It arrived in Italian cinemas on May 23rd Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, shortly after opening in Cannes. It was a very ambitious project right from the title: to set a new saga on the world Mad Max. But without Tom Hardy in the new films of Frank Millerand especially around the new entry Anya Taylor-Joywho took over playing that iconic character thanks to Charlize Theronit develops a story full of obvious holes and several action scenes that seem to get out of hand. 168 million dollars in the budget, ‘only’ 114.4 million grossed so far globally. For us in Italy it would be a maneuver, but for Hollywood the numbers are an average flop. However, his problems are different. Taylor-Joy was entrusted with the genesis of a character tougher than any Ripley Alien. She is an excellent actress, she demonstrated it above all with There Queen of Chessbut moving so far from her previous roles here she fails to jump into the character with the grit of those who came before her.
That character requires 150% tenacity, but more often than not she, with questionable training, just manages to surf a bit among those surreal beasts captained by Dementus (but what’s his name?) played by Chris Hemsworth and by his unwatchably fake hooked nose. Sometimes it seems like a parody of itself and of anyone villain muscular, as well as Thor, ironically pleasant in defiance of Marvel. On the other we have the fighting tutor who looks like the Gibson cosplayer (Tom Burke) alongside the young Furiosa still in one piece, a subject that raises strange questions regarding the meaning of her look, and a shame for her lackluster dramaturgical development.
A very convincing first work it is Noir CasablancaOf Kamal Lazrakwinner of Jury Prize in the section Un Certain Regard to the Cannes Film Festival 2023 and presented in May at FEESCAL in Milan – African, Asian and Latin American Film Festival. A poor Moroccan trafficker involves his son to take care of a revenge affair on behalf of a local boss. In the car and during the space of a single night they will live theirs hallucinating journey amidst threatening unexpected events and a relationship between the two increasingly strained. We could almost define it a modern one Beggar of Africa This slowburn is tense and engaging from start to finish. Its narrative mechanism not only presents a new story of Moroccan crime, but also the relationship between father and son in a conflict that will reverse the roles. Arrives in our cinemas on June 6th.
It has been in theaters since May 30th Rosalie. We are in the French countryside of the 19th century and a girl covered in hair due to her diversity fights together with her father to avoid becoming a freak. Everything will be turned upside down when her father gives her as a wife to a man who is no longer young but who has a decent inn as her dowry. She is a film that talks about dignity, of the perception of beauty and of the boundary between the diversity that is accepted and that which socially rejects it. She elegantly explores the twilights of prejudice and gives us a new character with creative and poignant resilience. Thus the erotic pride of Nadia Tereszkiewicz in blowing his soul through his Rosalie’s beard.
The direction of Stéphanie Di Giusto he manages both to knock fervently on the doors of appearance and to face the pain and desire of this woman. The male protagonist, on the other hand, is conflicted Benoit Magimelalso the protagonist The taste of thingswhere the mansion of the chef he plays there curiously resembles the house/inn where his relationship with Rosalie develops.
Finally with The penitent arrives at his fourth cinema direction Luca Barbareschi. Perhaps the most ambitious shot of him because he grabs a play text of David Mamet which he had already brought to the stage at the time of the Elysée. In ninth place at the box office after the weekend, the visual setting works as well as the American cast around the protagonist. In this legal-psychological drama set in New York, a renowned psychologist enters dangerous territory when one of his patients commits a massacre and kills himself. American law in this is different from ours and much more severe. Barbareschi dares with his work, maybe sometimes he falls, here he also keeps his flight albeit without taking us emotionally with him, but at least he creates something new. It’s true that we don’t have much attraction for the story or for its controversial psychologist, but the fact of having caught an author like Mamet and the audacity with which he produced this overseas story are valuable.
