Paris
Sarah Kent
When Berthe Morisot organised the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874, along with Monet, Degas, Renoir and co, she’d already exhibited at the Paris Salon for a decade – since she was 23. That’s not bad for someone refused entry to art school because she was a woman!Luckily, Berthe and her sister Edma had parents wealthy enough to employ artists like the renowned landscape painter Camille Corot to give them private lessons. They even had their own studio and, judging by the landscape included in the Dulwich Picture Gallery’s (DPG) show, Edma was rather good; but as was expected of an upper Read more ...
Nick Hasted
May 1968. As France’s Fifth Republic shook, radical director Jean-Denis Bonan divided his time in the Paris streets between filming protests and the fictional hunt for a cross-dressing serial killer. A Woman Kills lay unfinished and forgotten till 2010, a rough-edged film maudit from a tumultuous time.Hélène Picard, “a runaway…[with] a penchant for homosexuality and violence”, is executed for the serial murder of prostitutes, yet the killings by a woman seem to continue. Her executioner Louis Guilbeau (Claude Merlin) meanwhile creepily romances beautiful policewoman Solange (Solange Pradel, Read more ...
Mark Kidel
This is an enchanting album which brings together four outstanding musicians, brilliant in their own right, but also adept at the kind of collaboration in which the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.The distinguished cellist Vincent Ségal – with roots as varied as can be imagined – has known how to bring out the excellent musicianship of the Malian kora-player Ballaké Sissoko, in a series of beautiful albums for the adventurous French label No Format, which has once again brought the two perfectly matched players together. They are joined by accordionist Vincent Peirani and Read more ...
Sarah Kent
What a feast! Congratulations are due to the National Gallery for its latest blockbuster After Impressionism: Inventing Modern Art. Such a superb collection of modern masters is unlikely to be assembled again under one roof, so this is a once-in-a-lifetime, must-see exhibition.Room after fabulous room is hung with a hundred artworks, mostly paintings, on walls painted navy blue. This daring decision works well for most artists, the exception being Van Gogh whose landscapes die against the dark background. Luckily the dark blue offsets the cream wallpaper and pale pink blouse of Van Gogh’s Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Since the first John Wick film from 2014 became an unexpected hit, the Wick franchise has blossomed into a booming business empire, also including comic books, video games and upcoming TV spin-offs. The title role has transformed Keanu Reeves, who remains guarded about his spiritual leanings, into the Zen master of action heroes.At 58, Keanu may be getting a bit long in the tooth for these hyper-intense heroics, though he gently mocks himself by occasionally limping briefly after some especially taxing incident (falling off a tall building, for instance, or getting run over by a charging SUV Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
“Trapped?” hisses 40-year-old Rachel (Virginie Efira) at her boyfriend, Ali (Roschdy Zem), who has a five-year-old daughter and is returning, for the sake of their child, to his ex-wife, Alice (Chiara Mastroianni). “What’s trapped you? Nothing at all. You can have kids or not have them, whenever you like.”This is one of the most vivid scenes in Other People’s Children, Rebecca Zlotowski’s fifth feature. It is an attractive, quintessentially French film, set in Paris and beautifully shot by Georges Lechaptois, but rather cloying and well mannered compared to the wonderfully edgy, subtle An Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Vive l’entente cordiale! “Despite Brexit” (as the BBC likes to say), Apple TV+ has successfully bridged the Channel to create this lurid Anglo-French thriller, in which Euro-skulduggery rubs shoulders with bribery, corruption and high treason.At centre stage in Westminster we find Alison Rowdy (Eva Green) – slightly confusingly, Green is French, but plays an English character with a dollop of French in her background. She's employed as a civil servant who answers to the British government’s security minister, Richard Banks (a rough, gruff Peter Mullan). Rowdy will soon find herself entangled Read more ...
Saskia Baron
You Resemble Me is the very definition of a passion project, and all the better for it. First-time director Dina Amer was a journalist working for Vice News. She was sent to Paris to cover the 2015 terrorist attacks that left 130 people dead and hundreds more injured. Amer was on the scene when the police raided a flat where the terrorists were based. A young woman who died in the explosion was widely proclaimed to be France’s first female suicide bomber. The news was filled with lurid tales about Hasna Aït Boulahcen, a daughter of Moroccan immigrants who had swapped Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
First came Yasmina Reza’s 1994 long-runner Art; now another French hit, The Art of Illusion, has arrived after eight years in Paris. The two pieces couldn’t be more different: the former is a chatty spat between three sophisticated male friends (would producers use gender-fluid casting these days?); the new arrival, a larky, boisterous ensemble piece that plays with the theme of illusion and how much it contributes to what we have come to call “magic”.Thematically it’s stretched a little thin at times, but as a performance it’s a tonic. Its writer, Alexis Michalik, juggles three different Read more ...
Mark Kidel
Only a Eurostar day-trip away, at least from London, the Louvre is hosting an exceptional exhibition, which makes the journey to Paris well worthwhile. Things – A History of Still Life (Les choses – une histoire de la nature morte) is one of those massive shows that explores a complex theme in a thoroughly original and adventurous way.The curator, Laurence Bertrand Dorléac, has been given free rein to author a vast and very personal survey of still lives and artists’ representation and evocation of "objects" that ranges from Prehistoric Europe to contemporary work by artists such as Nan Read more ...
Mark Kidel
A tall African man stands alone in a pool of light. He has a cello and an immensely versatile voice. In a matter seconds, he holds the audience enchanted. He inhabits the stage as if it were by a campfire in the bush.The Bouffes du Nord, the Paris base for Peter Brook’s ritual-rich theatre for many years, the beautifully worn shell of a former music hall, with decaying walls in different tones of orange and red, has seen so many extraordinary performances. I, for one, will never forget Brook’s fulgurant Hamlet with Adrian Lester in the title role, and Isabelle Huppert, raw and present in Read more ...
David Nice
The sopranos are Ethiopian-Italian and Hispanic-American, the tenor Uzbek, the baritones South African (no EU principals, but it seems you can't have everything). This is opera at its best: the cream of international singers coming together to make a unified work of art under a director with a vision and a conductor who gives it all total security as well as freedom. It may be the tour, but it’s vintage Glyndebourne.Floris Visser’s concentrated take on Puccini’s note-perfect La bohème, revived here by Simon Iorio, premiered in the main festival earlier this year; Miranda Heggie Read more ...