Three movies to watch this week

“The Death of Belle”

Georges Simenon divided his books into "popular" (which included the books about Inspector Maigret) and "hard-boiled." Written and set in the US, Belle's Death belongs to the latter group and was adapted for film in 1961 by Édouard Molinaro, who set it in Switzerland. This new version, by Benoit Jacquot, is set in rural France. Pierre, a high school teacher (Guillaume Canet), and Cléa (Charlotte Gainsbourg), the owner of an optician, take in young Belle, the daughter of Cléa's best friend, during the school year. One night, the girl is found strangled in her room. There are no signs of forced entry, and Pierre, who was grading tests in the basement, claims to have seen or heard nothing, becoming the prime suspect. However, it turns out that Belle was anything but the well-behaved girl she seemed, and had a fixation on Pierre. Jacquot is quite faithful to the tone of the book and to Simenon's taste for peculiar, elusive and complex characters (Pierre is laconic, passive and distant, which makes him even more suspicious in the eyes of the police), but where the work has a closed and cruelly ironic ending, the director prefers to end the film with an (unnecessarily) open and ambiguous conclusion.

“An (Im)perfect Couple”

In 1989, Danny DeVito directed and starred in The War of the Roses , a satirical dark comedy based on Warren Adler's book The War of the Roses , about the acrimonious and increasingly violent separation of a wealthy and seemingly perfect couple, played by Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner. More than 30 years later, Jay Roach, the director of the Austin Powers films, directed The Perfect Couple , a new adaptation of Adler's book that is also a loose adaptation of DeVito's film and a tribute to it, now with two English actors in the lead roles: Benedict Cumberbatch and Olivia Colman. Ivy (Colman) and Theo Rose (Cumberbatch) seem like the perfect couple. They fell madly in love when they met, have successful careers—he as an architect, she in the restaurant industry—a harmonious marriage, fantastic children, and a dream home. All their friends envy them, but beneath this facade of perfection, a huge storm is brewing as Theo's professional dreams crumble and Ivy's ambitions begin to come true.

“Caught Stealing”

After The Whale , which earned Brendan Fraser the Oscar for Best Actor, and the documentary Postcard From Earth , Darren Aronofsky now turns to action cinema with Caught Stealing , set in New York in the 1990s and starring Austin Butler. He plays Hank Thompson, a promising baseball player who never made it to the professional league. Hank drinks too much, works as a bartender , has a beautiful girlfriend, and his favorite baseball team is doing very well in the league. When a neighbor asks him for a trivial favor—to watch his cat while he's away—Hank finds himself embroiled in a plot involving dangerous criminals, including Russian and American mobsters, and a Samoan hitman, who are out to get him, without him having the slightest idea why. The cast also includes Zoë Kravitz, Vincent D'Onofrio, Griffin Dunne, Matt Smith, Liev Schreiber, Regina King, and Carol Kane. Caught Stealing was chosen as Observador's film of the week.