Hu, Angela Chen
- Genre: < /b>thriller, drama/France, Norway/104 min
- In theaters: from December 7
Review of “Kommersant-Weekend” :“Anna and Pierre lead the life of a respectable family: she is a lawyer, he is a businessman, they have a rich house in the suburbs of Paris, boring respectable friends and charming adopted daughters. The only disturber of this bourgeois tranquility is Pierre’s son from his first marriage, high school student Theo, who moved in with them, who does not trust either his father or his stepmother and tries to attract attention with scandalous behavior. Trying to improve the relationship, Anna hides Theo’s next prank from her husband, but, having tied herself with her stepson with a common secret, this sensible fifty-year-old woman unexpectedly finds herself in a much worse situation: the sympathy that arose between her and Theo quickly goes too far – much further than Anna could have guessed, and much faster than she could understand what was happening…
By making films about moral issues, Breillat does not become a moralist. Her look is devoid of judgment – this is the key difference between the remake and Queen of Hearts with its more dramatic and unambiguous ending. The incestuous romance in “Forbidden Passion” develops naturally, as if by itself – with glances, gestures, omissions, touches. The fact that, in parallel with her adventures, Anna works as a lawyer with teenage girls who have experienced abuse and violence speaks of her hypocrisy. But Lea Drucker convincingly plays her as a woman who made a mistake and did not understand how it happened. Her adult, responsible heroine, who has successfully arranged her life, suddenly loses control over the situation and finds herself completely at a loss: she smiles stupidly, looks with a clouded look and has no answers to Theo’s provocations. Her hypocrisy is the result not of evil intentions, not of depravity, but of weakness. As for the second main character, there is a paradox in him too. Performed by the young Samuel Kirscher, 18-year-old Theo behaves even more disgustingly than the average “difficult teenager” from the cinema.”
More details about the film can be found in the Kommersant-Weekend material “Son and Stepmother” “.
Moon Man
- Director: Zhang Chiyu
- Starring: Shen Teng, Ma Li, Chang Yuan, Li Chenzhu, Huang Cailun, Jackie Li
- Genre: science fiction, comedy, melodrama/China/122 min.
- At the box office: from December 7
Film distributor “Base Development”:“To protect the Earth from the flow of asteroids, a complex of special structures was built on the Moon in 2033. Ordinary technician Yue Dugu missed the evacuation of personnel, and when part of the protection did not work and asteroids created a global cataclysm on Earth, he witnessed the death of the planet. Now Dugu considers himself the last person in the Universe and does not know that the remnants of civilization on surviving equipment are watching him live without the possibility of feedback. In addition, a large red kangaroo is discovered on the lunar base – a very strong and dangerous animal.”
Yolki 10
- Directors: Damir Miftakhov, Ivan Chekhov
- Cast: Elena Valyushkina, Galina Polskikh, Yuri Kuznetsov, Boris Shcherbakov, Regina Todorenko
- Genre: comedy/Russia/90 min.
- In theaters: from December 7
Film distributor “NMG Kinoprokat”:“On New Year’s Eve there is always room for a miracle, even if you suddenly stop believing in it. Gennadyich, who is spending his life in a nursing home near St. Petersburg, will find his real family. Aspiring blogger Larisa from Tyumen will have to find out what her husband is ready to do for the sake of his loved ones. Marina from Tatarstan wants to learn to love what is really important to her husband. And a gamer girl named Tanya from Nizhny Novgorod will understand that true love is not a game at all. After all, on the most magical night of the year, everyone has a chance to find their own personal happiness.”
The Boy and the Bird
- Director: Hayao Miyazaki
- Genre: anime, cartoon, drama, fantasy/Japan/124 min.
- In theaters: from December 7
Review of “Kommersant-Weekend”:“The mother of little Mahito dies in a bombing fire in the third year of World War II. A year later, his engineer father Shoichi decides to marry again – the choice falls on Natsuko, his mother's younger sister and almost an exact copy of her – and then transports his son from Tokyo to the province, where Shoichi awaits an important position at a military factory that makes glazing for fighter aircraft. Mahito’s new life is full of surprises: firstly, immediately upon arrival he learns that his stepmother is expecting a child, secondly, his mother’s new, or rather old family house is filled with the strangest old ladies, and thirdly, he lives on the river in front of the house A very annoying and rather scary heron with human teeth. She pesters the boy with screams that the burnt-out mother is supposedly alive. Curiosity leads Mahito to follow the bird to a mysterious tower built by his great-great-great-great-grandfather in the thicket adjacent to the house, and then straight to the other world, where birds reign and there are more dead than living.
“The Boy and the Bird” is the twelfth full-length work of the great Hayao Miyazaki, which is released 10 years after the premiere of “The Wind Rises.” In 2013, “The Wind,” which intertwined Miyazaki’s love of flying, Japanese history of the first half of the twentieth century and the motifs of Thomas Mann’s “The Magic Mountain,” was called his last by the author, solemnly announcing his retirement. Now Hayao Miyazaki is 82 years old, and I still want to call the new film “The Boy and the Bird” not the last, but the next masterpiece… “The Boy and the Bird,” despite the fantastic, fairy-tale surroundings, like most of Miyazaki’s works, cannot be called a children’s story . It is no coincidence that “The Boy and the Bird” is released almost all over the world with an age rating of 12+ (and in Russia even 16+). bird.”
Sleepwalkers
- Director: Yuri Moroz
- Cast: Stepan Belozerov, Victoria Isakova, Alexey Filimonov, Dasha Vereshchagina, Dmitry Chebotarev
- Genre: drama/Russia/92 min.
- In theaters: from December 7
Film distributor “Atmosphere of Cinema”:“The famous rap artist Nikita Prozorov was kidnapped from an apartment in the center of Moscow. Investigator Ivanov finds out that the kidnapping was staged, and Nikita’s mother, Renata, a television producer, was involved in this. Nikita, in an unconscious state, was taken to the clinic and treated using experimental computer technology for personality psychocorrection. In order to understand the motives and reasons for Renata’s action, the investigator will have to piece by piece reconstruct the history of the complex relationship between mother and son, and answer the question of whether Renata killed her son or saved his life.
The Canterville Ghost
- Directors: Kim Burdon, Robert Chandler
- Genre: cartoon, comedy/UK/84 min.
- Slogan: “It didn’t always want to be scary”
< li class="doc_board__post">In theaters: from December 7
Film distributor “Ten Letters”:“The Otis family purchases an old house on an English estate and moves there. But the ghost of Mr. Simon has lived in the house for 300 years, and he considers the house his own. All the new owners who had moved into the house before them ran away after three days. This time everything went wrong. The Otises, and especially their daughter Virginia, not only are not afraid of the ghost of Simon, but are also trying to help him get rid of the ancient curse. class=”doc_board__img” alt=”Kingdom of the Beasts (Le règne animal, 2023)” />
Kingdom of the Beasts
- Director: Thomas Kaye
- Starring: Romain Duris, Paul Kircher, Adele Exarchopoulos, Tom Mercier, Billy Blaine, Xavier Ober
- Genre: fantasy, drama, detective, adventure/France, Belgium/128 min
- Slogan: “You can’t defeat your true nature”
< li class="doc_board__post">In theaters: from November 30
Review of “Kommersant-Weekend”: “What a time!” – a neighbor remarks socially in a Parisian traffic jam, addressing François (Romain Duris), who, together with his high school student son Emile (Paul Kirscher), is going to the hospital to visit his wife. Just now they all watched as a bird-man burst free from the ambulance, disfigured only by his emerging wings. Like this chiropteran, Francois’s wife is stricken with a rare and mysterious disease that causes people to gradually mutate into representatives of the animal kingdom (or “kingdom” according to distributors who did not study biology at school). She, having already lost her human appearance, is sent to a special center for keeping “creatures” (as sick people are called in everyday speech) – apparently more likely a prison than a hospital, because no one knows how to treat mutants. Next, Emile and Francois move to the Gascony wilderness, continuing, despite everything, to hope for the healing of the woman they love. Meanwhile, Emil's claws and fangs begin to emerge little by little.
The “body horror” genre, actually invented by the Canadian Cronenberg in the 1980s, has become one of the most relevant subtypes of horror in our era of body modification and environmental concern. “The Kingdom of Animals” is not focused on any specific fear – in the plot you can hear the echo of the covid pandemic, and the fear of natural disasters, and the fear of nature in general, even the fantasies of conspiracy theorists fighting GMOs. Not to mention the fact that the hostile, sometimes cruel attitude of healthy people towards mutants – who remain human, but have become radically different – is read as a traditional metaphor for racism and xenophobia in general.”
More details about the film are in the material. “Ъ-Weekend” “An optimistic view of dehumanization.”
Mother-in-law
- Director: Askar Uzabaev
- Genre: comedy/Russia/98 min.
- In theaters: from November 30
< li class="doc_board__post">Cast: Larisa Guzeeva, Garik Kharlamov, Nastasya Samburskaya, Alexander Lykov, Mark Bogatyrev
Film distributor “Central Partnership”:“Olga Nikolaevna is a strong-willed woman and the head of housing and communal services, who is quite happy with her life. She is the mistress of the house and at work, completely controls her husband Roman Pavlovich and protects her daughter Varya. The only one who does not fit into her happy picture of the world is her son-in-law Victor, from whom her beloved daughter is due to be born one of these days. And then one day the barrage of mutual claims becomes so great that right on a family holiday the situation gets out of control.”
Mute Fury< /h2>- Director: John Woo
- Cast: Juel Kinnaman, Catalina Sandino Moreno, Kid Cudi, Arold Torres, Vinnie O'Brien, Yoko Hamamura
- Genre: Action/USA/104 min.
- In theaters: from November 30
Film critic Yulia Shagelman:“Chasing his son’s killers in the prologue, Brian is shot in the neck, damaging his vocal cords. So the hero cannot talk, and along with him, his wife, reduced to a sad silent shadow, an honest cop unsuccessfully trying to cleanse the city of rampant bandits and therefore giving Brian complete carte blanche for murder without trial, refuses to communicate with words through his mouth. , and the bad guys themselves, who communicate with each other exclusively through text messages and bestial glances.
The lack of dialogue is the main formal “feature” of the film, in an otherwise completely standard story about a people’s avenger whose name is legion.
< p>Once upon a time, in the eighties and nineties, the choreographed, incredibly beautiful shootouts in John Woo's films were compared to ballet. In “Silent Fury”, he, apparently remembering the time of his creative heyday, decided to bring this technique to its apogee, so as not to sound absurd, but, alas, there is no talk of any ballet beauty anymore, and the result is, to put it mildly, discouraging.
It's not that this film really needs dialogue, which, let's be honest, has never been John Woo's strong suit. But in the absence of lines, Joel Kinnaman for some reason begins to overact wildly… All the action scenes in “Silent Fury” look like a copy of a copy and a copy, and although there is not a single pigeon, they are replaced by a completely shameless cliche: flying away into the pure blue sky a red ball released by an innocently murdered child. As you follow him with your eyes, you share Brian’s desire to return to that moment when his son was alive, nothing bad had happened yet, and one could think about John Woo’s filmography with pleasant nostalgia, and not with a feeling of acute awkwardness.”
Read more about the film in the Kommersant materials “Artist of the silent genre” and “Silent comeback.”
Curse of the Piper
- Director: Erlingur Thoroddsen
- Starring: Charlotte Hope, Julian Sands, Oliver Savell, Kate Nichols, Alexis Rodney, Philip Christopher
- Genre: horror/USA/91 min.
- In theaters: from November 30< /li>
Global Film distributor: “The ancient legend of the Piebald Piper has frightened people for centuries. But what if not everything in it is fiction, but a mystical wanderer in a colorful suit who mercilessly doomed entire settlements to death exists? Mel is far from ancient stories: she is an ordinary musician in the modern world and is only trying to provide for her daughter. One day she manages to play a melody that can put people into a trance, but the legendary Pied Piper of Hamelin will not share such a gift. Now the ancient evil will appear again in this world to write a new bloody history.”
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