France
Camille Laurens: Little Dancer Aged Fourteen review - the story of a sculptureSunday, 05 July 2020
Edgar Degas is famous for his depictions of ballet dancers. His drawings, paintings and sculptures of young girls clad in the uniform of the dance are signs of an artistic obsession that spanned a remarkable artistic career. One work in particular... Read more... |
DVD/Blu-ray: Portrait of a Lady on FireTuesday, 23 June 2020
Portrait of a Lady on Fire, a story of impossible love between two young women, takes place in the 18th century, on a wind-swept, wave-battered island off the coast of Brittany. The writer and director Céline Sciamma, who established herself as a... Read more... |
Joan of Arc review – tough little numberSaturday, 20 June 2020
Jeanne d’Arc was 19, she believed, when she was tried for heresy by her English enemies in Rouen in 1431. Of the actors who have played her onscreen – Falconetti, Ingrid Bergman, Jean Seberg, Leelee Sobieski, Milla Jovovich among them – none has... Read more... |
La voix humaine, Grange Park Opera online review – hanging on the telephoneFriday, 05 June 2020
Rustles of renewal are stirring in the Surrey woods where Grange Park Opera has built the splendid theatre that remains, for this summer, sadly out of bounds. Faced with the cancellation of its 2020 programme, Wasfi Kani’s company has not simply... Read more... |
Alex George: The Paris Hours review - captivating yet frustratingSunday, 03 May 2020
A century on, the années folles of Paris between the wars do not cease to excite readers and writers of all varieties. Alex George’s latest novel, The Paris Hours, draws on the myriad charms the interwar period has to offer, condensing them into a... Read more... |
Earth and Blood, Netflix review - tense and broody thriller ultimately falls shortSaturday, 18 April 2020
There are quite a few good things to be said for Julien Leclerc’s Earth and Blood. It’s a terse and uncluttered thriller which makes full use of its main location, a battered old sawmill in the midst of a dank expanse of forest, and Leclerc has... Read more... |
Who You Think I Am review - Juliette Binoche dazzles as she wrestles with dual identitiesThursday, 16 April 2020
With influences as diverse as Hitchcock’s Vertigo to 2010’s Catfish, Safy Nebbou’s genre-splicing French-language feature, starring Juliette Binoche, comes loaded with a heady mix of cheap thrills and surprising psychological depth.... Read more... |
The Rake's Progress, Complicité online review - well-projected journey from pastoral to madhouseWednesday, 08 April 2020
One way to look at Stravinsky's celebrated collaboration with W H Auden and Chester Kallman is as a numbers opera in nine pictures, four of them indebted to Hogarth's series of paintings/prints. So it's not surprising that visual flair has marked... Read more... |
Nathalie Léger: The White Dress review – masterfully introvertedSunday, 22 March 2020
Nathalie Léger’s The White Dress brings personal and public tragedy together in a narrative as absorbingly melancholic as its subject is shocking. The story described by Léger’s narrator – a scarcely fictional version of herself – is of the... Read more... |
Director Marjane Satrapi: ‘The real question is do you like everyone? No? So, why should everyone like you?’Friday, 20 March 2020
Marjane Satrapi, the Iranian-born French filmmaker, has a reputation that precedes her. Her upbringing was the subject of the acclaimed films Persepolis (2007) and Chicken With Plums (2011). Persepolis won the Cannes Jury Prize, two César awards and... Read more... |
The Art Mysteries, BBC Four review - secrets and symbols of Van Gogh's famous self-portraitWednesday, 18 March 2020
Presenter Waldemar Januszczak suffers from something very like Robert Peston Syndrome, which makes him bellow at the camera and distort words as if they’re chewing gum he’s peeling off the sole of his shoe. Nonetheless he has a knack for finding... Read more... |
The Truth review - a potent Franco-Japanese pairingWednesday, 18 March 2020
It may offer veteran French star Catherine Deneuve as substantial and engaging a role as she has enjoyed in years, but the real surprise of The Truth is that it’s the work of Japan’s Hirokazu Kore-eda. The director, whose Shoplifters took the Palme... Read more... |
