France
igor.toronyilalic
You'd be forgiven for thinking that an opera that - in all seriousness - climaxes to the words, "Farewell, little table. You seemed so large," might need a small, but firm, slap in the face. But you'd be quite wrong. Manon is really quite froth-free. Its operatic brothers-in-arms are Lulu and The Rake's Progress, charting as they all do the rise and tumbling fall of an innocent at the hands of a corrupting city; its allusive musical ways reach out to Debussy and Puccini. The point is, it's a modern work. Add director Laurent Pelly (of La Fille du régiment fame), Anna Netrebko and young Read more ...
Matt Wolf
As cinematic landmarks go, Kutcher Speaks French may not quite be up there with Garbo Talks. But there's a certain pleasure to be had in the opening sequences of the otherwise dismal Killers to find that so quintessential a movie dude can actually manage the word "bonjour". Small wonder that a vacationing, newly single Katherine Heigl falls for this clearly keen linguist in a lift in Nice. His bared torso has nothing to do with it - surely, not! After all, a fella's skills with the bench press look even better accompanied by a self-evident immersion in the back catalogue of Berlitz.If only Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It’s an odd enough statistic that only four of Alan Ayckbourn’s plays have been made into films. Odder still that, of those, three are the work of Alain Resnais, the grand old man of the nouvelle vague. Yes, it was a curious moment when the director of Last Year in Marienbad got into bed with the author of Bedroom Farce. The last of those films, Coeurs, was no more than a mildly engaging romantic roundelay, but it was freighted with Anglo-Saxon certainties. Things like plot, meaning, a vague interest in the needs of the audience. Not far shy of 90, Resnais has for the first time adapted a Read more ...
fisun.guner
The war was over, Picasso was finally free to leave the privations of Paris behind him and to spend more time in the South of France, marking a return to his Mediterranean heritage. The Gagosian Gallery’s exhibition, curated by Picasso’s distinguished biographer John Richardson and the artist’s grandson Bernard Ruiz-Picasso, focuses on those Mediterranean years, between 1945 to 1962, when the artist was moving easily between styles. Organised around the works from the private collection of the Picasso family, it features paintings, sculptures, linocuts and ceramics that have come to be known Read more ...
neil.smith
This slot is always one of the trickiest to fill satisfactorily, though last year’s choice – Pixar’s delightful animation Up – was inspired. Coming on the same day as the film’s release date, alas, Robin’s rain-lashed, Ridley-less premiere felt like a non-event from the get-go, putting the festival on the back foot before it had even begun. Ground was made up the following day thanks to an out of competition showing of Oliver Stone’s belated Wall Street sequel, Money Never Sleeps, a film that, while rather undermined by its perverse determination to de-fang Michael Douglas’s rapacious Gordon Read more ...
Ismene Brown
These past five days in May have seen some fairly oddball goings-on labelled as "New Dance at the Southbank Centre". Accidentally coinciding with other oddball goings-on on the national scene, since it was booked up long ago before elections were called. But no double-act in politics is likely to be quite as peculiar and weirdly stimulating as that between the Spanish cabaret artiste La Ribot (often to be found nude) and the postmodern French choreographer Mathilde Monnier, playing two sides of a woman who can’t help being at war with herself, like slapstick twins or conjoined politicians. Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
For those of you who think that classical music ends with Mahler - or Brahms just to be on the safe side - that the musical experimentation of the past 60 years was some sort of grim continental joke, an extended whoopee cushion of a musical period that seemed to elevate the garden-shed accident into some kind of art form, you have two people to blame: Adolf Hitler and Edgar Varèse.Hitler's influence we shall come to another time. Edgar Varèse's impact was on display this weekend at the Southbank's retrospective, Varèse 360°. Everyone from Frank Zappa to Harrison Birtwistle have Read more ...
theartsdesk
There's a piquant French perfume to our April round-up. DVD of the month is Olivier Assayas's magnificent family drama Summer Hours, reissued in the US with revealing extras (and available worldwide from Amazon). Maurice Pialat's work is considered at length and Séraphine and Rumba are among the new releases. We unearth an extraordinary Czech epic,The Valley of the Bees, and watch Ernst Lubitsch's delicious early Berlin comedies. Films covered previously, including New Moon, The White Ribbon, 2012 and Zombieland are noted in brief, with a link to the original review. Our critics are Anne Read more ...
anne.billson
BD, pronounced bédé, is short for "bande déssinée", the French equivalent of the comic-strip or graphic novel, which has long been accorded a popular affection and cultural standing well beyond that of its anglophone equivalent. Luc Besson says he was weaned on BD, which comes as no surprise to anyone familiar with his films. The only surprise is that it has taken him so long to direct an adaptation of one. But here it is - his eleventh full-length live-action directing credit - Les aventures d'Adèle Blanc-Sec, a mash-up of two volumes from a series of BDs by Tardi, one of the most respected Read more ...
sheila.johnston
New films by Mike Leigh, Stephen Frears and Sophie Fiennes figure in the line-up of the 63rd Cannes Film Festival, which was announced at a press conference in Paris this morning. As expected, Leigh's Another Year will vie for the Palme d'Or, the only British film to be selected. Frears's Tamara Drewe, based on the Guardian comic strip, plays out of competition, as does Oliver Stone's Wall Street - Money Never Sleeps and Woody Allen's London-set You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger. Also out of competition, Fiennes's Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow, a film about the artist Anselm Kiefer, gets Read more ...
Graham Fuller
After a trio of harsh modern pictures dealing with the pitfalls of globalisation - Demonlover, Clean, and Boarding Gate - the director Olivier Assayas felt the need to write a more personal, reflective screenplay around the time Paris’s Musée d’Orsay invited him to make a film using artefacts from its collection to commemorate the 20th anniversary of its opening.But the dispersal of familial and national life are still felt in the resulting film, Summer Hours, which examines a family’s response to parting with the informal collection of objets d’art treasured by the matriarch following her Read more ...
David Nice
Why write gluey pastiche Massenet and Puccini when you could compose as your flamboyant self? Why collaborate on a cliché-ridden French text when your song lyrics declare themselves so piquantly in English? Rufus Wainwright must have his own reasons for concocting a fantasy of what opera might, or used to, be. Frankly I'd prefer an honest, Mamma Mia!-style confection of the masterly, and undeniably operatic, pop hits from his two Want albums. Yet the funny thing is that at the end of a weird but stylishly presented evening of Prima Donna, though resisting the obligatory standing ovation, I Read more ...