France
theartsdesk
Various: Cumbia Cumbia 1 & 2 Peter CulshawThese totally irresisitible compilations were originally issued as separate albums in 1989 and 1993, and were for many (including me) a first taste of this loping, vivacious sound, which originated originally in the 17th century on the Caribbean Coast of Colombia and has been a badge of identity for Colombians ever since.The music is a mix of African and indigenous rhythmic elements overlaid by brass, accordion, clarinet and electric guitar, pushed along with an addictively rocksteady bassline.Although Cumbia has since spread to Mexico, with more Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Although only a couple of shots are fired in Jean Renoir’s 1937 La Grande Illusion, its stature as one of the greatest of anti-war films is unquestioned; perhaps only All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) and Paths of Glory (1957) are comparable.Renoir’s film, though, is also a disquisition on the insurmountability of the barriers that divide men of different classes, religions, and ethnicities. National allegiances may count the most in wartime, but in peacetime it’s illusory that men who’ve fought together will stick together if they hail from the opposite ends of society. By 1937, the idea Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
If you’re not French, there are probably two things you know about Claude François: that he wrote “My Way” and that he died from electrocution when fiddling with a lighting fixture while in the bath. In France, however, he’s been part of pop-cultural furniture since the mid-Sixties and has remained so since his death in 1978. He’s even more ubiquitous right now due to a biopic, DVD box set and TV specials dedicated to the constantly dancing dynamo known as “Cloclo”. Posters for Cloclo line Paris’s streets.Unlike Serge Gainsbourg, François has remained a local delicacy. It’s unlikely the film Read more ...
emma.simmonds
“Feel good” is a description applied far too frequently in reviews, often to movies which are formulaic and saccharine in the extreme. However, Le Havre is a film that’s begging to be described as just that, though it’s far from conventional or fluffy fare. This buoyantly beneficent and frequently hilarious picture combines artful absurdity and a neo-noir aesthetic with a pervasive sense of social justice and a laudable belief in the kindness of strangers. From Aki Kaurismäki, the writer, director and producer of The Man Without a Past and one of the world’s most distinctive film-makers, Le Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
There are many directors who profess (or have claimed for them) one sort of naturalistic cinema or another, from Ken Loach in the UK, to Bruno Dumont in France and Lisandro Alonso in Argentina. It’s an odd characteristic of the Belgian brothers Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne, that one feels almost discourteous to give them any such label. To do so would suggest at least some degree of artificiality, of self-conscious and discernible design; but when you watch a Dardenne film, there isn’t a single moment that doesn’t ring true.The Kid With a Bike is no exception. As with The Promise, Rosetta, Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“The film is a series of very curious, strange and macabre unbelievable incidents,” said director Ken Russell of The Devils in 1971. "The point of the film really is the sinner who becomes a saint." The tribulations surrounding its release, still fresh in Russell's mind, could easily have been described as curious and strange too. The long-overdue arrival on DVD of his career landmark is important. The Devils is one of the most astonishing and powerful British films. Following Russell's death last year, its release now also serves as a posthumous tribute to the great auteur.Russell was Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Many a redoubtable British theatre talent has stumbled at the altar of cinema before, which is another way of saying that Bel Ami is hardly the first film to suggest that not every heavyweight of the London and international stage - in this case two such titans in Cheek By Jowl supremos Declan Donnellan and Nick Ormerod - is to the celluloid manner born. Leading man Robert Pattinson deserves credit for thinking outside the Twilight box while only confirming one's sense that he, too, looks sadly adrift beyond his established habitat. Much like his co-directors, if the truth be told.There Read more ...
Mark Kidel
On the face of it, a low-budget French film featuring the story of a pre-pubescent girl who pretends to be a boy promises little more than an off-centre tale of gender envy. Hardly edge-of-your-seat stuff, but Céline Sciamma’s second feature is lifted way beyond the run-of-the-mill by extraordinary performances, a daring but totally accomplished formal simplicity and a script that generates as much tension as the best Hitchcock thriller.Moving to a new home with her famiy gives Laure, the film’s young heroine (Zoé Héran),an opportunity to re-invent herself as “Michael”, convincingly passing Read more ...
Emma Dibdin
Following her nuanced turn last year in Mike Mills’ quietly wrenching Beginners, Mélanie Laurent makes her directorial debut with another dimly idiosyncratic tale of thirtysomethings finding love and facing grief. Alas, while Laurent and her co-writers Morgan Perez and Chris Deslandes initially set up some intriguing dynamics, they give way all too swiftly to predictable scenes and a crushingly saccharine third act that’s no less risible for being heartfelt.The plot centres on two sisters, adopted bookseller Marie (Marie Denarnaud) and aspiring musician Lisa (Laurent). Their opposing Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Une Femme Mariée has been all but lost. Made in 1964 and barely seen since, it lurked silently in Godard's filmography between Bande à Part and Alphaville. Its availability on Dual Format DVD/Blu-ray plugs a gap and also offers the chance to find a continuity in Godard’s film-making that previously didn’t seem to be there.Although Une Femme Mariée shares much of its languorously disassociated atmosphere with Alphaville, it’s more comfortably slotted into a line traced from Une Femme est une Femme and Vivre sa Vie to, later, Masculin Féminin: films dissecting the female role and perspective, Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Gil Pender is in Paris with his intended and future in-laws. He wants to be a proper writer, rather than hacking for Hollywood. No one else cares about that and he’s belittled by his girl, her Tea Party father and her overbearing American friend who just happens to roll up. Strolling off on his own, midnight strikes, he climbs into a car and is transported back to a golden age to hang out with Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Cole Porter, Picasso, Hemingway, TS Eliot and Marion Cotillard’s artist’s muse Adriana. Naturally, Gertrude Stein loves the book Gil is writing. He even gets to meet a tour Read more ...
Graham Fuller
In his previous films, the French director Bernardo Bonello has demonstrated a non-judgemental affinity for pornographers, prostitutes, and other transgressors. In his latest, House of Tolerance (House of Pleasures in the US), his sympathy is with the languid courtesans of a doomed high-class fin-de-siècle Parisian brothel, who are united in their contempt for the wealthy, condescending men who subject them to fetishes, diseases, and violence.Early in this gloomy elegy to the organised vice of the Belle Epoque, which implies the maisons de tolérance weren’t much safer then the sordid Read more ...