Les crevettes pailletées / The Shiny Shrimps (Maxime Govare & Cédric Le Gallo, 2019)
A typical French feelgood comedy in the vein of last years's Le grand bain, since it focuses on another band of misfits and a watersport: this time it's waterpolo, and they're not middle-aged men but young (most of them anyway) gay men (and a trans woman). That's nice I guess, but it doesn't really hide how rote the script is, with a much less capable cast as well, and the ending stuck me as being in extremely bad taste in its attempt to challenge traditional values. It features our heroes giving an flamboyant performance (of some sort) at a funeral, clearly without the consent of the family of the deceased. We're clearly meant to shake our heads at the stuffy attendants who walk out, but this is so blatantly disrespectful of the family (though they are of course into it by the end, because movie magic) that it just makes everyone in the film feel like, well, dicks.
3/10
The Dead Don't Die (Jim Jarmusch, 2019)
Basically what you'd think Jarmusch's version of Night of the Living Dead would look like, with everyone taking the news of the zombie apocalypse with a certain amount of wry detachment. It's pretty all-over the place tonally, with Adam Driver distractingly breaking the fourth wall for reasons I can't quite fathom and don't mesh at all with Sévigny's much more grounded performance. It's also extremely slight, and whenever it tries not to be, it's mostly through bad Trump jokes and/or Tom Waits heavy-handedly commenting from the sidelines. It's pretty funny though, which made it an overall pleasant experience for me.
6/10