Les Herbes secs, Limbo, Le Retour... The films to see or avoid this week

Drame de Nuri Bilge Ceylan, 3h17

Black silhouette on white background. The Dry Herbs begins with an abstract painting, recalling how Nuri Bilge Ceylan is an outstanding landscape painter. Very quickly the canvas tore. The man walking with difficulty in the snow takes on the features of Samet, a drawing teacher who returns to a village in Anatolia at the end of the holidays. He finds his roommate and colleague, Kenan, his students, and among them Sevim, a lively and sassy teenager. She alone seems to pull Samet out of the boredom of provincial life and the teaching profession. It is through her that he soon finds himself compromised, accused of "inappropriate behavior". Ceylan depicts Samet struggling against a Kafkaesque administration, mired in exhausting quibbles. But at Ceylan, master of ambiguity, no one is an entirely innocent victim. The meeting of Samet with the idealist Nuray, survivor of an attack in Ankara, awakens this heart in winter. Kenan is not insensitive either to the charms of the young woman. A love triangle is formed where love is not pure. It is a cruel and melancholy game. Ceylan orchestrates it with a terrible and superb lucidity. E.S.

Drama by Pierre Jolivet, 1h47

Since Force Majeure, Strictly personal, Fred, or Ma Petite entreprise, we know that Pierre Jolivet's cinema is not the type to take out the violins to make the cottages cry, even in Brittany. With his eighteenth film, Les Algues vertes, the director of Hands Armed remains faithful to this staging on the wire that defines his style. Jolivet could certainly have counted on a docufiction or a truth-finding film. He preferred to inject romance and create beautiful characters. His feature film in the form of a thriller, tense, nervous, without the slightest grease, is nonetheless a scrupulous adaptation of the graphic novel by Inès Léraud, drawn by Pierre Van Hove, published in 2019, Les Algues vertes. Sold in more than 150,000 copies, this comic had brought to light the scandal of the pollution of the Breton coast by green algae. And this, despite a series of pressures of all kinds coming pell-mell from agri-food lobbying, a form of regional denial, various and varied intimidations and threats, not to mention the embarrassed silence of city councilors, even the fortuitous disappearance of some sensitive files. In the album, the investigator does not appear. Pierre Jolivet did not let himself be told. He wanted to film a heroine, because the times needed it. For this, he chose with relevance Céline Sallette. The actress of L'Amour flou aptly embodies this young investigative journalist, specializing in environmental issues, who will have succeeded for this long-term investigation, to throw a stone into the Armorican pond. Even where the Celtic omerta has nothing to envy to that of Corsica. O.D.

Polar of Soi Cheang, 1h58

We thought the Hong Kong thriller was dead and buried by the economic crisis of 2008, replaced on the world cinema map by even more violent and baroque South Koreans. The corpse is still moving. If stylists John Woo, Johnnie To and other Tsui Hark no longer hold the upper hand, the genre still has beautiful remains. Soi Cheang, anything but a partridge of the year, proves it with Limbo, his sixteenth feature film. He stages a duo of cops as we have already seen everywhere. Will Ren, the young rookie with the look of a neat trader, teams up with Cham Lau, a battered veteran since the accident that sent his wife into a coma in the hospital. The person in charge, Wong To, a lonely and wild car thief, comes out of prison just when a serial killer rapes and murders women, after having cut off their hands. Cham Lau forces Wong To to help them track down the fetish serial killer in the Hong Kong slums. The young woman serves as bait in a city that looks like an open dump, between seeping sewers and dripping garbage cans, populated by traffickers, junkies and criminals. In this infernal labyrinth, we no longer know which of the cat or the mouse is hunting the other. Cheang shot his film in color, but flipped it to black and white. The result is a nightmare like we've seen nowhere. Very choreographic sequences, but much more brutal than the gunfight ballets of the flagships of the genre (The Killer, The Mission, Time and Tide, Infernal Affairs). The finale, in torrential rain, would almost make David Fincher's Seven look like a feel good movie. E.S.

Drama by Sofia Coppola, 1h37

Carlotta has the good idea to bring out Virgin Suicides in a restored version. In 1999, Sofia Coppola made a name for herself from her first feature film, adapting the novel by Jeffrey Eugenides. From the first sequence, the voice-over teaches the viewer that the four blonde and pretty Lisbon sisters will kill themselves in this suburban district of a small American town in the 1970s. Their tragic story is told from the point of view of boys, voyeur neighbors and shy. It remains a mystery, beyond the psycho-sociological explanations (strict education, puritanism). James Woods and Kathleen Turner are terrific parents who are completely dumped. Josh Hartnett plays the weed-smoking playboy to perfection. And Kirsten Dunst's Lux Lisbon announces the depressed bride before the end of the world in Lars Von Trier's Melancholia. Carried by the music of the group Air, a gem of spleen. The film will be released on Blu-ray on August 16. E.S.

Drama by Catherine Corsini, 1h46

The Return arrived in Cannes against a backdrop of controversy. Not for its content but for its filming, the working conditions of which have been criticized. It took a few days to get everything back to normal. The support of the actors, from the youngest, Esther Gohourou, to the veteran, Denis Podalydès, to their director, Catherine Corsini, has been unfailing. The film recounts the return of Khédidja (Aïssatou Diallo Sagna) to Corsica, after fifteen years of absence. This mother of a family returns to work as a babysitter for a family of sore Parisians (Denis Podalydès and Virginie Ledoyen). She took the opportunity to bring her two daughters Jessica (Suzy Bemba), 18, and Farah (Esther Gohourou), 15. The three stay in the bungalow of a campsite. The girls take it easy while their mother slips away to work without complaining. A great sweetness, a bit melancholy, emanates from Khédidja, which we feel marked by pain. Fifteen years earlier, the girls' father, a Corsican, was killed in a car accident when his wife had just left the village in the hinterland and this family that oppressed her. Catherine Corsini films Corsica without the magnifying filters that some gladly apply to the Isle of Beauty. Corsica reveals its hidden coves as well as its traffic of all kinds, its thousand shades of blue and its gray areas, but it never forces the line. The native is filmed with the same naturalness as the two Parisian girls who discover the beach, private swimming pools and an insularity that is difficult to apprehend. Jessica, the eldest, was accepted in the Sciences Po Paris competition. She is the pride of her mother and arouses the admiration of Denis Podalydès who compares her to his daughter Gaïa (Lomane de Dietrich), considered lazy and weak-willed. The two girls will soon get closer, and rather intimately. Farah, the little one, soon finds herself on her own. She's the busybody. The young actress who plays her is a phenomenon. Its naturalness and brilliance energize a film that could sink into languor. F.D.