LES LÉGENDAIRES DE GUILLAUME IVERNEL en salle maintenant

BANDE ANNONCE

À l’heure où les industries culturelles recyclent leurs franchises avec une régularité industrielle, l’arrivée au cinéma des Légendaires aurait pu n’être qu’un mouvement stratégique de plus : capitaliser sur une bande dessinée à succès, flatter une base de fans fidèle, ouvrir la voie à un univers étendu. La série créée par Patrick Sobral, forte de plus de vingt albums et de millions d’exemplaires vendus, appartient depuis longtemps au panthéon de la fantasy jeunesse francophone. Mais sous la direction de Guillaume Ivernel, le passage au long métrage d’animation cherche autre chose qu’une simple transposition : il ambitionne de reformuler le mythe fondateur d’une génération élevée à la croisée du manga, du roman d’aventure et du jeu vidéo.

Le pari est audacieux. L’univers d’Alysia, monde aux accents médiévaux et rétrofuturistes, est saturé de mythologies, de lignées royales, de créatures hybrides et de querelles magiques. En choisissant de condenser l’intrigue autour de la malédiction de la Pierre de Jovénia — ce cataclysme qui enferme les héros dans des corps d’enfants de dix ans — le film s’attaque d’emblée à l’un des nœuds dramatiques les plus féconds de la bande dessinée. Danaël, Jadina, Gryf, Shimy et Razzia ne sont pas des enfants appelés à devenir adultes ; ils sont des adultes prisonniers d’une enfance imposée. Ce renversement, loin d’être un simple gimmick narratif, donne au récit une tonalité mélancolique inattendue.

Ivernel, dont le travail sur Chasseurs de dragons témoignait déjà d’un goût pour les mondes baroques et les silhouettes anguleuses, adopte ici une approche plus lisse, plus calibrée. L’animation en images de synthèse privilégie des surfaces brillantes, des mouvements de caméra fluides et des scènes d’action chorégraphiées avec une efficacité presque algorithmique. Les combats — contre le sorcier Darkhell, contre des créatures parasitaires, contre les doutes intimes — s’enchaînent avec une précision métronomique. On sent l’influence d’un certain cinéma d’animation international, où la lisibilité prime sur la rugosité du trait.

Et pourtant, sous cette finition parfois clinique, affleure une inquiétude plus adulte. Le film s’ouvre sur une défaite morale : Les Légendaires ont sauvé le monde, mais au prix d’une catastrophe irréversible. Leur gloire passée s’est muée en opprobre. Deux ans après la malédiction, chacun vit dans l’exil, hanté par la culpabilité. Danaël porte le poids d’un leadership fissuré ; Jadina, princesse déchue, compose avec les attentes d’un royaume humilié ; Gryf rumine une colère qu’il ne sait plus canaliser ; Shimy revendique une indépendance fragile ; Razzia, sous ses dehors bravaches, dissimule une lassitude presque existentielle.

L’un des mérites du film est de prendre au sérieux ces fractures. Là où tant d’adaptations jeunesse se contentent de typologies rassurantes — le chef noble, la magicienne brillante, le guerrier fougueux — Les Légendaires laissent affleurer les contradictions. Le retour de la menace, catalysé par l’énigmatique Elysio, n’est pas seulement un moteur narratif : il devient l’occasion d’un réapprentissage. Se retrouver, après la honte et la dispersion, suppose d’accepter que l’on n’est plus tout à fait les mêmes.

Cependant, la condensation inhérente au format de quatre-vingt-dix minutes agit comme une épée à double tranchant. L’univers, si riche sur papier, se voit ici réduit à quelques décors emblématiques : cités champignons, forêts elfiques, gorges glacées. Ils sont magnifiquement rendus, baignés de lumières changeantes, mais souvent traversés trop vite. Chaque nouveau lieu semble promettre une digression, une respiration, qu’une coupe rapide vient aussitôt interrompre. Le film avance comme s’il craignait de perdre l’attention d’un public réputé volatile.

Cette hâte narrative a un coût émotionnel. Certaines réconciliations surviennent avec une facilité suspecte ; certaines trahisons manquent d’ampleur tragique. On devine, derrière le montage serré, la tentation de ménager des suites. Les fils laissés pendants, les antagonistes à peine esquissés, les révélations différées composent une architecture sérielle assumée. Ce premier opus fonctionne à la fois comme récit autonome et comme bande-annonce d’un univers à déployer.

Il faut néanmoins saluer la manière dont le film aborde la question centrale de l’identité. Être coincé dans un corps d’enfant, c’est expérimenter une dissonance permanente entre puissance intérieure et apparence diminuée. L’animation exploite habilement ce décalage : gestes trop assurés pour des silhouettes juvéniles, regards chargés d’une maturité que les visages ronds peinent à contenir. Dans ces instants silencieux — un plan suspendu sur Danaël contemplant un royaume qu’il ne gouvernera plus, un échange retenu entre Jadina et Gryf — le film touche à une vérité universelle : grandir, c’est accepter la perte.

La partition musicale, ample sans être envahissante, accompagne cette oscillation entre épopée et intimité. Elle souligne les envolées héroïques, mais sait aussi se faire discrète lorsque les personnages doutent. Ce dosage contribue à éviter l’écueil d’un ton uniformément tonitruant, fréquent dans le cinéma d’aventure contemporain.

Reste la question esthétique. Les puristes regretteront sans doute l’abandon du trait original de Sobral, avec ses lignes dynamiques et ses expressions exagérées héritées du manga. La 3D, malgré sa virtuosité technique, uniformise les textures et atténue la singularité graphique de la bande dessinée. Les visages, notamment, semblent parfois figés dans une expressivité standardisée. Là où le papier permettait des distorsions comiques ou tragiques audacieuses, l’écran privilégie une modération prudente.

Mais il serait injuste de réduire le film à cette perte. L’animation offre en contrepartie une ampleur spectaculaire que la page ne pouvait qu’esquisser. Les affrontements gagnent en verticalité, les sorts en matérialité, les créatures en densité. L’espace devient un acteur à part entière, et certaines séquences — une course-poursuite au cœur d’une cité en ruine, un duel suspendu au-dessus d’un gouffre — témoignent d’un sens aigu de la mise en scène.

Au fond, Les Légendaires version cinéma se situent dans un entre-deux fascinant. Trop ambitieux pour n’être qu’un divertissement formaté, trop contraint pour embrasser toute la complexité de sa matrice, le film avance sur une ligne de crête. Il parle d’amitié, de responsabilité, de rédemption, avec une gravité qui surprendra peut-être les plus jeunes spectateurs. Il rappelle aussi que l’héroïsme n’est jamais pur : il est traversé d’erreurs, de doutes, de conséquences imprévues.

En cela, l’adaptation de Guillaume Ivernel s’inscrit dans une tradition plus large du cinéma d’animation contemporain, qui refuse de cantonner le médium à l’innocence. Les Légendaires ne sont pas des mascottes ; ce sont des figures tragiques miniaturisées. Leur quête n’est pas seulement de vaincre un sorcier ou de sauver un monde, mais de réconcilier ce qu’ils étaient avec ce qu’ils sont devenus.

Le film n’est pas exempt de maladresses : un rythme précipité, une esthétique parfois trop policée, un univers dont on devine la richesse plus qu’on ne la ressent pleinement. Mais il possède une qualité rare dans le paysage des adaptations : le respect sincère de son matériau et la volonté de lui offrir une lecture nouvelle. S’il ouvre la voie à des suites plus audacieuses, capables de ralentir, d’approfondir et d’oser davantage, alors cette première incursion aura joué son rôle.

Comme ses héros condamnés à l’enfance, Les Légendaires au cinéma semblent encore en transition — entre la promesse et l’accomplissement. Et c’est peut-être dans cette tension, imparfaite mais vibrante, que réside leur véritable pouvoir.

LENA GHIO   

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BLUR @ PHI until March 29, 2026

Photo © Lena Ghio, 2026

 FRANÇAIS app de traduction en haut

There are artists who traffic in illusion, and there are artists who dare to make illusion feel like an ethical event. With Blur, Phoebe Greenberg and Craig Quintero come as close to conjuring magic as contemporary technology will allow — not the prestidigitator’s sleight of hand, but the older, riskier magic of summoning the dead and asking them to speak.

Presented in its North American premiere at PHI from February 19 to March 29, 2026, and coproduced with PHI Studio, Riverbed Theatre, and Onassis Culture, Blur arrives with the patina of international acclaim: a sold-out world premiere at the National Theater & Concert Hall in Taipei and a European unveiling at the 82nd Venice International Film Festival’s immersive section. Yet prestige is the least interesting thing about it. What matters is the audacity of its premise and the precision of its execution.

Set in a near future where cloning and de-extinction have leapt from speculative fiction into corporate feasibility, Blur centers on a mother whose child has drowned. Her grief is not a metaphor; it is an abyss. And into that abyss steps science, offering resurrection not as miracle but as service. What would you do if you could defeat death? The question hovers over the production like a moral storm cloud, refusing to dissipate.

It would be easy to reduce the piece to its technological apparatus — volumetric motion capture, augmented reality overlays, extended-reality headsets that dissolve the boundary between the live and the virtual. But that would be akin to describing a cathedral solely in terms of its scaffolding. In Quintero’s hands — and he has, over the past decade, earned a reputation as a kind of sovereign of 360-degree dramaturgy — technology becomes atmosphere, not ornament. A technique that often feels gimmicky elsewhere acquires, here, a dream logic both unsettling and intimate. His images close in, encircle, breathe against your neck. You begin to doubt not only what you are seeing but where you are standing.

There are faint, mischievous winks at Matthew Barney’s operatic grotesqueries in The Cremaster Cycle, that feverish intermingling of biology and myth. And in certain passages — corridors that seem to pulse with subconscious dread, lighting that feels siphoned from nightmare — one detects the surreal cinematographic DNA of David Lynch, particularly the haunted Americana of Twin Peaks. But Blur is no pastiche. Its aesthetic references function less as homage than as atmospheric kinship: a recognition that we are wandering through a landscape where innocence and monstrosity share a bloodstream.

What distinguishes Blur from lesser immersive spectacles is its refusal to let technological dazzle eclipse emotional gravity. The actors’ performances — raw, unvarnished — are not subsumed by the virtual landscapes but rather bleed into them. Grief here is not digitized into abstraction; it is amplified, refracted across algorithmic terrains. A mother’s sob becomes a seismic event, reshaping the topography of an AI-controlled underground facility where humanity’s ambitions and follies intertwine. The result is not escapism but confrontation.

Technically, the production achieves a level of visual acuity that borders on the hallucinatory. The sharpness of the images — rendered through advanced volumetric capture and seamlessly integrated augmented reality — is not merely high-definition; it is high-intensity. Edges are crystalline, textures palpably tactile: the sheen of synthetic skin, the granular dampness of cavern walls, the spectral shimmer of resurrected creatures moving through digital mist. There is no lag, no perceptible seam between body and projection. Light behaves with painterly intelligence, sculpting faces in chiaroscuro one moment and dissolving them into pixelated ether the next. The engineering precision behind these environments is invisible in the best sense; it allows the spectator to surrender wholly, trusting that the world will not fracture under scrutiny. In an arena where immersive works often betray their mechanics, Blur maintains an almost surgical clarity, as if each frame had been honed to a blade’s edge.

At the center of this landscape is Dolly, a human-animal hybrid whose very name invokes the first cloned sheep and the Promethean bravado of late-20th-century genetics. Dolly is not a villain, nor a mascot. She is an embodiment of triumph and ambiguity — the soft-eyed proof that scientific genius and ethical vertigo often arrive hand in hand. When she appears, rendered through motion capture into a liminal creature both tender and uncanny, the audience feels the tremor of recognition: we have already crossed this threshold in our laboratories; the stage merely makes the crossing visible.

In this sense, Blur is less about cloning than about the unbearable seduction of repair. We live in an age intoxicated by optimization — of bodies, of ecosystems, of death itself. The production’s resurrected mammoths roaming a precarious environment are not merely spectacle; they are indictment. If extinction can be reversed, should it be? If a child can be reconstituted cell by cell, does the act restore love or counterfeit it? The piece does not sermonize. Instead, it stages the ethical dilemma as lived experience, forcing the spectator-participant to inhabit the tremulous space between desire and consequence.

Greenberg’s curatorial vision, honed through years of championing boundary-dissolving art, is palpable in the work’s architecture. There is indeed “a bit of everything” in Blur: theater, artificial intelligence, animation, philosophical inquiry, even a strain of gothic melodrama. Yet the hybridity never feels chaotic. Rather, it registers as hunger — a restless experimentation at the crossroads of languages. At a time when immersive art risks calcifying into formula, Blur feels perilously alive.

One of the most remarkable achievements of the piece is narrative clarity. For all its visual audacity — for all its “absurd” imagery — the thematic spine remains legible. We understand the stakes. We grasp the implications. The storytelling does not dissolve into abstraction; it sharpens. In an era when spectacle often masquerades as depth, Blur accomplishes the inverse: it uses spectacle to excavate depth.

The experience culminates not in resolution but in disquiet. Can science mend a broken heart? The question lingers, unanswered, as the virtual and the corporeal collapse back into their respective domains. Perhaps the more unsettling inquiry is whether we would accept the answer if it were yes. What becomes of mourning in a world without finality? What becomes of humanity if death is rendered optional?

To call Blur immersive is accurate but insufficient. It is immersive in the way grief is immersive — enveloping, disorienting, impossible to observe from a safe distance. It shatters conventional storytelling not for novelty’s sake but because the story it tells — about resurrection, about defiance of fate — demands a form as unstable as its subject.

TRAILER

In the end, Greenberg and Quintero have fashioned something rare: a work that treats technology not as a toy but as a moral instrument. Blur does not simply ask us to witness the ramifications of resurrecting the dead; it implicates us in the desire to try. And in that implication lies its quiet, terrible magic.

INFORMATION

LENA GHIO   

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PHOTOS © Yoo-Wei Chen

I Live Here Now: A Motel of Mirrors and Mothers • a film by Julie Pacino

TRAILER

In I Live Here Now, the feature debut of writer-director Julie Pacino, the first question arrives early and lingers like smoke from the wildfires that encroach upon its heroine’s flight: “Why do you make everything so weird?” It is asked of Rose, a struggling actress played with tremulous restraint by Lucy Fry, by her dim, cosseted boyfriend Travis (Matt Rife). But it might just as easily be directed at Pacino herself, whose debut is a fever dream of saturated color, recursive trauma, and gothic interiors that seem to breathe alongside their inhabitants.

That weirdness is both the film’s calling card and its stumbling block. Born from Pacino’s NFT photography series of the same name, I Live Here Now announces itself as a work of image-making first and narrative construction second. It is a puzzle box less concerned with the elegance of its solution than with the baroque flourish of its compartments. Yet within its lacquered surfaces lies a thorny, sometimes piercing meditation on bodily autonomy, inherited shame, and the monstrous expectations placed upon women’s bodies.

The premise is deceptively simple. Rose, on the brink of what might be her last chance at professional redemption, receives a callback from a formidable casting agent, Cindy (Cara Seymour). The stipulations are punishingly familiar: lose three pounds in two days; submit a self-tape; become smaller, more pliant, more bookable. Then comes the rupture. A positive pregnancy test—impossible, she thought, after years of believing herself sterile—threatens to derail the fragile architecture of her ambition.

Telling Travis goes badly. Telling his mother, Marge (a glacial, blade-sharp Sheryl Lee), is worse. Marge, swathed in crimson and contempt, is less interested in Rose than in the fetus she considers family property. Faced with this encroaching matriarchal tyranny, Rose flees. Wildfires blaze across California. She checks into a remote motel in Idyllwild called the Crown Inn. Or perhaps the Crown Inn checks into her.

From here, Pacino tips the film fully into phantasmagoria. The Crown Inn is a love hotel without an exterior, a pastel labyrinth of suites named “The Lovin’ Oven” and “Seventh Heaven,” each a chamber of regression and rebirth. Upon arrival, Rose is offered a complimentary glass of “pink milk tonic,” a prop so aggressively symbolic it might wink at the audience. The gesture recalls the “Drink Me” enticement of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and indeed the film’s most overt literary debt is to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland—though its tonal register is darker, closer to the institutional horror of The Yellow Wallpaper.

The hotel’s denizens are less characters than embodiments. Ada (Lara Clear), the perpetually inebriated proprietor, exudes a dissipated sensuality. Sid (Sarah Rich), the cherubic receptionist, radiates infantilized cheer. And then there is Lillian, played by Madeline Brewer with predatory relish—a knowing, sadistic presence who seems to intuit Rose’s secrets before Rose herself can articulate them. Together, they form a triptych of possible futures and fractured selves, facets of womanhood warped by compliance, repression, and survival.

Pacino’s visual language is unapologetically referential. The saturated reds and blues nod toward Dario Argento’s giallo extravagance; the dream logic and doubling evoke David Lynch. At moments, one might detect the humid menace of Lynch’s Twin Peaks or the operatic dread of Suspiria. Yet Pacino’s sensibility is less derivative than devotional. She is not merely quoting her influences but situating herself within a lineage of filmmakers who treat space as psyche and décor as destiny.

Cinematographer Aron Meinhardt leans into this ethos, bathing corridors in hot pinks and jaundiced yellows, desaturating the “real world” so that the motel’s interiors throb with hallucinatory life. The production design by Hannah Rawson and Lucie Brooks Butler is a triumph of curated excess: womb-like chambers, mirrored hallways, brocades that seem to pulse. Editor Matyas Fekete, whose collaborations with Peter Strickland have honed a taste for sensory immersion, stitches together past and present with disorienting fluidity. Scenes do not so much cut as bleed into one another.

Sound, too, becomes an instrument of unease. The score by Jackson Greenberg and Pam Autuori (recording as TOMI) pulses with percussive anxiety and breathy, almost panting vocals. It underscores the film’s central conceit: that Rose’s crisis is both psychological and corporeal. Her body is a contested site—by her agent, by her boyfriend, by his mother, by the spectral memory of a childhood trauma hinted to be gynecological and unspeakable.

It is here that I Live Here Now locates its most compelling terrain. The horror is not primarily in jump scares or gore—though Pacino deploys a few jolts with bracing effectiveness—but in the slow realization that Rose has internalized the very forces that seek to diminish her. “You’re nobody’s prisoner but your own,” one character intones, a line that might feel trite were it not embedded within such an oppressive mise-en-scène.

And yet, for all its aesthetic assurance, the film sometimes withholds too much of the mundane world it seeks to destabilize. Because Pacino plunges us so swiftly into nightmare, we are given scant foothold in normality. Rose begins the film already unmoored; her baseline is abstraction. As a result, her descent—or ascent—lacks some of the emotional velocity it might otherwise carry. The stakes are clear in theory: autonomy versus erasure, individuation versus inheritance. But in practice, the narrative scaffolding can feel thin beneath the ornamental weight.

Fry’s performance is crucial in counterbalancing this tendency. Where others pitch toward operatic intensity—Lee’s Marge a study in icy hauteur, Brewer’s Lillian a feline embodiment of cruelty—Fry remains grounded, almost stubbornly so. Her Rose is not hysterical but hollowed out, moving through the motel’s rococo chambers with the wary stillness of prey. It is a canny choice. By refusing to match the film’s baroque temperature, she becomes its emotional anchor.

There are flashes of mordant humor. The suite named “The Lovin’ Oven” contains a crib. Wi-Fi is available only in the restaurant, though smoking is permitted everywhere. Pacino delights in these absurdities, and the film’s chaptered structure—announced like sections in a novel—further underscores its literary aspirations. At times, however, these gestures risk tipping into self-consciousness. One senses the director straining toward significance, eager to vault into the canon of feminist psychological horror.

Still, ambition is not a sin. If anything, it is the animating force of I Live Here Now. In an era when so many genre films arrive pre-packaged and algorithmically sanded, Pacino’s debut feels defiantly personal. Its preoccupations—with trauma, with reproductive choice, with the performance of femininity—are not merely topical but intimate. The film does not always cohere; its pacing can sag, its symbolism clatter. But it is alive with intention.

In the end, Rose’s confrontation is not with a single villain but with a lineage of silences. The Crown Inn becomes a crucible in which past and present combust, where maternal figures loom as both jailers and warnings. Outside, the wildfires threaten annihilation. Inside, another conflagration burns: the possibility of self-definition.

“I live here now,” the title insists—a declaration that is at once resignation and reclamation. For Rose, to live “here” may mean inhabiting her body without apology, claiming authorship over her own narrative. For Pacino, it signals an arrival. Imperfect, overwrought, but undeniably striking, I Live Here Now marks the emergence of a filmmaker willing to risk excess in pursuit of something visceral and true. In a cinematic landscape often allergic to sincerity, that risk alone feels worth taking.

LENA GHIO   

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The Ordinary Magic of Earth • the Earth's subtle voice ©

 INTRODUCTION 

Welcome.

Not to a program, nor to an argument armored in certainty, but to a threshold.

There are forces that move through us as wind moves through tall grass—unseen, undeniable, shaping the visible by their passing. We speak of gravity as though it were a number, of planets as distant stones circling a forgotten fire. Yet both ancient sky-watchers and modern physicists suggest something stranger: space is not emptiness but relation. The world is not inert matter. It is a living current of tension, rhythm, and exchange.

This journey begins there.

We turn away from the marketplace of distraction, where symbols are flattened into entertainment and intuition is diluted into mood. Instead, we approach astrology as architecture and orbital mechanics as scripture written in mass and motion. We inhabit a clockwork universe, yes—but it is a clock whose gears are carved from starlight, whose ticking is the pulse of becoming.

Gravity is not merely a force; it is a covenant between bodies across unimaginable distances. The invisible architects of life do not shout. They incline. And to listen, we begin with a witness.

The first magical story I will share with you is about lemon seeds.

Continued here : https://lenaghio.substack.com/p/the-ordinary-magic-of-earth

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-Lena Ghio

© 2026

BLADES OF THE GUARDIANS by Yuen Woo-Ping

TRAILER

 

There is a particular thrill that comes when a film announces itself not with a whisper of prestige but with the clang of steel. Blades of the Guardians—adapted from a popular manhua and directed by the legendary choreographer-turned-filmmaker Yuen Woo-ping—arrives swinging. It is enormous in scale, unabashedly pulpy in tone, and stacked with martial-arts royalty. Had it been produced on a tighter purse, it might have earned affection as a scrappy, retro-leaning genre piece. Instead, it emerges as something less common: a full-scale wuxia spectacle that still pulses with the spirit that made the form endure.

Yuen, still best known in the West for orchestrating the wire-fu miracles of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and The Matrix, has had an uneven late period as a director. Projects like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: Sword of Destinyand The Thousand Faces of Dunjia felt more dutiful than inspired, ornate but curiously inert. Yet with Blades of the Guardians, Yuen rediscovers a simplicity that suits him. The film’s pleasures are direct: a fugitive warrior, a perilous escort mission, a desert crossing riddled with ambushes, and a gallery of rivals who express themselves most eloquently through swordplay.

Set in the waning years of the Sui dynasty, the story wastes little time before hurtling into motion. Dao Ma (Wu Jing), a former imperial soldier turned bounty hunter, makes his living navigating the moral gray zones of a collapsing order. He travels with a young orphan, Xiao Qi, whose presence softens Dao’s mercenary instincts without sanding down his edge. When a local governor—played in a fleeting but resonant turn by Jet Li—attempts to coerce Dao back into service, the refusal sets off a chain reaction. Soon Dao is on the run, tasked with escorting rebel leader Zhi Shi Lang (Sun Yizhou) across the Taklamakan Desert to Chang’an, joined by tribal chief Mo (Tony Leung Ka-fai), Mo’s headstrong daughter Ayuya (Chen Lijun), and a swarm of pursuers with old grudges and new contracts.

It is a busy narrative, but not a confusing one. The film understands that in wuxia, clarity of trajectory matters more than intricacy of plotting. The desert becomes both stage and crucible. Yuen and his team stage ambushes amid sandstorms, horseback chases through oil-slicked fields, and stagecoach melees that ricochet between slapstick and balletic grace. Even transitional skirmishes—encounters that in lesser hands would register as filler—feel consequential. Yuen’s gift, honed over decades, is character-driven action: every blow reveals temperament, every defensive parry discloses doubt or pride.

The film’s early highlight is an encounter that doubles as a meta-textual event. Jet Li’s brief appearance—his first significant action showcase in years—carries the weight of history. When Li and Wu Jing cross blades, it is not merely two characters testing one another but two eras of martial-arts cinema colliding. Their duel, which escalates into a three-way confrontation involving Max Zhang, is shameless fan service, yet it is mounted with such precision and relish that cynicism dissolves. Li, playing against type with cool authority, moves with an economy that belies his years; Wu meets him with a grounded ferocity. The wirework, often maligned by purists, is here unapologetically operatic. In Yuen’s hands, gravity is not defied so much as poetically negotiated.

Wu Jing anchors the film with a megawatt charisma that has only deepened since his earlier star-making collaborations with Yuen. Now in his fifties, he carries himself like a man who has survived too many campaigns to romanticize war, yet not enough to surrender to nihilism. Dao Ma’s smile—quick, teasing, almost boyish—flickers like a challenge to fate. Wu’s physicality is less about acrobatic flash than about controlled impact. When he unsheathes his blade, the gesture feels ceremonial.

Opposite him, Nicholas Tse delivers a steely performance as Di Ting, a former comrade with unfinished business. Tse has rarely been afforded such space to brood; here, his restraint becomes a weapon. The climactic duel between Dao and Di Ting unfolds near water, an elemental counterpoint to the desert that has dominated the film. If the emotional scaffolding of their rivalry is sketched more briskly than one might wish, the physical storytelling compensates. The fight is less about vengeance than about recognition—two men acknowledging the cost of loyalty in a world where allegiances are for sale.

Indeed, the film’s moral atmosphere is one of cynical fatalism shot through with romantic uplift. Good men sell their swords; rogues reveal inconvenient honor. Ayuya’s defiance of her suitor Heyi Xuan (Cisha) evolves from flirtatious sparring into a commentary on autonomy within patriarchal structures. Even stock figures—a retired assassin running an inn, a rival bounty hunter with a code—are granted moments of interiority. Yuen lingers on faces before unleashing bodies into motion, reminding us that spectacle is hollow without sympathy.

There are, inevitably, seams. A production of this scale shows signs of second-unit patchwork; some connective scenes feel perfunctory. The political stakes, gestured at in voiceover prologues and imperial intrigue, never quite attain the mythic resonance the film seems to promise. And yet these shortcomings fade amid the momentum. Blades of the Guardians is a chase film at heart—a rip-roaring procession of pursuits, reversals, and last-minute rescues. It understands that propulsion can be a form of poetry.

manhua 

What ultimately distinguishes the film from more cynical franchise-building exercises is Yuen’s evident affection for the material. Adapted from a comic property primed for sequels (the subtitle all but guarantees them), it could easily have devolved into brand management. Instead, it feels handcrafted. Yuen treats each character, no matter how fleeting their screen time, as worthy of attention. Cameos by veterans of Hong Kong action cinema function not as nostalgic gimmicks but as a lineage made visible. The genre’s past stands shoulder to shoulder with its present.

By the time the watery finale subsides, the viewer may not recall every subplot or secondary allegiance. What lingers is a sensation: of velocity, of steel singing through air, of desert horizons promising both doom and deliverance. Blades of the Guardians may not reinvent wuxia, but it reaffirms its vitality. In an era when blockbuster action often mistakes noise for grandeur, Yuen Woo-ping offers something sturdier—an epic that moves with the confidence of experience and the exuberance of a master who still believes in the romance of the blade.

Now in a THEATRE NEAR YOU!

LENA GHIO   

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NEW YORK NEWS: cinema français : Two Pianos by Arnaud Desplechin

TRAILER

 

TWO PIANOS by Arnaud Desplechin

Arnaud Desplechin has never been one for half measures, and Two  Pianos —his latest act of cinematic exuberance—plays out like a fugue written in a feverish frenzy. The film begins with a crash, quite literally: a man faints at the sight of his former lover, hitting his head against an elevator door as she flees, like a fugitive pursued by her own emotions. From there, Desplechin doesn't so much build as ricochet, orchestrating a melodrama so intensely devoted to its excesses that one can only admire its sheer endurance. It's a film that staggers, waltzes, collapses, and rises again in the same movement—an erratic concerto in two keys: the sublime and the absurd.  

François Civil , in the role of the prodigious pianist Mathias , carries the film with a controlled volatility that reflects his character's fractured relationship to art and affection. Returning from a self-imposed exile in Tokyo to Lyon—a city depicted here as both his birthplace and a psychological trap— Mathias confronts a gallery of ghosts: his imperious mentor, Elena , embodied by Charlotte Rampling with the stature of a marble statue and the glimmer of buried tenderness; his mother, who constantly begs him to flee mediocrity; and Claude , a love too fragile to survive, yet too intense to be forgotten. The film's title refers, of course, to the instrument they share, but also to the impossible duality of past and present, master and student, man and woman, reason and desire.

Rampling's Elena is the film's focal point: each of her words is a command, each of her silences an accusation. Desplechin films her with almost religious reverence—low-angle shots that elevate her to the status of a deity, light that polishes her features like a tribute. Yet, when she gives in, when her voice trembles or her smile betrays fatigue, the camera finally dares to meet her at eye level. In these rare moments of tenderness, Two  Pianos seems almost to abandon its theatrical pretense. We glimpse the film it could have been: an austere meditation on transmission, mortality, and the perilous intimacy of artistic creation. But Desplechin , the eternal dramatist, cannot resist revving the tempo to a feverish intensity.  

The screenplay, co-written with Kamen Velkovsky , constantly flirts with implausibility. Deaths arrive at conveniently timed moments, coincidences pile up like dominoes, and Lyon seems inhabited by a dozen characters trapped in their mutual torments. Yet, Desplechin 's cinema has always thrived on the porous border between sincerity and parody; here, the chaos seems both self-aware and profoundly sincere. One minute, you think you're watching Scenes from a Marriage ; the next, a French soap opera . Mathias , played by Civil , may be over the top, and Claude is sketched as a figure of erotic instability, but both perform with such conviction that you suspend your disbelief—or at least defer your judgment until the next emotional outburst.    

Paul Guilhaume 's photography , lush with ochre tones and impulsive camera movements, infuses the film with its pulse, while Grégoire Hetzel 's music —oscillating between Chopin and tempestuous original themes—acts as both ballast and provocation. Together, they maintain the illusion that this excessive narrative is in fact a piece of chamber music, whose dissonances are deliberate and crescendos deserved.

With its strange, muted conclusion, Two  Pianos has run its course, and we with it, but it leaves behind a lingering fascination. Desplechin , his eternal rival, has composed a new symphony of human folly: excessive, erratic, but undeniably alive. Like Mathias , he can't help but play too many notes—and all the better for it.  

Starring François Civil, Nadia Tereszkiewicz, and Charlotte Rampling  • New York Premiere March 6 at Rendez-Vous With French Cinema at Film at Lincoln Center • Opening In Theaters May 1

LENA GHIO   

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