Tag: french film
Bonnard, Pierre & Marthe
Thursday, September 12th, 2024 Film Reviews,Despite the hundreds of books and catalogues devoted to the art of Pierre Bonnard, we are obliged to piece together his life from a mass of unreliable snippets. The major authority was his great-nephew, Antoine Terrasse (1928-2013), but the family connection can also act as a form of censorship, ensuring that difficult or disreputable stories […]
A Silence & Spanish Film Festival 2024
Sunday, June 30th, 2024 Film Reviews,A Silence doesn’t announce that it’s Based on a True Story, but its origins are not hard to find. In this film by Belgian director, Joachim Lafosse, the crime that looms in the background is that of paedophile, rapist and serial killer, Marc Dutroux, who kidnapped, imprisoned and tortured a series of young girls from […]
The Sitting Duck
Friday, June 21st, 2024 Film Reviews,As we’ve recently seen with Iranian director, Mohammad Rasoulof having to flee his native land to avoid imprisonment and a flogging, the cinema still has the capacity to send tremors down the corridors of power. Although films on social justice issues are not much appreciated in authoritarian states, those same regimes recognise the immense propaganda […]
The Three Musketeers
Saturday, June 8th, 2024 Film Reviews,Why did I wait so long to read Alexandre Dumas? One of literature’s all-time best-sellers, he had to be doing something right. The grandson of a French nobleman and a African slave, Dumas (1802-70) was as unlikely as one of his own plots, and no less successful. He spent money as fast as he made […]
Anatomy of a Fall & The Color Purple
Friday, January 26th, 2024 Film Reviews,“My job is to cover the tracks, so fiction can destroy reality,” says novelist, Sandra Voyter, not directly, but in a quote attributed to her by the presenter of a TV literary program. The context is significant, because Sandra, played by German actress, Sandra Hüller, is on trial for the murder of her husband, Samuel […]
The Origin of Evil
Friday, November 3rd, 2023 Film Reviews,Laure Calamy has amazing screen presence. She may not have the elegance of Catherine Deneuve or Fanny Ardant in their heydays, but she has charmed the French box office so effectively that, at the age of 48, she seems to be in every second movie. Naturally suited to comic roles, Calamy can turn on the […]
Lie with Me
Friday, October 13th, 2023 Film Reviews,As a title, Lie with Me is almost too tricky. The original French title of both Philippe Besson’s best-selling novel and Olivier Peyon’s screen adaptation was: Arrête avec tes mensonges – “Stop with your Lies”. There’s a significant difference: Stop with your lies is an order, while Lie with Me invites complicity. It seems as […]
Everybody Loves Jeanne
Friday, September 15th, 2023 Film Reviews,There should be a special ‘Quirky’ classification for films such as Everybody Loves Jeanne. The last movie I saw that combined comedy and strangeness in this fashion, was Maren Ade’s Toni Erdmann (2016), in whch a woman with a high-powered job is tormented by an embarassing father who wants to be part of everything. In […]
Reality & Driving Madeleine
Friday, July 7th, 2023 Film Reviews,Reality is a film that lives up to its title, with a script taken word-for-word from one woman’s experience of an actual FBI search. The protagonist is a young civil servant with the rather surreal name of Reality Winner (Sydney Sweeney) who arrives home from the supermarket to find two men waiting for her outside […]
Saint Omer & One Fine Morning
Friday, June 9th, 2023 Film Reviews,Hollywood scriptwriters are on strike, protesting about poor rates of pay and the threat of being replaced by AI. There may be quality writing on cable TV, but the stuff we get in American action films and superhero flicks could already have been written by AI, or by a fridge, or a lawnmower. My most […]