Ninety years after the first color film – Becky Sharp Despite the fact that Rouben Mamoulian and Lowell Sherman's 1935 film, black and white is far from finished. If proof were needed, here are three new films that explore the myriad nuances of monochrome in stories of very different genres and styles.
The Young Woman with a Needle by Magnus von HornIn 1910s Denmark, Karoline works alongside dozens of other women in a clothing factory. Her husband has gone to war, and she hasn't heard from him in a long time. She has high hopes for her new relationship with the young manager, with whom she is pregnant. But she will soon learn that one doesn't escape one's social class so easily, and that this baby can only be hers or no one's. Inspired by a true story, this is Magnus von Horn's third film (we remember his very different and very colorful one). 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 is reminiscent of that of White ribbon Michael Haneke's (2009) merely accompanies the tragedy. The image of the young Polish cinematographer Michal Dymek, to whom we owe the lighting ofEO by Jerzy Skolimowski (2022) or more recently by And Real Pain Jesse Eisenberg's (2025) gives the film an aesthetic that is as beautiful as it is terrible, and which will remain in our memories for a long time.
The Young Woman with a Needle by Magnus von Horn
Released in theaters on April 9, 2025
The Grill by Alonso RuizpalaciosHis first film, Gueros (2014), was already in black and white. Since then, the Mexican Alonso Ruizpalacios has filmed Museum (2018), starring Gabriel Garcia Bernal, which earned him a Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival, Our crime story (2021) and several episodes of the series Narcos: Mexico for Netflix. For his fourth feature film, the director returns to monochrome, setting his story in the United States, in New York, more precisely in the kitchens of a major restaurant. "The Grill" is the name of the establishment. They don't serve haute cuisine, but meat, burgers, pizzas, and salads. In other words, enough to feed both New Yorkers and tourists, and there are people both in the dining room and behind the scenes. And in the Grill's kitchens, all nationalities mingle: Mexicans, Colombians, Moroccans, Senegalese… Many undocumented workers who work in conditions that are not always easy while waiting to be granted legal status. And among them is Pedro, a young Mexican man who places a little too much hope in his relationship with the American waitress Julia (played by Rooney Mara). A stressful, real-time epic that is reminiscent of the series The Bear where the very clear black and white is sometimes enriched with a few clever touches of color.
The Grill by Alonso Ruizpalacios
Released in theaters on April 2, 2025
The riders of the wild lands by Michael Dweck and Gregory Kershaw. In a remote region of Argentina, on the fringes of the modern world, lives a community of gauchos, these cowboys of the pampas whose Latin American tradition dates back to the end of the 18th centurye 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 tribute for years to congregations as varied as the surfers of Montauk (his series The End: Montauk, NY, in 2004) and the truffle hunters of Piedmont (The Truffle Hunters(2020). This previous work was the subject of a film, already co-directed with cinematographer Gregory Kershaw. For this new documentary, the filmmakers opted for a high-contrast black and white, accentuating both the beauty of the weathered faces and that of the vast landscapes in which they blend.
The Riders of the Wildlands by Michael Dweck and Gregory Kershaw
Released in theaters on May 7, 2025
