France
French Exit review - Michelle Pfeiffer faces mortalitySunday, 04 July 2021
Michelle Pfeiffer all but purrs her way through French Exit, as befits a splendid actress who cut a memorable Catwoman onscreen nearly thirty years ago. Playing a New York grande dame who deals with bankruptcy by decamping with her son Malcolm (... Read more... |
Lupin, Part 2, Netflix review - master of disguise versus racists and liesSaturday, 12 June 2021
Lupin isn’t really about the fictional character it’s named after (the gentleman thief Arsène Lupin, created in 1905 by French writer Maurice Leblanc), but about Assane Diop, who’s an obsessive fan of the Lupin novels. He’s also a gentleman thief... Read more... |
Blu-ray: Masculin FémininTuesday, 25 May 2021
Jean-Luc Godard’s film-making career, a restless quest for a cinema that questions the medium as well as its place in the social and political context, is both astonishingly prolific and unique. Rarely drawing directly on autobiographical themes,... Read more... |
David Hockney / Michael Armitage, Royal Academy review - painting with an iPad vs brushes and paintSaturday, 22 May 2021
David Hockney has a new toy, an app designed specially for him that allows him to work on an iPad with fine brushes. He spent the first five months of lockdown In Normandy making daily records of the coming of spring; the results are displayed in a... Read more... |
Maylis de Kerangal: Painting Time review - safer in simulationTuesday, 11 May 2021
"Trompe-l’œil," explains the director of the Institut de Peinture in Brussels, “is the meeting of a painting and a gaze, conceived for a particular point of view, and defined by the effect it is supposed to produce”. In layman’s terms, it is the art... Read more... |
Blu-ray: RawTuesday, 04 May 2021
Raw opens with a bang, a distant figure on a remote country road stepping out in front of a car, causing it to crash into a tree. What’s really happened isn’t made clear until we’re well into French director Julia Ducournau’s 2016 feature. Part... Read more... |
Album: Gojira - FortitudeFriday, 23 April 2021
Chances are many will not have heard of Gojira. At best, as a music lover, theirs may be a name seen among the line-up of metal festivals. As ever with metal, perceived as niche but with a vast audience, this is misleading. Gojira are globally... Read more... |
Berlinale 2021: Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn review – cheeky, timely and very provocativeThursday, 04 March 2021
The Romanian director Radu Jude invariably serves spicy satire that challenges his compatriots to face historical crimes and present failings. The latest is an erudite and daft, raunchy and knockabout, endlessly provocative film that, for sake of... Read more... |
Billie Eilish: The World's a Little Blurry, Apple TV+ review - sprawling account of the singer's rise to superstardomSunday, 28 February 2021
The Billie Eilish story is a paradigm of pop music and marketing, 2020s-style. Eilish’s instinctive talent became evident when she was barely into her teens, and she flourished with the support of a close-knit and musical family. But the club-gigs-... Read more... |
Joseph Andras: Tomorrow They Won't Dare to Murder Us review - injustice and tenderness in the Algerian WarThursday, 25 February 2021
Joseph Andras wastes no time. “Not a proud and forthright rain, no. A stingy rain. Mean. Playing dirty.” This is how his debut novel kicks off, and it’s a fitting start for his retelling of the arrest, torture, one-day trial and subsequent execution... Read more... |
Album: Frànçois & The Atlas Mountains - Banane BleueWednesday, 24 February 2021
Frànçois Marry’s sixth album as Frànçois & The Atlas Mountains evokes warm days spent lounging in fields of clover reflecting on friendship, places visited and journeys which could be undertaken. Banane Bleue’s 10 tracks are unhurried and... Read more... |
Persian Lessons review - confusing Holocaust dramaSaturday, 23 January 2021
This is an odd film, made even odder by a caption near the beginning, which claims it is "inspired by true events" but doesn’t elaborate. Produced in Belarus, it’s a Holocaust drama based on a novella by the veteran East German screenwriter/director... Read more... |
