At a moment of weakness, one might be tempted to agree with viewers who believe that The history of sound is fussy, soporific, and cutesy. It would be to deny the evidence that the film has a languid narrative, that the love story it tells is presented in a dull manner, and that the overall production of the film sometimes seems as if it were designed to be accompanied by the hashtag #OnePerfectShot. But if we think twice, in the end, there's no need to agree with them. Because if the sixth film by South African director Oliver Hermanus is this way, it's because, clearly, it wants to be. It's a stylistic choice, a fully conscious vote for creative rigor.

The saga Daggers in the back It has not only revitalized a genre that Hollywood considered dead and buried, like the whodonitbut has transformed it into an incisive tool for social satire. After portraying the racism of the upper classes in the first part and the egomania of the techno-oligarchs in the secondIn this new installment, director Rian Johnson points to God. Specifically, to the parish where a young, former boxer priest (Josh O'Connor) arrives, hoping his kind nature will counterbalance the rabid hatred of the local priest (Josh Brolin), who attacks the "perfidious modernity" of single mothers and "whores" in his sermons. But it is when the priest is inexplicably murdered and suspicion falls on his younger colleague that the appearance of Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) provides the film's most compelling conflict: between the priest's waning faith in God and the uncompromising rationality of the infallible detective, a battle that unfolds through understanding.

The crime genre (or its apathetic reinterpretation) is nothing new to Kelly Reichardt, one of the most important American filmmakers of the last three decades. Since her debut, River of grass, even the masterful First cowpassing through Night movesThe crime – blowing up a dam or stealing milk from someone else's cow – appears as the only possible act of dissent for the outsiders unavoidable themes that abound in his films. Shot on celluloid by his regular collaborator, Christopher Blauvelt, The mastermind From the opening credits, we are transported to the turbulent United States of the early seventies, newly awakened from the utopian dream of the sixties. In a small town, JB Mooney (an excellent Josh O'Connor who changes the wrinkled white dress of The chimera (wearing worn-out wool sweaters), a failed art student, family man, and unemployed carpenter, organizes what he imagines as the perfect heist: the theft of artwork from a local museum.

Two years afterlooting Etruscan tombs inThe ChimeraJosh O'Connor returns to the Cannes Film Festival as an art thief, but this time it's not ancient relics he steals, but abstract paintings.The mastermindIn Kelly Reichardt's The Dark Knight, the British actor is an unemployed carpenter, married with two children and a conventional life in the Massachusetts suburbs that clearly falls short of what is expected of the son of a judge. The occasional petty theft from the local museum has no consequences, but the theft of four works by abstract painter Arthur Dove, which he steals from a museum with the help of two henchmen, second-rate criminals, does.