Black Stone, a surprising comedy about the absurdity of a Greek family

Last week’s top two films opened very well at the box office, each in its own box of course – but in any case, these are welcome developments. On the other hand, “Spider-Man: Climbing the Spider-Verse” opened as expected in first place, but with a total of several times more tickets than what the first film brought in upon opening. The trend we also find at the global box office which clearly confirms the massive popularity and influence this film has had in the intervening years.

Behind the big blockbusters, the first to appear in the week tickets of the independent circuit is the French court comedy “Crime”, which we also talked about with the hero Nadia Tereskiewicz. And since nearly 5,000 tickets at opening, along with its subject matter and the genre it belongs to, shows that it’s one movie that could have a healthy trajectory throughout the following summer.

Movies of the week:

Black stone

(Spyros Iacovides, 1 hour 27 minutes)

3/5

Two directors who want to capture something of the audience’s paranoia stumble upon Harula, a Greek(TM) mother who is searching for her son, a civil servant accused of fraud who has apparently disappeared from the land of Face. Harula’s other son, who is disabled, still lives in Harula’s house – along with a taxi driver they know. In one of many transport odysseys of apathy. In a neo-Greek urban dystopia, Harula and her son will do everything they can to find the missing person. . And together they will discover the secret of who he really is.

What do we mean when we say that The Black Stone is a comedy surprise? In the beginning, he deals with the modern Greek reality, with the urban landscape, with the family, with the public, with the new structures and the new reality of what the “new Greek fabric” means. This is not very common, let alone authentically recorded. First, we have the character of Mana, which is rarely captured in such a layered way, that includes mimicking its comics in popular comics to the tragedy of a person trapped by archaic patriarchal structures in one dimension. The role you don’t deserve.

In the role, Eleni Kokkidou does something unique — she seems to veer from fun personality to shade dramatic in the blink of an eye. A claustrophobic presence, funny, human, dramatic, and 100% real.

On the other hand, we have an unlikely taxi driver played by rapper Negros Morea with a nature that puts him at the other end of the interpretive spectrum from Coquido. He’s a character full of feelings, who seems to flow in a world that he constantly views anyway as something outlandish. (The imaginary verse “Where are you from?” – “From Kypseli.” – “Yes, but where were you born?” – “…in Kypseli.” is a scene that countless Greek comic relishes deliberate about times and supposedly That makes popular humor.)

How harmoniously these two performances coexist shows how meticulously Iacovides and his team work, but also how the film manages to work on a level vaguely intertwined with realism and inspection. And it does so with style and playfulness, drawing aesthetics from something like “The Office” and performance – as well as original comedy but also social satire – as a kind of mystery. The search for a missing son gives the film a narrative drive that doesn’t let it tire, even at various local points where its individual ideas run wild.

and finally leads to a bold (or even daring) finale where pain and optimism coexist, essential elements as you look at – or simply live through – a rapidly changing modern Greece but you never know what.

As the movie progresses, there are points that feel like they haven’t developed enough as ideas. Ideas are constantly abandoned or left unexplored, from issues of plot and setting (the Greek government, for example) to whole themes (the ideological confusion of the combatants and the role of the taxi driver) leaving open accounts in places. But like when a piece of the action doesn’t quite work, the movie doesn’t leave you there for long — it’s constantly moving, constantly offering new ideas, twists, and new comedies.

There are missteps here, but we’re dealing with a film that tries things out, often succeeds, that has a really rich perspective on the outside world (ours), is full of humor and bittersweet, and is willing to explore the taboos and absurdities of modern Greece in Question Mark. You’ll laugh more, have more fun, and get to know everything.

Lovely breakfast

(“Un Beau Matin / One Fine Morning,” Mia Hansen-Love, 1 hour 52 minutes)

4/5

Mia Hansen-Love (“Bergman Island”) directs Léa Seydoux as Sandra, a woman who must deal with her father’s neurodegenerative disease, while an encounter with an old acquaintance sparks a new passion. What seems, at first glance, already seems like a spontaneously produced French film, with beautiful, airy, old-fashioned spaces in which the protagonists move and live, filled with books on the walls and sweets on the table for guests, hides a dramatic artifice over the passage of time itself.

Sandra is a mother, she is a daughter, she is a mistress, she is sometimes determined, sometimes desperate, she is both strong and vulnerable. With the help of stunning first-time actress Seydou crafting a new character from utterly mundane and banal material, Sandra takes on familiar human proportions within a linear, fragmented narrative. Who never gets tired of the show, never focused on actions, and jumps with enviable ease from one situation and development to another.

Thus Hansen-Love imagines, in a sense, the very sense of life, in which everything cosmic ultimately appears as a series of snapshots from our own experience. In her film everything seems trivial and unremarkable, yet the focus on the heroine and how she interacts and listens to everything, combined with rhythmic editing, careful use of framing and elaborate elliptical text, results in a cinematic that captures the very experience of living, absorbing, reacting and – In the end – continuous. always.

Master gardener

(Paul Schrader, 1 hour 50 minutes)

2.5/5

Narvel Roth is the lonely, taciturn, gardener in the gardens of a grand, old-fashioned mansion in the American South, who naturally carries—according to Paul Schrader’s gospel—the trauma of a guilty secret that prevents him from salvation. His employer (Sigourney Weaver, in a fearlessly spirited performance full of lust, command and control) asks him to hire her niece, a black girl who doesn’t do well with authority. Narvel’s coexistence with her will awaken ghosts of guilt within him–and bring the violence of his past into the present.

The conclusion of an informal trilogy with lonely men full of secrets and penitence, who find themselves somewhere between lust and existential paranoia. After the brilliant “First Fix” with Ethan Hawke and the excellent “Card Counter” with Oscar Isaac, Joel Egerton’s Gardener sounds like a somewhat shrunken final note. Shredder pulls the same tricks as the previous films, and follows patterns, which isn’t a bad thing by any means – it’s just that this time the recipe feels less desperate or angry than ever.

Coupled with a gritty finale (if nothing but fantasy) that pretty much undoes the troubled director’s lot, it adds up to a movie made of recognizable great stuff, but cooked up in a slightly awkward way at the end, like a series of patterns that must That to be placed in the text as is. Perhaps after all this, even Paul Schrader has finally loosened up. It doesn’t matter, because even in his ordinary moments he has something painful to convey to us.

Mafia mom

1.5/5

Let me meet my father

2/5

Moving on to the “Summer I Think It’s OK” segment of the programme, this week we find “Mafia Mamma,” an adventure comedy (?) directed by Kathryn Hardwicke who once directed “Thirteen.” Toni Collette inherits control of the mob family she didn’t know she owned after her grandfather’s death in Italy, creating a series of adventures in which she learns that running a mob isn’t farfetched if you think about it. Time passes but the humor is sloppy and the whole thing isn’t as silly as it could be for something really entertaining.

On the other hand, Let Me Meet My Father is a family drama about barriers to marriage and love in general, adapted from a play and consisting mainly of closed passages of dialogue between a few people at a time. Coincidences abound, and the film’s worldview has to sweat a bit to achieve the dramatic weight it desires – but the six-member cast is fundamentally entertaining, whether they fight to be believed (as William Macy) or live with hedonism and style (as Suzanne Sarandon). Nothing special, but you can see it.

It is still being traded

Transformers: Rise of the Monsters: A new chapter in the “Transformers” franchise, without Michael Bay, so it makes sense to wonder what’s the point. This time, the Maximals, that is, the Transformers that we met in the CGI animated series “Beast Wars”, play a central role, so in terms of story and characters, there is a broader renewal. The results will appear in the cash registers. “Hamilton” stars Anthony Ramos.

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