Paris
fisun.guner
While any Manet survey, however compromised by a lack of significant loans, must be considered "an event", this is not quite the exhibition one might have hoped to see of a great artist. Taking up one vast floor of the Royal Academy with just over 50 paintings (and some not very good pastels), many of which are unfinished and must have been judged unsatisfactory by the artist himself, it is far too thinly spread to be the touted blockbuster it seeks to sell itself as. And since there are quite a few indifferent paintings, one feels slightly sad that anyone coming fresh to this bold and Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
Les Misérables is revolutionary, but not in a French way. Oscar-winning director Tom (The King's Speech) Hooper’s film of a musical seen by over 60 million people in over 40 countries and in half again as many languages has engaged so much critical ink I’m almost dreading writing my own opinion. However, as a property that has run onstage for 27 years, Les Misérables - once nicknamed The Glums - is a stirring tale of love, loss, cruelty, salvation and predation that also comes with a built-in audience of which you may or may not be a member.Whatever you think about musicals (I hate Read more ...
David Nice
Rolando Villazón at 40 is back on reasonably stylish form, as far as the voice will allow him to go – which is not always up and volume-wise only just as far as the Covent Garden Balcony. John Copley’s Royal Opera Bohème is two years younger than the Mexican tenor. It burns less warmly than the faltering stove in the first act, casts a pall over collective attempts to reanimate the naturalism which is all there in Puccini’s perfect score, and needs a second interval to drag its weary bones back up the stairs to the students’ attic in Act Four.The late Julia Trevelyan Oman’s sets still have Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Although it's impossible to place yourself in the shoes of audiences seeing these other-worldly short films at the dawn of the 20th century, the reaction they provoke now cannot be that different. Delight, surprise and then amazement. These films were meant to be magical, and remain so. Taking 19th century theatre in all its forms, capturing it on film and making it even more unreal with hand tinting and editing resulted in a unique strand of cinema.Fairy Tales collects 25, chronologically sequenced, films made by the Pathé Frères between 1901 and 1908. Most are feéries, or fairy films, but Read more ...
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 ...