Following Alix Delaporte’s success with her first film, Angèle et Tony (2011), which won acting prizes at the Césars for Clotilde Hesme and Grégory Gadebois, the director has teamed up with the same actors for Le Dernier Coup de Marteau (The … Read More
Continuing our run on reviews of French films set in Africa, this week we have Les Jours d’Avant, a short (47-minute) movie directed by Karim Moussaoui that takes place in a suburb of Algiers in 1994. The movie starts from … Read More
The actress Endurance Newton plays Hope, the female lead in the film of the same name directed by Boris Lojkine. Perhaps her real first name would have been a more accurate title for this movie about poor African emigrants trying … Read More
The life of Daru, the hero of the fine new film Loin des Hommes (Far from Men), directed by David Oelhoffen and loosely based on a short story by Albert Camus, couldn’t be any simpler: a teacher living in a … Read More
Most crime dramas thrive on ever-increasing tension, long car chases and bloody shoot-outs, so the fact that Frédéric Tellier’s new movie has very few of these elements makes it refreshingly distinctive. Focusing on the police investigations into the murders committed … Read More
If anybody ever suspected that the extraordinarily prolific François Ozon wished to be viewed as the French Almodóvar, his latest film, Une Nouvelle Amie (The New Girlfriend), amply confirms those suspicions. Not only (like the Spanish director’s Live Flesh) is … Read More
Mommy, the latest film by French-Canadian wunderkind Xavier Dolan, is no Mommy Dearest. If anything, it is the child who is abusive in this tale of a dysfunctional mother- son unit. Mommy is Diane (Anne Dorval), feisty, attractive and sexy … Read More
In September 2011, the (real-life, controversial) French novelist Michel Houellebecq disappeared for some time during a promotional tour for his novel La Carte et le Territoire, giving rise to speculation on the Web as to what had happened to him … Read More
The title of Les Garçons et Guillaume, à Table!, the movie that swept this year’s Césars (the French Oscars) with five awards, including best film and best actor, says it all. When he was a child, that was the phrase … Read More
After watching director Guillaume Brac’s Tonnerre, you might be inclined to make the distinction between forgettable works of art that are pleasurable because they entertain, and unforgettable works of art that are at once pleasurable and disturbing. I would place Tonnerre … Read More
