Tag: France

Categories
Animation Features Live Action Movies

Mars Express
(Mars Express)

Director – Jérémie Périn – 2023 – France – Cert. 15 – 85m

*****

In the 23rd Century, a private investigator and her resurrected robot assistant go to Mars to investigate the murder of a cybernetics student – out in UK cinemas on Friday, June 13th from the 27th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival

The difference between humans and machines is one of the great themes of science fiction from Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982) to Ghost in the Shell (Mamoru Oshii, 1995). Mars Express takes its name from an Earth-Mars shuttle which, following a bravura action / chase sequence early on, not unlike the one at the start of Ghost in the Shell, is used by private investigator Aline Ruby (voice: Léa Drucker from Custody, Xavier Legrand, 2017) and her assistant Carlos Rivera (voice: Daniel Njo Lobé) to transport a captured suspect from Earth to Mars where, it transpires on arrival, the relevant paperwork to detain their prisoner has been wiped from their on-person devices and internet-accessible office, meaning they are forced to release their prisoner. The narrative is littered with cleverly thought out ideas like this.

The setting is the 23rd Century and mostly Mars, where the pair are hired to search for a second year cybernetics student who has gone missing.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

The Seed
of the Sacred Fig
(Dane-ye
Anjir-e Ma’abed,
دانه‌ی انجیر معابد)

Director – Mohammad Rasoulof – 2024 – Iran, Germany, France – Cert. 15 – 167m

*****

An Iranian state functionary, married with two teenage daughters, is promoted to the position of judge at the same time as the Women, Life, Freedom protests erupt… And then, his gun goes missing at home… – out on Blu-ray and DVD from Monday, June 9th 2025

A film so extraordinarily brilliant that it is almost impossible to conceive.

An opening intertitle explains the remarkable life cycle of a tree which grows on one of the southern Iranian islands. Its seeds fall onto the branches of other trees through bird droppings. The seeds then germinate, and their roots move towards the ground. When the roots reach the ground, the sacred fig tree stands on its own feet and its branches strangle the host tree.

2022. The tireless and diligent work of state functionary Iman (Missagh Zareh) has finally been rewarded; he is to be appointed a judge. In a repressive regime like Iran, that’s not a job looked upon favourably by most of the population, so his work gives him a pistol just in case he should need to defend himself or his family. At home, in the Tehran apartment where he lives with his family, he keeps the weapon in a drawer.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Mongrel
(Baiyi Cang Gou,
白衣蒼狗)

Director – Chiang Wei-liang – 2024 – Taiwan, Singapore, France – Cert. 15 – 128m

****1/2

An immigrant caregiver is caught between the demands of his exhausted, needy clients on the one hand and his profit-oriented gangster taskmasters on the other – out in UK cinemas on Friday, May 23rd

This gets straight in there with a taboo-breaking shot of a human bottom covered in excrement, something familiar to anyone who has worked as a carer for an incontinent person but a bit of a shock to the rest of us. A hand bearing a cloth comes into shot and wipes the excrement off. When we eventually see the carer’s head, he is wearing earphones as he does the work. All his male client is doing is wordlessly moaning. We watch the carer lift the man, reassuring him, and deposit him in an offscreen chair. An elderly woman dozes on the sofa. He wipes her brow with a fresh towel. She takes it from him and wipes her face. He tells her he’s fed and bathed Hui (i.e. the son, played by Kuo Shu-wei who has cerebral palsy).

The carer goes outside in the rain. In the cab of his truck, his boss asks, what the hell took you so long?… Read the rest

Categories
Art Documentary Features Live Action Movies

Exhibition on Screen
Michelangelo
Love and Death

Director – David Bickerstaff – 2017 – UK – Cert. U – 91m

*****

Sixteenth Century Renaissance sculptor Michelangelo remains one of the greatest artists of all time, yet his overreaching ambition frequently proved his undoing – back out in UK cinemas to tie in with the 550th anniversary of Michelangelo’s birth from Tuesday, May 20th

“From a fountain of mercy… my suffering is born.” These words (voiced by James Faulkner as Michelangelo) accompany images of a present day sculptor (Marco Ambrosini) working away at a piece of marble in his studio. The writings of Vasari (voice: Lawrence Kennedy) take up the story. A boy was born to a noble family in 1475. Art Critic and Author Jonathan Jones places Michelangelo among the greats, like Leonardo da Vinci, Rembrandt, Picasso. He deals with the strangest, darkest and most difficult stuff. He is the original famous artist. He had two biographies written about him in his lifetime, and took great interest in them, helping bring them to fruition. He painted, sculpted, built architecture, wrote poetry, even built military fortifications. This was the time when artists started being regarded as creative geniuses, according to Art Historian Jennifer Sliwka. Vasari referred to Michelangelo and his art in terms of Divinity and then the Divine.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Blue
is the Warmest Colour
(La Vie d’Adèle)

Director – Abdellatif Kechiche – 2013 – France – Cert. 18 – 180m

UK release date 22/11/2013;

Review originally published in Third Way magazine, November 2013.

A loose adaptation of Julie Maroh’s graphic novel Le Bleu est une Couleur Chaude, this is one of the most touching films about romantic love (and physical passion) ever. Be warned, it contains some pretty explicit, real rather than simulated, sex scenes (there’s good reason for the 18 certificate) but these appear in a wider, character-driven context.

Adèle (Adèle Exarchopoulos) and her mainly girl peer group at school spend much time discussing boys. She sleeps with but feels no real connection to a boy who’s a “sure thing”. While this romance is going nowhere, she exchanges glances with an unknown blue-haired girl on the arm of another woman on the street and is completely smitten. Seeing her emotional turmoil, she’s dragged off for a drink by her confidant, a boy she’s unaware is gay until they’re together in a gay bar, from which she makes her excuses and somehow winds up alone in an all-girl bar where Emma (Léa Seydoux), the girl with blue hair, chats her up. From there, to the confusion of her straight peers, a relationship slowly blossoms into full-blown passion.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

The Devils

Director – Ken Russell – 1971 – UK – Cert. 18 – 106m 41s (cut)

*****

UK DVD release date 19/03/2012, cert. 18, 107 mins plus extras, £19.99. Reviewed for Third Way

40 years after its 1971 theatrical release, the late Ken Russell’s key work reaches UK DVD in its original UK X Certificate version with a host of invaluable DVD extras. Although a more complete (2004 restoration) director’s cut exists, the nature of the excised material makes the current cut as complete as is ever likely to be released on DVD. In terms of controversy, the film has everything – sex, religion, politics and torture – and Russell’s original cut didn’t hold back in any of these areas. This presented headaches for not only the distributor Warner Bros. in terms of a mainstream US release but also the UK censor who questioned, as the BBFC’s secretary John Trevelyan succinctly put it, “whether artistic quality justifies total freedom.”

The plot concerns seventeenth century France where Cardinal Richelieu (Christopher Logue) is attempting to increase the Catholic Church’s hold on the nation by persuading decadent monarch Louis XIII (Graham Armitage) to knock down the walls surrounding cities that enable their functioning as self-governing entities.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

The Return

Director – Uberto Pasolini – 2024 – Italy, Greece, UK, France – Cert. 15 – 116m

**

Odysseus returns home to his island kingdom of Ithaca ten years after the Trojan War to find faithful wife Penelope fending off insistent suitors who threaten to kill son Telemachus – out in UK cinemas on Friday, April 11th

A young man (Charlie Plummer) stares out on clear blue Mediterranean waters crashing against the shore’s rocks. In an interior, an older woman (Juliette Binoche) weaves at her shuttle. On a beach, unobserved, the flotsam and jetsam of a shipwreck wash up, as does the unconscious body of a man (Ralph Fiennes). In the local village, a man threatens the young man with a knife.

Under pressure to marry one of the men in the village – her husband Odysseus, the island’s king, never having returned from the Trojan War – Penelope (for the woman played here by Binoche is she) claims she will do so once she has finished weaving her grandfather’s shroud. She is accused of having been weaving it for months.

The Fiennes character is rescued from the sea by a boat, only for crew members to throw him back into the sea.… Read the rest

Categories
Animation Features Movies

The Most Precious
of Cargoes
(La Plus Précieuse
des Marchandises)

Director – Michel Hazanavicius – 2024 – France – Cert. 12a – 81m

*****

In Winter in a forest, a poor woodcutter’s wife rescues an abandoned baby thrown from a passing train and, despite her husband’s misgivings, raises the girl as her own – out in UK and Ireland cinemas on Friday, April 4th

Once upon a time… In the woods through which many trains pass… In a war… Yes, that war… In Winter, when everything is under snow… The wife (voice: Dominique Blanc from La Reine Margot, Patrice Chéreau, 1994; Indochine, Régis Wargnier, 1992) of a poor woodcutter, unable to have children, is outside and prays to the Gods of the Trains. Whether they hear her and look upon her kindly, or whether they even exist, it’s impossible to say. Following her prayer, however, she hears the sound of a baby crying. How did the baby get there? Well, unbeknownst to the woman, a man in a goods wagon threw it out of a passing train. She locates the baby girl, takes it home, feeds it. It’s the child she never had.

Her husband, the woodcutter (voice: Grégory Gadebois from Everything Went Fine, François Ozon, 2021; Redoubtable, Michel Hazanavicius, 2017), on returning home, discovers the baby and is furious.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

When Autumn Falls
(Quand Vient l’Automne;
US: When Fall is Coming)

Director – François Ozon – 2024 – France – Cert. 15 – 102m

*****

A grandmother’s cooking accidentally poisons her daughter, who survives… in the ensuing emotional turmoil, past truths are revealed, which have devastating effects… – out in UK cinemas on Friday, March 21st

Michelle (Hélène Vincent) lives alone in rural Burgundy. She goes to church. She goes out picking mushrooms with her old friend Marie-Claude (Josiane Bolasko), who attempts to stop her picking the poisonous ones. At home, Michelle double-checks the mushrooms against photos and blurb in her mushroom reference book. She cooks the mushrooms. She gets a phone call telling her her guests are on the way. She is surprised that the driver is using Laurant’s car.

Her daughter Valérie (Ludivine Sagnier) arrives in the car with grandson Lucas (Galan Erlos) in tow. He is looking forward to spending the Summer with his gran. Valérie, however, is constantly angry, blaming her mum for everything, occasionally making remarks about “what you did”. She is clearly upset by something in their past history, although it’s unclear as to exactly what. Although grandmother has given daughter her former Paris apartment, Valérie also seems keen that Michelle sign over the current house to her under a scheme that would exempt Valérie from paying tax on it.… Read the rest

Categories
Art Documentary Live Action Movies

Exhibition on Screen
Dawn of Impressionism
Paris 1874

Director – Ali Ray – 2025 – UK – Cert. U – 91m

*****

The origins of Impressionism are revealed via the 1874, anti-art-establishment exhibition which birthed what is today the world’s favourite art movement – out in UK cinemas from Tuesday, March 18th

At the present time, the best known school of painting in the history of art must surely be Impressionism. To both open this latest Exhibition on Screen outing and promote the film on its posters, the filmmakers head to arguably the most iconic Impressionist painting of them all, Claude Monet’s Impression: Sunrise (1872), pictured above. To reinforce the point, a brief art auction sequence shows one of his paintings fetching astronomical prices.

Exhibition on Screen’s excellent, history of art documentary series entries are often built around one or more specific art exhibitions, and this one uses two as its foundation. The Musée d’Orsay in Paris held Paris 1874: Inventing Impressionism from March 26th until July 14th 2024, after which the exhibition travelled to the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC to appear under the slightly different moniker Paris 1874: The Impressionist Moment from September 8th 2024 until January 19th 2025. Alas, this is not one of those cases where your appetite will be whetted to go and see a current or upcoming exhibition, because both shows have already been and gone.… Read the rest