Film
Demetrios Matheou
I have no idea why the original title of this fine first feature from Frenchwoman Alix Delaporte has been changed, from Angèle and Tony to the current one. Apart from the pointlessness, it also suggests the wrong tone entirely, since Angèle is certainly no angel.The film’s first scene sees Angèle (Clotilde Hesme) having sex against a wall, in a public space in broad daylight, with a young man we will never see again. The brashness is accompanied by a business-like ennui; her payment, rather fantastically, is an action man: yes, the toy.This twisted transaction sums the woman up. The toy is a Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Earlier this year Clotilde Hesme won the César, France’s equivalent to the Oscars, for “most promising actress” in the excellent, atypical love story Angel & Tony. One wonders if the voters have some kind of collective myopia, or simply don’t see enough good movies, because Hesme stopped being "promising" a long time ago.That’s not to take away from a much-deserved award, for one of France’s unsung actresses. Ever since she came seemingly out of nowhere in 2005 to match (and even out-pout) the smouldering Louis Garrel, in his dad Philippe’s epic love story Regular Lovers, Hesme has been a Read more ...
Matt Wolf
The sun shines - a LOT - in the new Zac Efron film, which seems appropriate to a celluloid landscape shaded with loss and grief that puts such aspects of the human condition to one side in favour of the sequence of pretty-as-a-postcard images on which Scott Hicks's direction alights before too very long. Rife with portentous voiceovers on such topics as guardian angels, fate, and moving from darkness through to light, the film may appeal to rain-drenched spectators who can go on holiday simply by feasting on the visuals here; others may yearn for those halcyon days before Efron got all Read more ...