If the omicron variant and the authorities do not prevent it, the January card will be preheating the imminent awards season, especially the Golden Globes (January 9) and Oscar (March 27th). The first applicant will arrive after the Kings, on Friday the 7th (the 14th AppleTV+), and comes from the hand of Shakespeare y Joel Coen, which leaves his beloved brother Ethan aside for the first time after three decades of working together. His Macbeth return to the place (Scotland) of crime, ghosts and power struggles with a great Denzel Washington which aspires once again to the statuette in this undisguised theatrical drama in black, white, mists and darkness that American critics have already hailed as one of the best films of the year.
Somewhat later, on the 21st, the new-old movie of Guillermo del Toro, dedicated to animated series (The three below) from success and awards to The girl from the water. Starring Bradley Cooper, Cate Blanchett and Rodney Mara in what some have pointed to a major casting error, The alley of lost souls is a remake from the film of the same title directed by Edmund Goulding in 1947, a moral fable about human nature in key noir which has the endorsement of critics and the American Film Institute, although some have also pointed out that the careful period setting and the brilliant visual display of the house hardly camouflage its narrative deficiencies.
The premiere of The Williams method, new star vehicle for Will Smith in his umpteenth role of hero-father, here played Richard Williams, a father unavailable to discouragement who helped raise two of the most extraordinary athletes of all time, tennis players Venus and Serena Williams. The word “classicism” appears frequently in critical reviews of the film directed by Reinaldo Marcus Green, also “emotional” and “moving”. If you add it all up, like tennis or high-level sports, and are a fan of Smith’s performance and emotional ups and downs, this might be your movie of the month.
To close it, the 28th will arrive Belfast, from Kenneth Branagh, the autobiographical, black-and-white film about his childhood and early life Northern Irish youth that has not stopped reaping awards since its presentation in Toronto. Seven nominations for the Golden Globes endorse this return to the hometown and its turbulent landscape warlike At the end of the 60s that the most optimistic have wanted to relate to the cinema of Douglas and Davies but that I am afraid it will be more similar to that of Branagh himself, sprinkled, yes, with a handful of songs from Van Morrison that fix (almost) any mess.
Already out of the front line of awards, in January we will also see the new of Sean Penn (Flag’s day, day 5), the unnecessary resurrection of the saga Scream (day 14), the meeting of Penelope Cruz, Jessica Chastain, Diane Kruger and Lupita Nyong’o at the thriller feminine Agents 355 (day 21) or the two new and long-awaited films of the Gauls Francois Ozon (Everything went well, day 28) and Emmanuel Carrere (On a Normandy dock, day 28).
Colman and Thewlis in the garden of mythomania
If there is something that has always been attributed to the series, it is their lack of formal courage for the sake of transparency, progression and narrative tension. How to get into a garden (Landscapers in the original, in HBO Max) comes to deny it: a series that gave for format true crime and that its creators, Ed Sinclair y Will Sharpe, have become a risky experiment where the steady fall of the fourth wall and other stylistic vagaries of theatrical slant contradict the axiom of clarity, rhythm and suspense in high episode by episode.
Starring two extraordinary and brave Olivia Colman and David Thewlis on the edge of the pathetic caricature, the series reconstructs the real case of a couple accused of having murdered and buried her parents in the garden of their house to keep the inheritance, an accusation that they always denied and that led them to flee from England to settle in France, country of their mythomaniacal dreams and moviegoers. The series unfolds that double facet between reality and dreams and puts them at the center of a metaficción where they and the police officers who accuse them are the protagonists, in a high-risk exercise that sets aside the criminal intrigue to focus on the dreamy and overflowing forms of a love story that goes beyond the facts.
And Netflix
In the wake of the promotional algorithm that has made Don’t look up the most watched and talked about Christmas movie, Netflix It also has among its offer some hidden gems: for example, Chiaroscuro, Rebecca Hall’s elegant debut; Procession, the documentary on sexual abuse within the North American church; or The boy from Asakusa, biopic youth of the great actor and director Takeshi Kitano when he started his career as a comedian.
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