Paris
emma.simmonds
Stop me if you know this one. What do you get if you combine Gallic absurdity with a pristine, pouting Eva Mendes and Kylie as a suicidal chanteuse? The answer, it turns out, is gloriously unpredictable entertainment – by turns satirical, melancholy and effervescently eccentric. Following on from David Cronenberg’s Cosmopolis, which chose to set its verbose and violent social critique in a white stretch limo, Holy Motors uses a similar vehicle both to transport and transform its protagonist.The short prologue sees the film’s French director, Leos Carax, fumbling blindly about a hotel room, Read more ...
Sarah Kent
It's a brave director who not only plays herself but also sings and dances in a story based on real events. After obsessively cleaning her table, Sally Potter (Orlando) sits down to write the screenplay for a film called Rage. Inspiration comes in visual flashes that, filmed in vivid colour, tell the story of three supermodels mysteriously murdered during fashion shoots in Paris. But the project is doomed because Potter refuses to make the compromises suggested by her backers.Meanwhile, though, she has taken up dancing. Wandering into a Paris theatre she is entranced by Argentinian tango Read more ...
james.woodall
Elles promises much. Małgorzata Szumowska, from Poland, is an engaged, serious film maker. 33 Scenes from Life (2008), which won a Locarno special prize, had an edgy, bohemian authenticity to it, and looked with wry east European melancholy at the darker side of real life. It might be thought that Polish edginess and French sharpness combined with beauty – in the form of Juliette Binoche – would be a winning ticket. Yet with Szumowska’s translation to Paris something’s gone wrong.First screened at Toronto last year and then Berlin earlier this, with a star of Binoche’s sureness Elles might Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
You might wonder whether Kristin Scott Thomas is doing Paris arrondissement by arrondissement. Last time we saw her was in Pawel Pawlikowski’s The Woman in the Fifth, where she was reincarnated in that district. In Lola Doillon’s In Your Hands (Contre toi in the original), she’s moved to the Eighth to undergo a bit of living hell.Or at least that’s where her character Anna Cooper begins, as a soon-to-be middle-aged surgeon, a professional, living alone, and very likely a bit lonely. Her mother at the end of the telephone, and conversations with hospital colleagues, seem the closest she gets Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
As a refreshing change from Disney-style hyper-tech 3D animated blockbusters, A Cat in Paris offers a modest story of adventure and intrigue on a pleasingly human, as well as feline, scale. The titular character is a faintly sinister black-and-orange tomcat called Dino, an accomplished lizard-hunter who lives in a Parisian apartment with Zoe and her mother Jeanne. Or at least he does by day. After dark, he slips out onto the rooftops and window ledges of Paris, and becomes the accomplice of Nico, the notorious cat burglar. Writers Jacques-Rémy Girerd and Alain Gagnol (who also co- Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
As the clouds continue and the rain pours down, the Sackler Gallery at the Royal Academy is filled with sun-dappled scenes from France. The anthology is a potpourri of paintings culled from the remarkable collections put together by the millionaire race horse breeder and art obsessed Sterling Clark – the fortune inherited from his grandfather’s involvement with the Singer Sewing Machine company - and his French actress wife Francine. Current renovations and expansions for the Clark Institute, founded in 1955 by the couple in the university town of Williamstown, Massachusetts, and one of the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The press release for The Woman in the Fifth says it’s “a twisted and intense love story” that's about a “passionate and intense relationship”. It is, to a degree. But that undersells the film. As an oblique examination of mental breakdown, director Pawel Pawlikowski's film shares a lineage with Polanski’s Repulsion.The Woman in the Fifth adapts Douglas Kennedy’s novel. American author Tom Ricks (Ethan Hawke, sporting an excellent haircut) arrives in Paris to seek out his estranged wife and their daughter. Whatever barriers there are between them are insurmountable – she has a restraining Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Hailed in some quarters for its gruelling realism in the depiction of the work of the Paris-based Child Protection Unit (the French call it La Brigade de Protection des Mineurs), Polisse is another French cop drama but with tiresome pretensions of social concern plastered on top. Actor/writer/co-director Maïwenn spent time embedded with the real-life mineurs-protecting cops and was able to observe ongoing cases, but though these have given her plenty of horrific or hair-raising raw material, the finished film fails to achieve convincing documentary weight, and doesn't feel plausible as drama Read more ...
Joe Muggs
Club culture has always had a tension between democratisation (“come one, come all!”) and exclusivity (the thrill of being in the know about the newest or most underground thing). The best clubs have always been the ones that find ways of short-circuiting this seeming opposition, and a great part of the success of The Boiler Room is the way they have harnessed technology to perform the same trick.Begun barely a year and a half ago, the premise was incredibly simple – to use video streaming to allow viewers online to watch a DJ playing to a group of friends – but the impeccable quality of the Read more ...
fisun.guner
The Vollard Suite is Picasso’s most celebrated series of etchings. Named after Ambroise Vollard, the influential avant-garde art dealer who gave the 19-year-old Picasso his first exhibition in Paris in 1901, the series was commissioned by the dealer in 1930. For the next seven years Picasso worked on it in creative bursts, completing a series of 100 etchings. Last autumn, one of the complete set – a total of 310 were printed – was purchased by London-based private collector Hamish Parker as a gift to the British Museum.Since the series has never previously been shown in its entirety in the UK Read more ...
Joe Muggs
Welcome to our second show, brought to you again from the Red Bull Studio in London where it was recorded by Brendon Harding.This time, Peter and Joe are joined live in the studio by two guests: friend of theartsdesk and musical polymath Mara Carlyle, and Arthur Jeffes of Sundog and Penguin Café. Mara discusses sharing management with J-Lo, and sings Gershwin with a ukulele, while Arthur discusses continuing the legacy of his father, Penguin Café Orchestra founder Simon Jeffes, and exclusively plays us some new material from his Sundog project, hot from the hard drive.Elsewhere you can hear Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The first series of the French cops gone-to-pot drama ended with Lieutenant Eddy Caplan about to blow the head off his nemesis Serge Lemoine. Offing him was supposed to solve all Caplan and his team’s problems. Unfortunately, Lemoine was fitted with a wire and things didn’t go to plan. Series two began in the immediate aftermath with Caplan, his in do-do colleagues and Lemoine caged in the back of police van. As it rattled along, their on-the-run compadre Théo Vachewski was being hunted down.After a brief recap of the previous series, the episode was off and running. Braquo's Read more ...