Ninety years after the first color film - Becky Sharp by Rouben Mamoulian and Lowell Sherman (1935) - black & white is far from having said its last word. If proof were needed, here are three new films that explore the thousand nuances of monochrome for stories of very different genres and styles.
The Young Woman with a Needle by Magnus von Horn. In 1910s Denmark, Karoline works alongside dozens of other women in a clothing factory. Her husband is away at war, and she hasn't heard from him for a long time. She has high hopes for her new relationship with the young director, with whom she is pregnant. But she soon learns that it's not that easy to get out of the classroom, and that the baby can only be hers or no one else's. Inspired by a true story, Magnus von Horn's third film (we remember his very different and very colorful Sweat, about the life of an influencer, in 2020) is particularly chilling. In this hopeless Denmark, color has no place, and the use of black and white, reminiscent of Michael Haneke's White Ribbon (2009), only accompanies the tragedy. The image of young Polish cinematographer Michal Dymek, who created the lighting for Jerzy Skolimowski'sEO (2022) and, more recently, Jesse Einsenberg's A Real Pain (2025), gives the film an aesthetic as beautiful as it is terrible, and one that will linger long in the memory.
The Young Woman with the Needle by Magnus von Horn
Opening April 9, 2025
The Grill by Alonso Ruizpalacios. His first film, Güeros (2014), was already in black and white. Since then, Mexico's Alonso Ruizpalacios has made Museum (2018), starring Gabriel Garcia Bernal, which won him a Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival, Our Police History (2021) and several episodes of the Netflix series Narcos: Mexico . For his fourth feature, the filmmaker returns to monochrome, setting his story in the United States, in New York, more precisely in the kitchens of an important restaurant. "The Grill" is the name of the establishment. It doesn't serve haute cuisine, but meat, burgers, pizzas and salads. In other words, enough to feed New Yorkers and tourists alike, and it's busy both inside and out. And in the Grill's kitchens, all nationalities come together: Mexicans, Colombians, Moroccans, Senegalese... Many undocumented immigrants working in conditions that are not always easy, while waiting to be regularized. And among them is Pedro, a young Mexican who is getting his hopes up a little too much in his relationship with American waitress Julia (played by Rooney Mara). A stressful epic in real time, reminiscent of The Bear series, where the very clear black and white is sometimes enriched by a few clever dots of color.
The Grill by Alonso Ruizpalacios
Opening April 2, 2025
Riders of the Wilderness by Michael Dweck and Gregory Kershaw. In a remote region of Argentina, on the edge of the modern world, lives a community of gauchos, cowboys of the pampas whose Latin American tradition dates back to the late 18th century. The endangered identity of this community is at the heart of this documentary, whose visual richness is a continuation of the photographic work of its two co-directors. Michael Dweck is a New York photographer who has been paying homage for years to congregations as varied as the surfers of Montauk (his series The End: Montauk, N.Y., in 2004) and the truffle hunters of Piedmont(The Truffle Hunters, 2020). The latter work had already been the subject of a film, co-directed with cinematographer Gregory Kershaw. For this new documentary, the filmmakers have opted for high-contrast black & white, accentuating the beauty of the marked faces as much as that of the immense landscapes in which they blend.
Riders of the Wilderness by Michael Dweck and Gregory Kershaw
Opening May 7, 2025
