French cinema
Beating Hearts review - kiss kiss, slam slamThursday, 14 August 2025
Andrew Garfield was 29 when he played the teenage Spiderman and Jennifer Grey was 27 when she took on a decade-younger-than-her character called “Baby” in Dirty Dancing. So you’d think that directors and casting experts could find actors to advance... Read more... |
The Kingdom review - coming of age as the body count risesSaturday, 09 August 2025
The acorn doesn’t fall far from the tree is the bitter message of The Kingdom. Director and co-writer Julien Colonna’s nerve-fraying drama about an adolescent girl’s sudden immersion in the brutal, uber-macho world of her father, a ruthless Corsican... Read more... |
Jane Austen Wrecked My Life review - persuading us that the French can do you-know-whoFriday, 13 June 2025
Do the French do irony? Well, was Astérix a Gaul? Obviously they do, and do it pretty well to judge by many of their movies down the decades. As we brave the salutes on this side of the Channel to arch irony-spinner Jane Austen’s 250th birth-year –... Read more... |
Misericordia review - mushroom-gathering and murder in rural FranceWednesday, 02 April 2025
“Be careful what you wish for, you might get it.” The Aesop-ian maxim roughly applies to Jérémie Pastor (Félix Kysyl) in Alain Guiraudie's Misericordia. Though unemployed Toulouse baker Jérémie doesn’t acquire the business that was run by his... Read more... |
DVD/Blu-ray: The SubstanceTuesday, 01 April 2025
“I knew I wanted all the effects practical and made for real. The movie is about flesh and bones, about women’s bodies.”Coralie Fargeat, writer, editor, producer and director of The Substance, is discussing the “visceral journey” and extraordinary... Read more... |
theartsdesk Q&A: director François Ozon on 'When Autumn Falls'Thursday, 20 March 2025
François Ozon is France’s master of sly secrets, burying hard truths in often dazzling surfaces, from Swimming Pool’s erotic mystery of writing and murder in 2003 to the teenage boy cuckooing his way into his middle-aged mentor’s life in... Read more... |
The Second Act review - absurdist meta comedy about stardomSunday, 12 January 2025
Can any line from The Second Act be taken at face value? Not really. “I should never have made this film,” confides Florence (the starry Léa Seydoux) just before the half-way mark. It's just another line from a script.The film’s working title had... Read more... |
theartsdesk Q&A: director Jacques Audiard on his Mexican trans gangster musical 'Emilia Pérez'Friday, 25 October 2024
Jacques Audiard – creator of such subversive crime dramas and alternative romances as Read My Lips (2001), The Beat That My Heart Skipped (2005), A Prophet (2009), and Rust and Bone (2012) – isn’t an aficionado of film musicals. But in blending one... Read more... |
Dahomey review - return of the kingWednesday, 23 October 2024
Mati Diop’s “speculative documentary” reverses the transatlantic journey of her feature debut Atlantics’ ghost Senegalese migrants, as plundered Beninese artefacts are returned from France. Dahomey is about African displacement and despoilment, and... Read more... |
The Crime Is Mine review - entertaining froth from a crack castThursday, 17 October 2024
For his latest pick’n’mix sortie into the world of the women’s picture, François Ozon has gone back to the 1930s and a popular play of the time, Mon Crime (1934). In his hands it emerges as an île flottante of a film that slips down easily but isn’t... Read more... |
The Goldman Case review - blistering French political dramaFriday, 20 September 2024
It’s a bold move to give a UK cinema release to this fierce courtroom drama about a French left-wing intellectual who was assassinated in1979. Pierre Goldman isn’t exactly a well-known figure on this side of the Channel, but perhaps the distributors... Read more... |
Blu-ray: Army of ShadowsTuesday, 25 June 2024
One of those rare films that leaves you speechless after the closing credits, Jean-Pierre Melville’s Army of Shadows (L'Armée des ombres) sounds on paper as if it shouldn’t work.Melville’s penultimate film (it was released in 1969), this World War 2... Read more... |
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