Dans la brume (Daniel Roby, 2018)Basically what you'd expect would happen if a French director directed a disaster film. It doesn't bring much new to the genre, but it executes the basic tropes of it pretty well, and the effects are pretty convincing. Duris and Kurylenko are good, but I think I wanted more from them, Duris especially. He seems to be doing a Gary Cooper, "strong, silent type" without really bringing much character to it, and as easy as it is to relate to the basic stakes here (divorced couple try to ensure their sick daughter's survival in a disaster scenario), it never really goes beyond that, and the various developments are all rather expected. It all works pretty well though, aside from an ending that's too cute by half.
6/10America (Claus Drexel, 2018)A documentary about a small town in Arizona in the days before and after the 2017 election. I'm a sucker for this Depardon-style of documentaries, but Drexel can't help but try and direct things in a specific direction by repeatedly asking about guns, which constantly threatens to make this into an insuferable "how wacky and crazy is it that Americans love their guns so much, amirite ?" exercise. I mean, naming the thing "America" is obnoxious enough... still, putting people in front of a camera and having them talk about politics is kind of in my wheelhouse, so I found some stuff to enjoy in it.
5/10
Madame Hyde (Serge Bozon, 2017)Isabelle Huppert as a physics/chemistry teacher version of Jekyll and Hyde sounds interesting, doesn't it ? And it is... it just doesn't work for me on any level. The Hyde part of it seems entirely superfluous and doesn't really connect much to the rest of the film, which is a weird version of those hokey teacher dramas. I don't know what Bozon is trying to do at all, and I don't really like the way he goes about it (the writing is pretty literary with people not contracting words that they definitely would... but it's not consistent either), so... Romain Duris shows up in a supporting role and seems to be in some kind of a comedy, and that was probably my favorite part ? It's not much though, and I just didn't connect with the film overall.
3/10
Mektoub, My Love: Canto Uno (Abdellatif Kechiche, 2017)My first Kechiche, and the main thing I take away from it is that I'm now very curious to see his other films, but I also hope they have a different subject matter. This is a 3-hour semi-autobiographical, meandering... journey? into the lives of young people in 90s Sète (in the South of France). Lots of going to the beach and dancing in bars and in clubs and gossiping about each other, which is basically everything I try to avoid in life (well, the beach is fine I suppose), which does prove to be a limiting factor in my enjoyment of the film. All of it centers around what I can only assume to be a Kechiche stand-in as the protagonist, back from Paris after having abandoned medical school and exploring his interest in photography/his cousin's lover. Kechiche films it all in a sensual kind of naturalism, and gets great performances out of a bunch of newcomers, especially two of the main actresses (Ophélie Bau and Lou Luttiau) I just hope the basic narrative will get more interesting to me in the announced sequel(s). I still enjoyed this quite a bit, to be clear, and its length only started to wear on me in a particularly drawn-out party sequence in the third hour.
7/10