France
mark.kidel
The much-respected visual artist Isaac Julien made his name as one of the first great black British filmmakers, not least with Looking for Langston (1989) and Young Soul Rebels (1991). While Steve McQueen moved from gallery art and installations to big-budget fiction movies, Julien has gone the other way, leaving narrative behind and finding his vocation as an artist rather than a story-teller.His BFI film on Frantz Fanon, made in 1995, co-written and directed with Mark Nash, focuses on the story of the psychiatrist from Martinique who made his name as a vivid and penetrating theoretician of Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Loving Vincent was clearly a labour of love for all concerned, so I hope it doesn't seem churlish to wish that a Van Gogh biopic some seven or more years in the planning had spent more time at the drawing board. By that I don't mean yet further devotion to an already-painstaking emphasis on visuals that attempt to recreate the artist's own palette in filmmaking terms. The fact is, no amount of eye-catching amplitude can overcome consistently tin-eared writing, and by the point someone posed the onscreen question, "Did you know he was a genius?", I was primed to drain my own face of Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
This is the 100th feature film by Takashi Miike, Japan’s fabled maestro of sex, horror and ultra-violent Yakuza flicks, and here he has found his subject in Hiroake Samura’s Blade of the Immortal manga comics. Manji (Takuya Kimura) is a veteran Samurai haunted by the cruel murder of his sister Machi, but saved from death himself by the “bloodworms” which were fed to him by a mysterious veiled crone and have rendered him immortal. If he loses a hand or is hacked by a sword, the worms speedily patch him up again.Fifty years after Machi’s death, Manji embarks on a new quest to avenge the murder Read more ...
graham.rickson
Guy Johnston: Tecchler’s Cello - From Cambridge to Rome (King’s College Cambridge)Acquiring a second-hand instrument always leads one to wonder what sort of a life it led before. Did said instrument enjoy a flourishing professional career, or was it abandoned in an attic for decades? Cherished by a master or mistreated by a bumbling amateur? Guy Johnston’s enjoyable anthology celebrates his recent acquisition of a 300-year-old cello made by one David Tecchler. He was a Bavarian-born craftsman who pitched up in Rome towards the end of the 17th century, one of his workshops being situated Read more ...
mark.kidel
Carla Bruni delivers smooth and sophisticated pop. She undoubtedly has plenty of talent, and this latest collection of songs – all of them covers, and sung in impressive English – reeks of good taste, careful artistic choices and a wide knowledge of popular music, from which she has drawn material, as she has said, that "blew her away".She is a wide-ranging pop connoisseur, and the tracks run from the Stones’ “I Miss You” to Abba’s “Winner Takes All”, and from Lou Reed’s “A Perfect Day” to Willie Nelson’s “Crazy”. The production by hit-maker David Foster is flawless, well suited to the Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
The title says it all, or at least quite a lot. Luminously intelligent, an exceptionally hard worker, bilingual in French, a gifted biographer, Claire Tomalin has been at the heart of the literati glitterati all her working life. Here she turns her forensic sharp eye on herself in a life that even her nonagenarian father characterised as hard, although she herself sees it as privileged.Of course, both are right. Her parents – a clever very young Frenchman, Émile Delavaney, infatuated by both the English language and its literature, and her mother Muriel Herbert, a gifted musician and composer Read more ...
David Nice
Has Hackney ever seen or heard such a spectacle – a full Hungarian orchestra taking up most of the Empire stalls to complete the semi-circle of a relatively empty stage? And did enough of London get to hear about it? I certainly wouldn’t have done had it not been for a chance conversation with Péter Eötvös, a leading figure in Hungary’s beleaguered but still thriving cultural life, in an interval of the Budapest Ring. You don’t often get to witness a major composer conduct his own response to a masterpiece – Senza Sangue, a psychological two-hander fit with Bartók’s Bluebeard’s Castle – so Read more ...
Peter Brook
A long time ago when I was very young, a voice hidden deep within me whispered, "Don’t take anything for granted. Go and see for yourself." This little nagging murmur has led me to so many journeys, so many explorations, trying to live together multiple lives, from the sublime to the ridiculous. Always the need has been to stay in the concrete, the practical, the everyday, so as to find hints of the invisible through the visible. The infinite levels in Shakespeare, for instance, make his works a skyscraper.But what are levels, what is quality? What is shallow, what is deep? What changes, what Read more ...
Howard Brenton
I wrote The Blinding Light to try to understand the mental and spiritual crisis that August Strindberg suffered in February 1896. Deeply disturbed, plagued by hallucinations, he holed up in various hotel rooms in Paris, most famously in the Hotel Orfila in the Rue d’Assas.He’d had great success in Paris. A revival of Miss Julie in 1893 created a sensation and, in 1895, The Father had been rapturously received. But now he abandoned playwrighting. He announced he was not a writer but a true “natural scientist”, an alchemist. His hands burnt by chemicals, he attempted to make gold.It would be an Read more ...
Graham Fuller
In Jean Grémillon's final fiction film The Love of a Woman, Marie Prieur (Micheline Presle) arrives on the Breton island of Ushant to replace the tiny settlement's aging Dr Morel (Robert Naly). While showing Marie her new digs and surgery, Mme Morel (Madeleine Geoffroy) compliments the lady doctor on her youth. Marie sighingly replies that she is 28. Quel horreur!Ninety-five now, Presle was 31 when the film was released in France in 1953. It is no discourtesy to say she looked closer to 35 – Marie is an attractive, dignified woman who performs her work with a quietness and authority that Read more ...
Jasper Rees
There are three bravura scenes in Ronin that merit the price of acquisition. Two of them are French car chases, one along the twisting alleys of Nice, the other through the tunnels and up the wrong side of the carriageway in Paris. It’s a mark of John Frankenheimer’s punctilious attention to white-knuckle thrills that both chases have individual character. Imagine how bland they’d be now in the age of CGI, when anything is possible and everything improbable (Ronin was released in 1998). You can learn all about them in the extras of this welcome Blu-ray release.The third scene features Robert Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
The two haunting series of crime novels by Fred Vargas, the writing pseudonym of a French archaeologist and historian, have acquired a worldwide following: quirky, idiosyncratic, eccentric and beautifully written, they are highly individual and, for some perhaps, an acquired taste. But once hooked, you cannot help but follow through. The first series – eight novels translated into English so far – has the Paris-based Inspector Adamsberg as its chief protagonist, and contains, perhaps not for purists, elements which go well beyond the intuitive and towards the borders of the paranormal and Read more ...