Body in Cinema and Series 2025: Flesh and Storylines

🎥 Elio – Pixar: extraterrestrial body

Release: June 18, 2025 – Director: Madeline Sharafian

This is not your typical Pixar. In Elio, space is merely a mirror—a cosmic reflection of a far more terrestrial disturbance: that of a lonely, gentle, invisible boy suddenly propelled into the role of “ambassador of humanity.” This role reversal—where the weak child becomes a figure of authority—deeply questions the concept of assigned bodies: to a family, a gender, a planet.

Madeline Sharafian delivers a film where the organic and floating animation style mirrors the protagonist’s hesitations. His too-soft, too-gentle, too-different body gradually becomes the vessel for a new kind of power: the power to say no, to assert oneself, to exist. Science fiction at Pixar is no longer escapism; it becomes a sensory rite of passage, at child’s eye level.

🎯 Why watch it? For that rare moment when an American animated film dares to turn gentleness into a tool of resistance.

🎬 Avignon – Johann Dionnet: body and theatre, between mimicry and sincerity

Release: June 18, 2025 – Director: Johann Dionnet

Johann Dionnet, coming from stage and short films, delivers Avignon, a light romantic comedy infused with deeper stakes: the actor’s body as a space of social transformation. Baptiste Lecaplain plays Stéphane, a struggling actor who shows up at the Avignon Festival pretending to star in Le Cid to impress. This lie unveils the tension between popular theatre and elitist art, captured by a handheld camera that renders actors’ bodies tangible and vulnerable.

The film, awarded at Alpe d’Huez (Grand Prize, Jury Favorite, Canal+), avoids cold portrayal or cheap satire: it’s first and foremost an embodied tribute, where physical fragility—strained voices, exhaustion, rivalries—becomes narrative material. Still, the romantic comedy part lacks surprises, and some misunderstandings feel forced. But what truly captivates is the troupe’s energy, the simplicity of dialogue, and the sincere way the stage is filmed as a shared adventure.

🎯 Why watch it? Because Avignon is a love letter to the actor’s body—a story where truth emerges through performance: imperfect, flawed, but always alive—and where comedy becomes a collective gesture.

🎥 28 Years Later – Danny Boyle: infected bodies, a devastated society

Release: June 18, 2025 – Director: Danny Boyle

Some films never heal. 28 Days Later was one of them. 28 Years Later is its long-awaited, furious, and necessarily uneven sequel. But Danny Boyle returns with a clear mission: to place the body in crisis back at the heart of the screen.

In this ravaged England, everything vibrates, shakes, and erupts. Boyle’s style—shaky cam, dirty lighting, jarring cuts—reconstructs an aesthetic of organic chaos. Zombies are no longer creatures but symptoms of a sick world. The fear is not in the monster but in the gaze it reflects back at you.

At times, the film struggles to renew its stakes. But it succeeds in one rare feat: making the viewer physically uneasy, reminding us that horror is, above all, a sensation.

🎯 Why watch it? For its punk energy, rejection of comfort, and its ability to turn the body into flammable material.

🎥 Enzo – Robin Campillo: social body, desiring body

Release: June 18, 2025 – Director: Robin Campillo

Campillo captures a teenager in rupture: neither hero nor victim. Simply a boy—barely self-defined, yet already scrutinized, projected upon, judged.

Everything here is political. School, gazes, body language. But the film’s miracle is its refusal to impose a message. It lets the bodies speak: silences, avoided gestures, broken impulses. Enzo becomes a mirror to an adult world unable to face its own violence.

The direction is discreet, but strikingly precise. Static shots tremble with emotion. The film could have been militant; instead, it is something more powerful: it is incarnate.

🎯 Why watch it? For its rare ability to make cinema an act of deep listening.