Nick Hammond
Le Petit Canard
Duck, Duck, No Goose
Click here for a more recent review of this restaurant. A recent survey reported that the current favorite dish of the French is magret de canard, which came as a surprise to me, as it is served relatively rarely in … Read More
La Forza del Destino
Zoran Todorovich as Don Alvaro, Violeta Urmana as Donna Leonora and Kwangchul Youn as Padre Guardiano. Photo: Opéra National de Paris/Andrea Messana Verdi’s La Forza del Destino seems tailor-made for the incomparable Joyce Grenfell’s comic monologue, “Opera Interval,” about a spectator … Read More
L’Exercice de l’État
All the talk in Paris the last couple of weeks has been of the new movie L’Exercice de l’État, which dissects French political life and gives an unflinching insight into the corridors of power. Most of the major newspapers and … Read More
The Artist, Les Biens-Aimés and Le Skylab
Three films first seen at the Cannes Film Festival last summer have opened recently in Paris: The Artist, directed by Michel Hazanavicius, for which Jean Dujardin won the prize for best actor at this year’s festival; Christophe Honoré’s new offering, … Read More
Lulu
Men in fedoras watch Lulu’s every move from the shadows. © Opéra National de Paris/Ian Patrick Lulu, the figure inspired by two Franz Wedekind plays, seems to have fascinated writers, composers and filmmakers in the early part of the 20th … Read More
Tannhäuser
Blood-covered near-naked men add to the air of orgiastic intensity. Photo: Opéra National de Paris To say that the first Paris performances of Richard Wagner’s opera Tannhäuser, about an artist torn between the lure of sensuality and that of spirituality, … Read More
Tuer le Père
Certain aspects of novelist Amélie Nothomb’s work are utterly predictable: for example, every fall a new novel (usually around 150 pages long) appears without fail, with a portrait of the author (easily identifiable by her pale face and long black … Read More
Omar m’a Tuer
The violent murder in the Alpes-Maritime region of wealthy widow Ghislaine Marchal in June 1991 has long fascinated the French press and public. Marchal’s body was discovered in her property’s cellar, which had been barricaded from within. On the wall, … Read More
Götterdämmerung
Siegfried (played by Torsten Kerl) toys with the world. Photo: Opéra national de Paris/Elisa Haberer Detractors of Wagner’s Ring Cycle claim that the four operas promote an Aryan ideal of heroism, which explains why they appealed to the extremism of … Read More
Le Gamin au Vélo
The Dardenne brothers have long been the darlings of the Cannes film festival, winning the Palme d’Or twice (for Rosetta in 1999 and L’Enfant in 2005), and in this year’s festival picking up the Grand Prix for their new movie, … Read More