What are the must-watches on Crave? Get inspired by the ideas of our journalists.
Anaïs Barbeau-Lavalette offers a film whose evocative power also includes beautiful poetic impulses. Characterized by another impeccable composition by Denis Ménochet, this drama with social and political overtones also benefits from the performance of K. C. Collins, excellent in the role of this African-American trainer who tries to rehabilitate the aggressor dog. White Dog is one of those works that make an impression. In this regard, Anaïs Barbeau-Lavalette has perfectly achieved the goal she had set herself. Her film is sure to spark some interesting discussions.
Ambitious at will, Nope remains on the cinematographic level the most impressive feature film by Jordan Peele. Whether it takes place at blue hour or in the dark, the photography of Hoyte van Hoytema – known for his work with Christopher Nolan – is impressive, as is the immense care given to the sound. By playing in the flowerbeds of Steven Spielberg and M. Night Shyamalan, Jordan Peele has just offered with Nope one of the most singular and entertaining experiences of the summer. To see more than once to grasp all the subtleties.
Like so many of his colleagues – is this the effect of the pandemic? –, Christophe Honoré turned to his own teenage memories to write his most personal film. Better: he even assigned himself the role, brief, but oh so significant, of the father, to whom Lucas, the protagonist, is very close. With great delicacy, but also in a more frontal way, Christophe Honoré echoes the torments of late adolescence, in all its aspects. The high school student is a film that is both fragile and violent, one of the most accurate about this particular period of life, marked in this case by great inner confusion.
There’s the tone — both funny and tragic — that the Three Billboards Outside director Ebbing, Missouri maintains throughout his story. Then there is the main theme, very rarely addressed: the end of a friendship between two men, frankly expressed, and the consequences it entails. Visually stunning, The Banshees of Inisherin, whose title refers to a female creature from Irish folklore, also stands out, of course, thanks to Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson. The two actors obviously share a very real complicity. It feels.
No, December 23 does not revolutionize the genre. Doesn’t revolutionize anything, in fact. But that’s not the goal either. It is rather an unpretentious film, which wants to be faithful to a tradition, funny, comforting and unifying.
The second season of Yellowjackets promises to be even more sinister, creepy and disturbing than the first, although perhaps less surprising. But despite a softer and more diluted plot, it’s stronger than us, we obviously want to know the meaning of the mystical symbols engraved in the trees and, above all, to see how the girls managed to survive for 19 months in the middle of the forest, without conveniences, without anything at all.
The period series Désobéir: Chantale Daigle’s choice, which takes place between November 1988 and December 1989, becomes, alas, a series very much of its time, a time when struggles won for nearly 35 years are reversed. It’s very good, what the team behind this production has meticulously concocted, with remarkable attention to detail.
For nearly an hour, Noovo’s former station chief Noémi Mercier takes us back to this sensitive period of 1989, using archive images and enlightening interviews, with activists in particular, who recount detail the secret operation they carried out to enable Chantale to cross the border and obtain her abortion in Boston, United States.
There are shows I have to watch for my job that make me want to open my brain with a nail bar. There are also great shows that make me want to seize the day and let life take its course. This is the case of Succession. It’s probably the most brilliant, cynical, funniest and cringest thing being made on American TV right now.
Éric Tessier has brought together an excellent cast, dominated by a great performance – yet another – by Rémy Girard. The actor manages to evoke the inner tumult of a being well aware of his inevitable decline, who clings to a past that is sometimes still too real, whose gaze can nevertheless be emptied of all recent memory in an instant. Borrowing a classic approach, putting himself entirely at the service of the story and the characters, Éric Tessier has also been able to avoid all pathos and does not underline anything in broad strokes. His film only becomes more moving.
