Latest news with #Misericordia
Sydney Morning Herald
17-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Sydney Morning Herald
It's hard to figure out the rules of the game in Misericordia
MISERICORDIA ★★★★ R. 103 minutes, selected cinemas Nobody could call Alain Guiraudie's Misericordia the work of a prude. But despite a couple of fleeting surprises, there's a lot less visible sex and nudity than in Guiraudie's best-known film, the 2013 Stranger By the Lake, an elegant erotic thriller set in a secluded gay cruising spot. Guiraudie's excuse might be that Stranger By the Lake was a summer film, whereas the equally original and provocative Misericordia is an ode to autumn, when it's logical to stay covered up. It's early November when the hero Jeremie (Felix Kysyl) returns after a decade to the mountainous region of Occitanie in southern France (Guiraudie's home turf too, and the setting for most of his films). As he gets out of the car, we can hear the breeze and feel the chill setting in. The chestnut trees in the nearby forest are turning gold, mushrooms sprout from the damp soil, mist hangs in the air. All of this sets an appropriate mood, given that what has brought Jeremie home is death – the death not of a relative, as we might first suppose, but of his old boss at the local bakery, a crucial figure in his life. This means reuniting with Vincent (Jean-Baptiste Durand), the son of the deceased and a childhood friend of Jeremie's who now views him with suspicion, especially when Jeremie decides to stick around after the funeral at the home of Vincent's mother Martine (Catherine Frot). A good deal of what has occurred between these characters is left to the imagination, while Jeremie is an enigma in his own right as protagonists go. He could be around 30, or somewhat older; his manner combines shyness and self-assurance, while his large, pale blue eyes seem both trustworthy and not.
The Age
17-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Age
It's hard to figure out the rules of the game in Misericordia
MISERICORDIA ★★★★ R. 103 minutes, selected cinemas Nobody could call Alain Guiraudie's Misericordia the work of a prude. But despite a couple of fleeting surprises, there's a lot less visible sex and nudity than in Guiraudie's best-known film, the 2013 Stranger By the Lake, an elegant erotic thriller set in a secluded gay cruising spot. Guiraudie's excuse might be that Stranger By the Lake was a summer film, whereas the equally original and provocative Misericordia is an ode to autumn, when it's logical to stay covered up. It's early November when the hero Jeremie (Felix Kysyl) returns after a decade to the mountainous region of Occitanie in southern France (Guiraudie's home turf too, and the setting for most of his films). As he gets out of the car, we can hear the breeze and feel the chill setting in. The chestnut trees in the nearby forest are turning gold, mushrooms sprout from the damp soil, mist hangs in the air. All of this sets an appropriate mood, given that what has brought Jeremie home is death – the death not of a relative, as we might first suppose, but of his old boss at the local bakery, a crucial figure in his life. This means reuniting with Vincent (Jean-Baptiste Durand), the son of the deceased and a childhood friend of Jeremie's who now views him with suspicion, especially when Jeremie decides to stick around after the funeral at the home of Vincent's mother Martine (Catherine Frot). A good deal of what has occurred between these characters is left to the imagination, while Jeremie is an enigma in his own right as protagonists go. He could be around 30, or somewhat older; his manner combines shyness and self-assurance, while his large, pale blue eyes seem both trustworthy and not.
Yahoo
17-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
The best movies of 2025 so far, according to critics
When it comes to movies, why wait for the end-of-year best-of lists? A number of movies have already garnered 3.5 stars or more from The Washington Post's critics and contributors (Ann Hornaday, Ty Burr, Michael Brodeur, Jen Yamato, Michael O'Sullivan, Thomas Floyd and Chris Klimek — identified by their initials below). Throughout the year, we'll update this list — bookmark it! — with the films we loved and where to watch them. (Note that all movies reviewed by The Post in 2025 are eligible for inclusion.) Ryan Coogler's wildly entertaining mash-up of genres, tonal flavors and stunning production values veers confidently between pulpy and profound, never sacrificing what's on its mind for its primary aim, which is to shock and enthrall. There's a culture war raging within the throbbing, thrumming 1930s juke joint that serves as its backdrop; viewers should rest assured — or be forewarned — that this particular skirmish will leave blood on the floor. (R, 137 minutes) — Ann Hornaday Where to watch: In theaters The French writer-director Alain Guiraudie makes transgressive dramas that double as the bleakest of black comedies, where friendships between men veer from social to sexual to antagonistic and back, and where the morality of a country village can be a thin veneer over the darkest deeds of the heart. 'Misericordia' is less sexually explicit than Guiraudie's most well-known movie, the Cannes prizewinner 'Stranger by the Lake,' but it's no less fascinatingly, even amusingly wicked. (Unrated, 104 minutes) — Ty Burr Where to watch: In theaters It takes nerve to make a documentary about the most unpopular period of a massively popular public figure's life. 'One to One: John & Yoko' demonstrates that it's worth the effort. Co-directors Kevin Macdonald and Sam Rice-Edwards have done an impressively deep archival dive to give us this portrait of John Lennon in 1972, the year the ex-Beatle arrived in New York City to stay and embarked on a period of radical politics and art, accompanied by his wife, muse, collaborator and co-instigator Yoko Ono, whose mere presence drove most people nuts. (R, 100 minutes) — T.B. Where to watch: In theaters In baseball, an 'eephus' is a trick pitch, a high-arcing throw that discombobulates a hitter while dazzling the crowd. Which is not a bad description of 'Eephus,' a tiny but nearly perfect movie that bids goodbye not only to a local ballfield and the middle-aged men who play on it, but to a vanishing America for whom baseball was the game — a definition of how we congregate and compete and build small myths to sustain us after the final at-bat. (Unrated, 99 minutes) — T.B. Where to watch: Apple TV+, Google Play, Prime Video, YouTube The guinea fowl is a ubiquitous, henlike bird native to Africa, where it's known for traveling in flocks and raising a noisy alarm when predators are nearby. In Rungano Nyoni's scalding Cannes prizewinner 'On Becoming a Guinea Fowl,' the bird serves as a metaphor for a society that will do anything to avoid listening. Nyoni's film is a keening black comedy with sparks of magical realism and folktale, in which she lets the visual and thematic pieces of the dramatic puzzle fall into place gradually. (PG-13, 99 minutes) — T.B. Where to watch: Apple TV+, Google Play, Prime Video, YouTube Nearly a decade ago, Britain's perennially hapless rom-com heroine Bridget Jones actually did make it to marriage and motherhood after three movies and countless comical indignities. But in the tender, sexy coda 'Mad About the Boy,' the fourth film adapted from Helen Fielding's Bridget Jones's Diary novel series, she discovers there's more life to live after the happily-ever-after. It's the best of the sequels yet. A buoyant and luminous Renée Zellweger returns as a widowed Bridget, with Leo Woodall of 'The White Lotus' as her younger love interest, Roxster. Michael Morris directs. (R, 124 minutes) — Jen Yamato Where to watch: Peacock Filmed from 2019 to 2023, this documentary is the work of a joint Palestinian-Israeli collective of four filmmakers, but really it's the story of two of them and of a friendship that is both hopeful and hopeless. Basel Adra is a young Palestinian activist who grew up in the southern Hebron Hills. Yuval Abraham is a young Israeli whose political views were changed by studying Arabic in high school; now he tries to get stories of the demolitions of Palestinian villages into an Israeli news media that doesn't want to hear it. As an act of citizen journalism, 'No Other Land' is a document as damning as they come, and it lands in this endless, bitterly complex struggle like an argument that refuses to be rationalized away. (Unrated, 92 minutes) — T.B. Where to watch: Not yet available for streaming This documentary about the conflict in Ukraine and the citizen army fighting back against Russia's invasion focuses squarely on artists and craftspeople who by necessity have become warriors. Are their senses and sensibilities dulled by the violence around them and the violence they're forced to wreak? Or are they more alert to the pains, paradoxes and even joys of struggling through to the end of each day alive? 'Porcelain War' is a testament to how life's beauty — all the world's fertility an artist is trained to see — endures among privation and death. (R, 87 minutes) — T.B. Where to watch: Not yet available for streaming Director Walter Salles crafts an epic within an epic: a teeming family drama contained within the melodrama of a country going insane. In 1970, Brazil existed in a state of constant tension, with a military dictatorship overseeing a resurgent economy and the increasingly brutal repression of anyone it saw as stepping out of line. Among the latter was Rubens Paiva (Selton Mello), a civil engineer and congressman, whose disappearance unleashed the fury and determination of his wife, Eunice (Fernanda Torres) — this film's real hero. (PG-13, 136 minutes) — T.B. Where to watch: Apple TV+, Google Play, Prime Video, YouTube A ghost story, as told from the point of view of the ghost. 'Presence' is more unsettling than scary, more dramatically gripping than nerve-shredding. And it's directed by Steven Soderbergh, so you know it has to be smart. His camera silently roams an old suburban house, unable to step past the doors outside, putting the audience inside the mind of a phantom as it yearns to protect the most vulnerable member of the family that lives there. (R, 84 minutes) — T.B. Where to watch: Apple TV+, Google Play, Prime Video, YouTube Building his scripts through collaborative improvisation with his casts, director Mike Leigh creates itchy comedy-dramas about life's misfits and reprobates and, occasionally, its optimists — average folk, often, who create and survive their own mundane disasters. 'Hard Truths' stars Marianne Jean-Baptiste as a middle-aged, working-class Londoner with a gift for invective and complaint: a woman of titanic feeling who has somehow become a prisoner of herself. (R, 97 minutes) — T.B. Where to watch: Apple TV+, Google Play, Prime Video, YouTube This delightfully unhinged musical biopic from director Michael Gracey ('The Greatest Showman') chronicles British pop singer and former boy band sensation Robbie Williams, revisiting the singer's tumultuous rise and celebrating his effervescent body of Brit-pop hits ('Angels' among them). American audiences might be shocked at how well it works on all fronts. Especially considering that Williams is rendered throughout as a CGI chimpanzee. (R, 135 minutes) — Michael Brodeur Where to watch: Apple TV+, Google Play, Prime Video, YouTube Adapting Colson Whitehead's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel that was inspired by the true story of dozens of young men (the majority of them Black) tortured and killed at a reform institution in the Florida Panhandle, RaMell Ross ('Hale County This Morning, This Evening') reinvents the cinema as a language of hope. Hope for what? Survival, connection, bearing witness to historical crimes, the sacrament of peering into another person's soul. It's one of the most visually and sonically gorgeous movies of the year. (PG-13, 140 minutes) — T.B. Where to watch: Apple TV+, Prime Video
Wall Street Journal
03-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Wall Street Journal
‘When Fall Is Coming' Review: Autumnal Ambiguities
This year, spring has sprung at American indie cinemas with a pair of French films that are distinctly out of season, colored by the yellow leaves of autumn: Two weeks ago was Alain Guiraudie's 'Misericordia,' and this weekend brings 'When Fall Is Coming,' directed by the prolific François Ozon. Both involve murder, mushrooms, and a young man who just might be taking advantage of an older woman. But where Mr. Guiraudie is an impish auteur, using mystery and melodrama for his own playfully perverse ends, Mr. Ozon takes a slightly more straightforward approach, and his movie is the less persuasive and compelling of the two. That it is still worthwhile owes largely to the sympathetic, sinuous performance of Hélène Vincent, in the lead role of a grand-mère who may not be as simply sweet as she first appears. Ms. Vincent's Michelle lives alone in a lovely old house in Burgundy, where she leads a quiet life of gardening, going for walks and reading by the fire, her typical solitude broken only by meetings with her best friend, Marie-Claude (Josiane Balasko). But as the film begins, Michelle is expecting visitors, soon to arrive from Paris: her daughter, Valérie (Ludivine Sagnier), and grandson, Lucas (Garlan Erlos). In eager anticipation, Michelle prepares a splendid-looking lunch—mushrooms, freshly foraged and sautéed, and a quiche of epic diameter—and then sits to await the sound of their car pulling up outside. As written by Mr. Ozon and Philippe Piazzo, Valérie turns out to be a bit of a caricature, the harried adult child who radiates stress and urban frenzy even in the tranquil countryside. She enters the movie complaining about traffic and shortly thereafter lands on the sofa to stare squarely at her phone, scarcely interested in her mother and rudely rebuffing attempts at conversation. When she ends up in the hospital due to the mushrooms served at lunch, it almost seems like a bit of karmic justice. But could it have been justice of a more deliberate kind? Devised by, say, her own mother? At lunch, Michelle claimed that she wasn't hungry, and she knew that Lucas didn't like mushrooms, which left only Valérie to eat them. The doctors and the police whom Michelle talks to see the incident as an honest mistake, familiar to anyone who has taken a chance on wild fungi. (Which is, it seems, most French people.) But Mr. Ozon delights in tweaking the drama with tacit uncertainties. Didn't we see Michelle consulting a mushroom identification chart as she prepared lunch? Could she have made such a dangerous error? Valérie neither knows nor cares—all she wants is to return to Paris, which she does as soon as she's out of the hospital, taking Lucas along with her, to the devastation of his grandmother. The film allows a moment of bare emotion for mother and daughter alike following her departure, as we see Michelle in her loneliness at home and Valérie crying as she drives away. There is, we sense, a past of great pain between these two. When the film eventually reveals more about that past, the answers are surprising. But they don't carry much depth, instead tending toward a silly, scandalizing sensibility that Mr. Ozon's generally realist approach can't convey with much credibility. Still, the film has its strengths: Ms. Vincent and Ms. Balasko make a great, world-weary team as rueful mothers, with Marie-Claude's son, Vincent (Pierre Lottin), having just been released from prison. 'I hate to say it,' Marie-Claude says, 'but with our kids, we failed miserably.' Yet Vincent, at least outwardly swearing off the troublemaking of his youth, is friendly to Michelle, who hires him to do odd jobs around her property. Mr. Lottin leverages the hint of menace beneath his slick handsomeness to create a figure whose seductive ambiguity tilts toward the sinister, which the film puts to engaging use in its continuing twists. And although some work better than others, Ms. Vincent is steadfast in her commitment to a character whose morality and true affections are themselves the stuff of mystery.
Chicago Tribune
31-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Chicago Tribune
‘Misericordia' review: A funeral mourner sparks a tiny French village's erotic roundelay
Under wraps or busting out all over, inconvenient yearning is everywhere in the films of Alain Guiraudie. And like most of his characters, the French writer-director likes to keep his options open. No one genre suits him. Now at the Gene Siskel Film Center and the Landmark Century Centre Cinema, 'Misericordia' begins with a homecoming, proceeds to a funeral, expands to other corners of a not-so-sweet-little-village, throws in a murder and a cover-up, and concludes with elements of a deadpan sex comedy. It's easier to get at what 'Misericordia' isn't than what it is. And that makes it all the more interesting. The story begins with Jérémie, around age 30 with an uncertain future, falling back into his past. He returns to his former village of Saint-Martial for the funeral of the town baker. Jérémie worked as his apprentice a decade earlier. At the cozy hillside home of Martine, the baker's widow, Jérémie settles in for a stay of undetermined length. Early on, we see one framed photo in particular that catches Jérémie's eye: the baker in his prime, in a Speedo, at the beach. Casually, Martine refers to an intimate connection between her late husband and his apprentice. Connections like that maintain the film's low boil of erotic intrigue. Martine's hot-tempered son, Vincent, a childhood frenemy of Jérémie's, lives nearby. He does not relish the upcoming funeral's conspicuous outsider worming his way back into Saint-Martial. Vincent and Jérémie, it's implied, were more than just frenemies when they were teenagers. The bad blood between them eggs the men onto violence, tinged with physical need. Elsewhere, 'Misericordia' lets a comically glaring moment of side-eye do what words cannot. Most of it comes from the town abbot who, in frequent scenes set in the nearby woods, always seems to be drifting into view with his basket of precious mushrooms, whenever Jérémie is near. The rhythm and plotting of 'Misericordia' subverts expectations, not with story twists but with a tonal game of three-card monte. Guiraudie's best-known work, the 2013 movie 'Stranger by the Lake,' blended a more selective array of genre elements more smoothly; his new film, nuttier, more free-ranging, sets its queer male gaze inside genre boundaries drawn and re-drawn on the fly. More than once, this or that villager sneaks into Jérémie's bedroom at night, with something urgent to say. It's as if a murder story changed its mind and turned into a Joe Orton farce, taken at a peculiar half-speed. Some will buy it, some will not. But if life can pull switcheroos on us, movies can, too. The cast finesses the material without a misstep as the pent-up townsfolk orbit around cryptic, magnetic Jérémie, played by Félix Kysyl. Portraying Martine, whose jealousy-tinged affection for her houseguest becomes genuinely touching, Catherine Frot is the X-factor that makes 'Misericordia' a whole, rather than merely parts looking for a whole. As the village abbot never far from the woods, or from Martine's little dining room table, Jacques Develay manages the trick of utter simplicity in his motives and line readings. Nobody in this village can quite figure out why the alluring tabula rasa, Jérémie, has a hold on everybody. They only know desire works in mysterious ways. Misleadingly, this filmmaker's brand of suspense has often been labeled 'Hitchcockian,' because there are sometimes corpses to be hidden and alibis to be faked. In 'Misericordia,' on the other hand, there's a touch of Hitchcock's atypical lark 'The Trouble With Harry' in its straight-faced handling of strange developments. The trouble with Jérémie isn't that he's dead, even though his homecoming involves not one but two casualties. Is he bad? Misunderstood? A tender soul in hiding? A portrait in opaque omnisexuality, as adaptable as a zipper? Since 'Misericordia' has no interest in being only one kind of movie, it seems strange to expect a single motive or simple explanation from anyone in it. 'Misericordia' — 3.5 stars (out of 4) No MPA rating (nudity, some language and violence) How to watch: Now playing at the Landmark Century Centre Cinema, 2828 N. Clark St., and Gene Siskel Film Center, 164 N. State St. In French with English subtitles.
