Canadian filmmaker Xavier Dolan is almost indecently precocious. After writing, directing and starring in the favorably received J’Ai Tué Ma Mère (2009), he has now done the same thing in his second film, Les Amours Imaginaires. And he’s still only … Read More
Stephen Clarke, a British writer who lives in Paris, has built a successful career for himself by cleverly exploiting the long-standing love-hate relationship between the rosbifs and the frogs, to use each side’s slurring epithet for the other. After a … Read More
Copacabana, written and directed by Marc Fitoussi, is a fresh, completely absorbing little film about people – or rather, one person – you feel you might have known. Isabelle Huppert steps away from the tortured characters she often plays to … Read More
Jean Cocteau (1889-1963) is a slippery character. It’s hard to get a grip on who he was and what he did, partly because he did so many different things – he was a poet, artist, novelist, playwright, filmmaker, screenwriter, set … Read More
It’s a dream-team concept: Sylvain Chomet, the creator of the marvelous animated film Les Triplettes de Belleville, has made a new animated movie based on an unfinished script by the late, great French director and actor Jacques Tati, L’Illusioniste (The … Read More
Jean Becker’s new movie, La Tête en Friche (based on Marie-Sabine Roger’s book of the same name), is in so many ways hopelessly outdated. It portrays village life as it was represented on film in the 1930s and 1940s: gentle, … Read More
Even though L’Arnacoeur (Heartbreaker), the recent movie starring Romain Duris and Vanessa Paradis, struggled to get funding when it was made, it has proved to be a smash hit in France in the seven weeks since it opened, with 3.3 … Read More
Director Anne Le Ny has the confidence and chutzpah to deal with a number of broad themes and moral ambiguities in her second movie, Les Invités de Mon Père (My Father’s Guest), ranging from problems of immigration and cultural difference … Read More
