French cinema
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... |
Blu-ray: ChocolatWednesday, 15 May 2024
Claire Denis’ 1988 debut is a sensual madeleine to her Cameroonian childhood, with its taste of termites on butter, sound of birdsong and insect chitter, and the camera’s slow turn and rise into vast vistas. It’s also a colonial reckoning, setting... Read more... |
The Taste of Things review - a gentle love letter to haute cuisineWednesday, 14 February 2024
Awarded the best director prize at Cannes last year, Anh Hung Tran has served up cinema’s latest hymn to gastronomy, The Taste of Things. Tasting (and smelling) what’s on the screen is obviously impossible, but even so Tran provides as total a... Read more... |
The Innocent review - muddled French crime comedyThursday, 24 August 2023
Thespians and thieves have often pooled their resources in movies, notably in the work of Woody Allen. Since acting is basically a form of lying, goes the joke, actors dine at the same Runyon-esque table as people who nick stuff, and this French... Read more... |
Blu-ray: EarwigTuesday, 15 August 2023
Even more than David Lynch, to whom her work has been compared, director Lucile Hadžihalilović is a strange agent between this world and the dreamworld.From her debut feature, Innocence, an adaptation of Frank Wedekind’s symbolist novel about pre-... Read more... |
Mother and Son review - 20 years with an erratic maFriday, 30 June 2023
In French, this film is called Un petit frère (“A little brother”), and for once it may be that a film’s English title is an improvement on the original. The fitful and fragmented second feature by Léonor Serraille is about a multi-tasking migrant... Read more... |
Blu-ray: Le Mépris (Contempt)Tuesday, 27 June 2023
It’s an odalisque to arouse envy in Titian, Boucher, Ingres, or Manet.Filtered amber, white, and blue lights successively bathe Brigitte Bardot, crowned by that golden cloud, as she asks Michel Piccoli, her co-star and screen husband in Jean-Luc... Read more... |
Full Time review - Laure Calamy as a driven single motherSaturday, 27 May 2023
Full Time opens in darkness. All we can hear is the sound of a sleeping woman breathing. It’s one of the few quiet moments in a film that follows Julie (Laure Calamy) as she scrambles to manage her life. Divorced with two young children, she... Read more... |
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