THE CAST – Arieh Worthalter, Mélanie Thierry, Karim Leklou, Mara Taquin, Bouli Lanners, Julien Frison & François Damiens

THE TEAM – Michaël R. Roskam (Director/Writer) & Bernard Falaise (Writer)

THE RUNNING TIME – 133 Minutes

You can’t open a WWII movie without an air raid siren, and “Le Faux Soir” welcomes its audience with that sound. It’s 1943, Belgium is occupied, and Le Soir, the Belgian daily newspaper, has lost its voice, defiled with Nazi propaganda. What’s on the newsstands isn’t Le Soir anymore. One character says as much, marveling that anyone believes the headlines; another shrugs him off. It doesn’t matter if it’s true. It just has to sell.

That cynicism is exactly what Marc (Arieh Worthalter) can’t stomach, and he’s the reason this film works so well. He’s genuinely, cuttingly funny, which is rarer than it should be in a genre this consistently grim. Early on, he prints a flyer so gleefully profane –  calling Nazis “dung dung ducks” – that it reads like schoolyard mockery. But his words hold power, and he slips it into library books, betting something this small might seed something bigger. His girlfriend Geraldine (Mara Taquin) wants him bored and alive. He calls that cowardice. Better a coward than “a dead hero,” she tells him. It’s an exchange where you feel exactly what headspace he’s coming from: a man who has decided doing nothing is its own kind of death.

Soon, Marc is invited into the Resistance through drawing lessons that turn out to be a front. He gets a codename, and you see his role take shape in the Independence Front; it all moves briskly, and the dialogue stays sharp even as the stakes rise. There are many humorous conversations – like the bit about why Hitler’s mustache looks the way it does – that shouldn’t work tonally in a film about occupation, but they do. And it never lets humor become a cushion for the real danger outside. A scene where two Nazis pull a Jewish girl from Geraldine’s classroom, the head nun telling her to be “vigilant” because Jews hide in plain sight, sits a few scenes from a joke. That tonal whiplash oddly works and makes you even more invested in the narrative.

The film’s title refers to the Resistance’s main plan: to print their own edition of Le Soir, using the real paper’s name, format, and delivery routes so Belgians would buy the fake, believing it was the collaborationist original, only to find the truth of the war instead. It’s a heist movie wearing a war uniform. There’s a scene with a map tracing the papers’ route from press to newsstand, discussed with the same clipped precision of a crew planning to rob an armored truck. The operation plays like a robbery, right down to timing the drop so the fake edition beats the real one to the stands without arriving too early. One wrong move, everyone’s dead. The film lets you feel those stakes.

It also knows how to use its score, which has an offbeat, almost musical quality. There’s a genius bit where Françoise (Mélanie Thierry), the boss of the operation, reads articles aloud and the beat of the score picks up her cadence exactly. Another scene has a character’s rant against the Nazis built into something with the rhythm of a showstopper, like a musical without singing. It’s a strange, specific choice for a WWII film, and one of the things that keeps “Le Faux Soir” from settling into the dourness this genre usually can’t, understandably, escape. There’s real joie de vivre running under the danger here, and it’s rare enough in this kind of story that it’s worth naming as an achievement on its own.

Where the film runs into trouble is scale. Many players are involved, and the film can’t give most of them an interior life. Many characters exist almost entirely as their function in the plan, not as people with lives before or after. The closest the film comes to acknowledging this is a closing note explaining who lived, who died, and what it cost. That’s a real gap, and it compounds a structural problem. Because this is a true story, the film is committed to showing every setback the operation hit. That means it circles back through the same beats many times as a new obstacle, a scramble to solve it, and a return to planning happen often enough that momentum drains out of the middle stretch. At over two hours, it earns some of that length by showing the labor of pulling this off, but it also drags in a way a tighter cut might have solved without losing what makes the story worth telling. What makes “Le Faux Soir” work is its insistence that the Nazis could take everything from these people except their sense of humor, and that humor itself, along with the power of the truth, becomes the resistance.

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THE CAST – Arieh Worthalter, Jan Hammenecker, Thibaud Dooms & Anthony Welsh

THE TEAM – Anke Blondé (Director) & Angelo Tijssens (Writer)

THE RUNNING TIME – 115 Minutes

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THE CAST – Noah Parker, Arieh Worthalter, Aurélia Arandi-Longpré, Paul Ahmarani, Antoine Marchand-Gagnon, Sophie Desmarais, Guillaume Laurin, Carlo Harrietha, Irène Jacob & Laurent Lucas

THE TEAM – Philippe Lesage (Director/Writer)

THE RUNNING TIME – 155 Minutes

It’s a classic set-up for a horror movie. A cabin deep in the woods. No way to get in or out except by seaplane. Eight people are cooped up together, one of whom has an axe to grind—scary stuff. However, writer/director Philippe Lesage has other ideas, and in his latest dramatic comedy, “Who By Fire,” he explores something even more volatile: the fragility of the male ego.

For twenty years, film director Blake Cadieux (Arieh Worthalter) and his screenwriting partner Arthur Gary (Paul Ahmarani) had a successful partnership, collaborating on a series of films that garnered them both awards and critical acclaim. But their partnership ended suddenly when Blake, unbeknownst to Arthur, segued into documentary filmmaking and no longer needed his services. Ostensibly, to make amends, Blake has invited Arthur and his family to his cabin in the deepest forests of Quebec. Arthur has brought along his two children — his college-age daughter Aliocha (Aurelia Arandi-Longpré) and his teenage son Max (Antoine Marchand Gagnon), along with Max’s best friend Jeff (Noah Parker). Jeff, an aspiring filmmaker, is thrilled at the prospect of meeting the great Blake Cadieux, but upon meeting Aliocha, his goals for the holiday suddenly become more complicated. Add to the mix Blake’s editor (Sophie Desmarais) and friends Eddy (Laurent Lucas) and his partner, veteran actor Hélène (Irène Jacob), and you’ve got a combustible octet about to come down with a severe case of cabin fever.

What Lesage has fashioned out of these ingredients is a complex human comedy that explores the generational conflict between its young guests, whose lofty goals still lie ahead of them, and their disillusioned elders, whose dreams have faded, though they’d be the last to admit that.

Initially, civility reigns at the cabin (at least for the first few hours) as Blake’s guests scope out the lay of the land. However, resentment begins to emerge once the guests are seated at the dinner table and the wine bottles are uncorked. Tensions are high as the now-lubricated Arthur lays out his hurt feelings at being left behind by Blake, both personally and professionally. Blake counters by calling his friend a sellout, believing that Arthur demeaned his talent by taking a job as a showrunner on an animated children’s show called “Rock Lobster.” The argument does result in one silver lining, though. It triggers a spontaneous conga line to the B-52s song that turns into one of the most delightful dance sequences of 2024.

As for the young adults, they’re content to let the old folks fight it out — Aliocha, Max, and Jeff have their own problems. Jeff announces his romantic intentions to Aliocha, and while she’s not interested romantically, as a friend, she wants to help him work through his sexual anxieties. Meanwhile, Max is creeped out that his best friend is making a move on this sister. And Aliocha soon becomes far more interested in Blake, who is anxious to photograph her in alluring positions.

A secret rendezvous, mistaken identity, unspoken desires — this is the stuff of classic French farce, but Lesage unexpectedly plays them for suspense. At each of the film’s three dinner scenes, for example, the audience tenses as the guests are seated, ready for any threat or accusation to be thrown across the table, always with an unspoken threat of violence bubbling just below the surface. Even those characters with little stake in the confrontations (such as Hélène, Eddy, and Émilie) are not immune, and when a weapon appears in Act 3, we as an audience fear the worst. Yet it is a testament to Lesage’s writing skills that he never loses the film’s comedic side. He often ends scenes with the kind of laugh that makes you want to see what happens next in that narrative arc, then switches to another storyline entirely and makes you want to follow that as well.

Still, it can too often be too much of a good thing. For all the scenes that click, others simply overstay their welcome. When a scene achieves the point it’s trying to make, and it’s time to move on, often the film doesn’t, lingering on and on to the moment where it’s simply underlining the scene’s purpose. Include enough of these overlong scenes, and it’s easy to see how the run time of “Who By Fire” could balloon up to 161 long minutes, which ultimately works to the film’s detriment.

Yet so much of “Who By Fire” works precisely because Lesage imbues his characters with the kind of enormous vitality that keeps us invested in their fate. Like the Leonard Cohen song from which the film takes its title, the film suggests that we never know who will still be with us next year, so we should make the most of the time we have left together. It’s a simple message, but it’s one that “Who By Fire” largely pulls off with imagination and skill.

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