‘The Good Lawyer’
Moving at breakneck speed from start to finish, this French crime thriller kept me on the edge of my seat for its entire run time. The film plunges us headlong into chaos with the opening: We meet the lawyer Léonard Landry (a riveting Laurent Lafitte) as he’s running between two hearings at court, trying to simultaneously defend two different drug lords, while also making stops at the bathroom to snort cocaine. That goes disastrously, as one might expect. Léonard is sent to rehab, and upon release, he has one week to prepare for a trial that will decide his career fate.
That’s just the beginning of “The Good Lawyer.” Léonard seems cursed with bad luck and lands in deeper trouble with every move, until he’s embroiled in a criminal conspiracy involving a multinational oil company and African rebels. The film’s snappy editing and kinetic camerawork recall the work of the Safdie brothers, and Léonard is not unlike Adam Sandler’s Howard Ratner in “Uncut Gems,” a man whose desperation you can smell from a mile away. But in the process, Léonard’s long-dulled skills as an attorney, not to mention his integrity, start to re-emerge. The director Tristan Séguéla ramps up the ethical stakes as the film proceeds, delivering a profound critique of the legal system with an unforgettable adrenaline rush.
Agatha Bock, the nonagenarian woman at the heart of this mesmerizing film portrait, is indomitable. She lives alone on her family’s 54-acre farm in Manitoba, Canada, with few modern amenities: no vehicle, no cellphone, no modern plumbing. Her time is largely spent tending to her vast garden, where she grows verdant fruits and vegetables. “Agatha’s Almanac” is directed by Bock’s niece, Amalie Atkins, who documented her aunt’s life on the farm over six years. The film’s mode matches the Luddite life of its subject; it was shot by the cinematographer Rhayne Vermette on 16 mm celluloid using an old, hand-cranked camera.
The result is stunning. The weeds Agatha pulls from the soil are a deep and luminous green, the strawberries are bright red, her skirt startlingly blue. A field of sunlit flowers becomes an Expressionist mosaic as the camera zigzags over it. For the most part, Atkins zeros in on her aunt’s hands as she lovingly performs her daily labors, and the voice-over relays her memories of growing up and reflections on solitude. By making the everyday aspects of our natural world look miraculous, the film underscores the insight of Agatha’s that it ends on: It is a privilege just to be alive.
The beautiful and terrifying thing about desire is its mystery — it emerges from parts of ourselves that we may not even know exist. In this Spanish drama from Elena Martín, a woman is forced to dig deep and confront those parts as a crisis of sexuality threatens her relationship with her partner. Mila (played by Martín) and Marcel (Oriol Pla) have just moved to the seaside house where Mila spent her summers growing up. The sea breeze promises renewal, but there is one rut they can’t seem to get out of: Mila shuts down when they try to make love, with stress-induced rashes appearing all over her body.
But the house also inspires memories that provide, if only hazily so, the clues to her trauma. As “Creatura” progresses, we go back and forth between Mila’s childhood and present, and witness her complicated relationship to sex from a young age: the early yearning for transgression and consequent shame, her attachment to her father that she is told is wrong, her confusion when she witnesses intimacy between adults. Martín allows her heroine an exploration of her sexual awareness that is not bound by any clichés or clarifying narratives; instead, she lays bare how complex and opaque the first stirrings of desire can be, and how, in denying ourselves that complexity, we alienate ourselves from our bodies.
This sweet Dutch drama has a charmingly far-fetched premise: A single mother’s lonely life transforms when a man lands on her farm in a hot-air balloon. Since an accident (involving a rogue chicken named Bouillon) that killed her father and rendered her mother mute with grief, Gaby (Sallie Harmsen) has been the breadwinner and caretaker of her household, which now also includes her young son, Kuif (Beau Minnaert). As much as Gaby tries to keep Kuif happy, writing him fake letters from his absent father and making beautiful miniature sculptures, her life is a drag she gets through with gritted teeth.
Until the handsome Arnaud (Pieter Embrechts) literally swoops into her life, having bought a nearby plot of land from which to run his business offering hot-air balloon tours. The events that ensue are predictable — initial enmity turns, gradually, into affection and then love — but Tim Oliehoek’s film still feels full of surprises. There’s an endearing absurdity to its cast of characters: the Turkish owner of the hotel Gaby works at who is preparing for a role in a re-enactment of a historic battle, the deaf local sheriff who is driving his pregnant wife crazy with his anxieties, the old and taciturn neighbor with a gay love story for the ages. Filled with colorful details and driven by sincere, big-hearted performances, “The Balloonist” is a balm for the soul, the kind of movie that affirms one’s faith in the enigmatic logic of the universe.
In this Argentine film from Hernán Golfrid, a revered psychologist decides that to effectively treat his clients, he must intervene in their actual lives and not just their minds. Dissatisfied with the passivity of talk therapy, Ulises Verón (Ricardo Darín) begins to operate like a spy. He secretly convinces the husband of a distraught client to admit to his cheating and leave his wife; he takes another client, blindfolded, to her mother’s house and stages a much-overdue confrontation. But this Machiavellian method faces its hardest test yet when Verón gets a famous client, the author Martin Bouchard (Diego Peretti).
“Therapy Done Right” is deliciously scripted, laced with mordant humor and sly social commentary. At its best (and funniest), it is an exposé of the fragility of the male ego. In the guise of therapy, Verón and Bouchard engage in what is essentially a duel, with Verón eager to best his client and Bouchard eager to prove himself a genius. The actors, both veterans of Argentine cinema, provide just the right dose of camp as the high jinks get crazier, with the film expertly swerving from drama to thriller to a (very) dark comedy.
