Chicken for Linda! (Movie)

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    ‘Chicken for Linda!’ Review: A Comedy That Cooks

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    In this madcap film, a mother’s apology leads to a delightful misadventure that begins with mourning and ends with a father’s favorite recipe.In the animated French feature “Chicken for Linda!,” directed by Chiara Malta and Sébastien Laudenbach, a mother accuses her young daughter of stealing a ring of great and mournful value. When the mother, Paulette (voiced by Clotilde Hesme), discovers her error, she promises to do whatever Linda (Mélinée Leclerc) wishes by way of apology. Linda was an infant when her father died, so she asks her culinarily challenged mother to cook her father’s go-to dish: chicken and peppers.A general strike — Vive la France! — tosses a slapstick wrench into Paulette’s pledge, closing stores and forcing her to secure the chicken by other means. Police officers give slapstick chase. A watermelon truck and its kindly driver enter the fray. Paulette’s older sister, Astrid (Laetitia Dosch) — a yoga teacher who self-medicates with candy — is dragged into the mess. And the children and denizens of the congenial apartment complex observe and participate in the increasingly madcap antics of mother and child.For all its playful color-block hues and deceptively casual illustrations, the movie delivers a sharp mix of pathos and humor. “Chicken for Linda!” explores the differences in grief and memory for child and spouse with a touch as wisely light as the movie’s score, by the composer Clément Ducol’s, which lands festive, thrilling, sorrowful notes instrumentally and in songs.As the indomitable chicken makes break after break for it, and more and more people are involved in its capture, you’d be right to wonder: What about the tray of peppers one of Linda’s friends left cooking in the oven?Chicken for Linda!Not Rated. In French and Italian, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 13 minutes. In theaters. More

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      2024 New York International Children’s Film Festival Preview

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      A range of films, many of them animated, some hilarious, some serious, bubble up at this year’s festival in New York, where kids can vote for awards.One of the cinematic highlights of the 2024 New York International Children’s Film Festival could be described, at least partly, as a wild-goose chase. Or, more precisely, a domestic-hen chase.That animated feature, “Chicken for Linda!,” follows a guilt-stricken single mother trying to buy the main ingredient of her daughter’s favorite dish. But since grocers are on strike in their French city, the desperate mother steals a live hen. The bird flees from her car’s trunk to a watermelon truck to the space behind an armoire, with adults and children, including the high-spirited young daughter, Linda, in hot pursuit.A simple farce? Not exactly. The film, by Chiara Malta and Sébastien Laudenbach, also includes time shifts, a singing ghost, an exploration of memory and multiple references to death — that of Louis XVI and Linda’s beloved father, as well as the chicken’s potential demise. Done in loose, almost abstract animation, the movie, which is billed as the festival’s “centerpiece spotlight,” is about as far as an audience can get from typical commercial children’s fare.It is also exactly the kind of unusual work to expect at the festival, which begins on Saturday and continues on weekends through March 17 with a slate of 18 feature presentations and more than 70 short films. About three-quarters of those titles are animated.“I think when you see live action, you’re very enraptured with someone else’s story,” Maria-Christina Villaseñor, the festival’s programming director, said in an interview. But with animation, she added, “you’re very excited also about your own, because I think you’re paying attention to the medium, you’re paying attention to the way that artists are using different techniques and different storytelling approaches. That really forefronts the idea of creativity and possibility.”Villaseñor and Nina Guralnick, the festival’s executive director, did not set out to focus on animation this year, but found that those films were often the most interesting. Ever since the festival’s founding in 1997, it has shown its audience — cinemagoers as young as 3 and as old as 18 — work that they’re unlikely to see anywhere else, including features that have previously been shown almost exclusively at festivals for adults.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More