One of the neatest tricks Carême has pulled over the course of this fine first season is erasing Napoleon. He is there, when he needs to be, but he never speaks and the face of the actor playing him is rarely shown. The focus on the power games swirling around …
After all the machinations of the previous episode it’s no wonder this course of Carême chooses a different focus for all its power struggles. The episode takes place entirely within Talleyrand’s (Jérémie Renier) estate and revolves around Hortense (Lily Taieb) unexpectedly going into labour. For those of you not keeping …
It is perhaps unfair to review a film based on the comments its director made at a festival Q&A, but what Kim A. Snyder said at the Sheffield DocFest summed up the flawed worldview of this film better than the documentary itself did. Filmed largely during the Biden years as …
This documentary is so bleak that it’s going to be very hard for it to find its audience. This is a shame because it shows what countless movies have shown, only for real: how exposure to the battlefield, whether as an observer or a participant, inalterably changes a person. A …
North South Man Woman is a documentary focused on a North Korean woman, Yujin, who has made her way to safety in South Korea and who now runs a matchmaking bureau for South Korean men who wish to marry North Korean women. The cameras follow Yujin’s personal life and that …
This documentary about the continuing phenomenon of Rocky Horror is directed by the son of the man who created the phenomenon. Normally this would lead to calls of nepotism, but somehow here the closeness to the material is appropriate. The stories within Strange Journey have clearly been told and revisited …
This movie is horrifying and shaming and unspeakable but it deserves our attention, because all the horrifying, shaming, unspeakable things within it are happening to human beings. This is often forgotten in prison discourse, that every prisoner is a person too. Regardless of the worst things we have ever done, …
This documentary, about the director’s mother’s alcoholism and its impact, makes vividly apparent the problem with most documentaries. If it has been anyone other than her daughter Myrid Carten making the film, it’s clear Nuala Carten would not have participated. But director Myrid Carten made the choice to be a …
The fundraising headline of The Gas Station Attendant was clearly that director Karla Murthy’s father, H. N. Shantha Murthy, worked in a gas station while Ms. Murthy was in college. But his life was considerably more complex than the stereotype mainstreamed into American society by The Simpsons. What clearly started …
There are some shots of actress Suzu Hirose in A Pale View of Hills that are so gorgeous the audience at the Cannes Film Festival gasped aloud. Cinematographer Piotr Niemyjski clearly made heavy use of visual effects in his work – not least for the many gorgeous shots of Nagasaki …
The generic title underplays the importance of this French war film, which does something utterly shocking from an American perspective: it pays respect to France’s allies, too. Not since the days of World War II movies have any American films bothered to mark our allies, even in passing. (A brief …
In the USA, the Italian actress Valeria Golino is mainly famous for two very different roles: as Tom Cruise’s sexy girlfriend in the incredibly serious Rain Man from 1988, and then as Charlie Sheen’s sexy love interest in the incredibly silly Hot Shots! movies in 1991 and 1993. Ms. Golino …
No one quite knows what to do with director Fatih Akin. His explosive early movie Head-On was about the complex convergence of immigration and mental health issues between two Turkish-German punks. It’s one of the most violent and romantic movies ever made and also one of the smartest about intersectional …
Sentimental Value won the Grand Prix at this year’s Cannes Film Festival thanks to the three central performances by Renate Reinsve, Elle Fanning and Stellan Skarsgård. Director Joachim Trier has a real talent for pulling out the emotional subtexts of ordinary lives and figuring out why people make the choices …
Romería is the movie above all others I have been recommending from this year’s Cannes Film Festival. That is because this is such a powerful story, told with such an incredible amount of love, that it is utterly impossible to be unaffected by it. And that is before I mention …
Romane Bohringer is a French actor who, for her second film as director, has chosen to make an extremely personal story about her search for more information about her mother, Maggy, who left the family before she was a year old and died when Ms. Bohringer was in her early …
This enormous, sumptuous, magnificent movie is almost too much, which is not a complaint. Resurrection is one of those movies that decided to tell the story of a universe starting with a kitchen sink and then built out from there. It’s very long – 160 minutes in this edit – …
Now here is where things get very good. There’s a sense of humour in Escape Velocity Protocol which we haven’t seen before, just as we haven’t seen violence this serious in Murderbot before. But the main issue here is the dichotomy between the world as Murderbot (Alexander Skarsgård) understands it …
We’re off to the races! Can free planets handle themselves? Can Murderbot (Alexander Skarsgård) stand to be “stuck with these people and their pheromones in a small craft”? Although for a being that claims not to care about people, it sure does spend a lot of time paying close attention …
The movie with the best title at this year’s Cannes Film Festival is also the kind of movie filmmakers love to make: a movie about making a movie. But less joyously, the setting here is present-day Egypt, a nation not currently enjoying the delights of democracy. The creatives involved, beginning …