Paris
Nick Hasted
This has been Scarlett Johansson’s defining year. Previously seeming a slightly dazed, limited beauty, she bravely abandoned her comfort zone in Jonathan Glazer’s gruelling and strange Scottish s.f. vision Under the Skin, then had her biggest hit with Luc Besson’s Lucy.Lucy is a fun-loving student whose time in Taiwan takes a turn for the worse when she is handcuffed and flung into the clutches of Korean gangster Mr. Jang (Oldboy’s Choi Min-sik). A bag of CBH4, a drug accelerating our brains’ supposed 10 percent usage is sewn inside her, bursts when she’s kicked, and floods her system. Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
There’s a wonderful drollery to Guillaume Nicloux’s wry and eccentric comedy The Kidnapping of Michel Houellebecq (L‘Enlèvement de Michel Houellebecq) which is quintessentially Gallic. Three years ago the enfant terrible of French literature disappeared for some days from a book tour, giving rise to rumours as extreme as that he had been kidnapped by Al-Qaida. The truth – though “truth” is a very relative word in this world – as shown in the film is that Houellebecq was vanished to the suburbs of Paris where he was held in circumstances that couldn’t be friendlier.Houellebecq plays gamely Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“God isn’t in this class, we’ll leave God outside.” Although teacher Brigitte Cervoni declares that matters of religion are not appropriate for her class of non-French children learning the language of their new country, a lengthy section of School of Babel nonetheless finds them debating Adam and Eve and the differences between faiths. It’s not the only disconnect in director Julie Bertuccelli’s documentary.Despite chronicling a year of a group of immigrant children in the French school system, School of Babel (La Cour de Babel) is not about the politics of France’s attitude to immigrants or Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Eastern Boys is a disturbing film. Robin Campillo’s second feature as director catches the often aggressive world of immigrant grifters in Paris – they’re a gang of young men largely from the former Soviet Union – and their interaction with the society that surrounds them, through prostitution and crime. The issue of prostitution itself is given a complex nuance in the film’s central relationship, where control and care, exploitation and protection become uneasily mixed up, before the film’s closing third moves into thriller mode. It won the director the Best Film award in the Horizons Read more ...
Katie Colombus
This is a simple story told in the most creatively chaotic way. A kaleidoscope of stunning visuals, intricate mechanics and curious characters unfolds, revealing the tale of Chloe (Audrey Tautou) and Colin (Romain Duris) who fall in love.Their Parisian romance, set in a non-specific era, is based on the 1947 cult novel by writer and musician Boris Vian, L'Ecume des Jours. The story is predetermined by an orchestrated manuscript, constructed on a revolving conveyor belt typewriter. It dictates the development of Colin’s Pianocktail – a piano that mixes cocktails to the tune played; Read more ...
Matt Wolf
An Off Broadway play that largely passed without notice in 2002 is now a movie poised to suffer the same fate, notwithstanding the fact that this starry three-hander marks the film directing debut of the prolific American dramatist Israel Horovitz, at the age of 75. So it's no surprise that the older generation gets championed in a script (adapted by Horovitz from his stage play) that finds Maggie Smith playing a nonagenarian who, she tells us, is too old for subtlety. In which case, someone should have bitten the bullet and told Horovitz that his film is a talky, contrived and a highly Read more ...
Florence Hallett
Anselm Kiefer reminds me a bit of someone I once worked for. Totally unpredictable, and possessed of a formidable intelligence and creativity, his mental leaps can be bewilderingly hard to follow, leading occasionally to truly breathtaking results, but crashing and burning just as often. Everyone else, like me, or in Kiefer’s case his long-suffering assistant Tony, not to mention poor old Alan Yentob, has to trot along behind, barely able to keep up with the barrage of ideas, questions and orders, let alone judge whether any of it is any good.Early on, Yentob was struggling to keep abreast of Read more ...
fisun.guner
Polish director Agnieszka Holland is best known for two Holocaust films, both based on remarkable true stories: the 1990 Europa Europa and the 2011 release In Darkness. Here she tackles horror of the supernatural kind. This NBC two-parter is an updating of Ira Levin’s best-selling 1967 novel rather than a remake of Roman Polanski’s 1968 classic film, though it wouldn't matter either way, for while Polanski remained faithful to the book, this version of Rosemary’s Baby revises significant details. And in doing so, it cuts off the rich vein of elegantly spun dark humour that runs through the Read more ...
Simon Munk
What a setting! The history-hopping stealth action series drops into Revolutionary Paris in Unity. Arguably the first game of the "next generation" uses more processing power to render a gigantic, living city teeming with revolting peasants, towered over by Gothic cathedrals and stuffed full of passageways and distractions. Assassin's Creed: Unity looks so real you can almost smell Robespierre's breath. Such a shame, then, that the game fails to engage meaningfully with setting or period.The Assassin's Creed series follows an increasingly ludicrous and labyrinthine plot about memories of our Read more ...
David Nice
ENO may not always have matched the Royal Opera in the Great Puccini Voices stakes. But it's served up many of the classiest Mimìs, with Valerie Masterson, Mary Plazas and Elizabeth Llewellyn as top seamstresses. Californian former beauty queen Angel Blue, an acclaimed Musetta in the previous revival, now joins them. Unlike Llewellyn, still awaiting the international recognition she deserves, Blue is also among the favoured roster of young sopranos who, after an interregnum where we wondered where all the best black opera singers had gone - whether the spell of Leontyne Price and Jessye Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
French soprano Sandrine Piau, born in 1965 in a south-western suburb of Paris, has an agile, supple voice. It soars, so critics reach readily for all those bird metaphors: nightingale, sparrow, "she leaves the earth on wings of song" and so on. She has worked regularly with more or less the entire pantheon of baroque and early music specialists: William Christie, René Jacobs, Philippe Herreweghe, Christophe Rousset, Emmanuelle Haïm, Sigiswald Kuijken, Gustav Leonhardt, Ivor Bolton, Ton Koopman, Marc Minkowski and Nikolaus Harnoncourt.Away from Baroque repertoire, Piau sings Mozart - a Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
In a moment of wild fantasy, I thought I might try and write a whole review of Manon without mentioning sex. After all, there’s plenty of other stuff going on in Kenneth MacMillan’s tale, which last night at the Royal Opera House celebrated 40 years since its première. Inequalities of class, wealth and power are ever present, and in fact drive the story to its sticky (quite literally) conclusion in the Louisiana swamps. It's not precisely her screwing around that lands Manon on a one-way penal transport to the colonies, but her (and her brother’s) screwing over of a rich man.But who was Read more ...