What is most striking about JOHN WICK: CHAPTER 4, and JW:C4 is a very striking film, is how emotionally engaging it is as is goes about the business of filling the screen to bursting with gloriously choreographed, ultra-violent action sequences. What in other films of this ilk would provide a paper-thin motivation for its protagonists… Read More »
FRENCH EXIT
FRENCH EXIT is a deft comedy that is low key but also pointed and deeply affecting, despite concerning itself with the trials and tribulations of a woman who has raised superficiality and self-absorption to a high art.
CYRANO, MY LOVE
CYRANO MY LOVE is an ebullient comedy of errors that recounts the fraught confluence of art, commerce, and egos that gave birth to Cyrano de Bergerac, the most successful play in French theater history. As witty and wise as that character himself, it is a love letter to the creative process that spares none of… Read More »
RADIOACTIVE
RADIOACTIVE tells a story of scientific curiosity in a world where personality skews the perception of the work itself, and politics are never far from the equation. It lays bare not just the injustice of that, but also its stupidity
THE TRUTH (La Vérité)
In Hirokazu Koreeda’s last film, the Oscar®-nominated SHOPLIFTERS, he incisively examined the ethics of capitalism, and its effects on one poverty-stricken, yet devoted, ragtag family ingeniously doing battle with a system designed to keep them down economically. In THE TRUTH, he moves the action from Tokyo to Paris to examine the ethics of veracity on… Read More »
ANNA
There is in Luc Besson’s ANNA fully one-third of a very good movie. That third is a finely drawn satire, cartoonishly violent in its sublimation of female rage as it addresses female exploitation in the modern world using the milieus of espionage and modeling as the metaphor. The other two-thirds is a plodding retread of… Read More »
LOST IN PARIS
The spirit of Jacques Tati is alive and well in LOST IN PARIS, a charming comedy of coincidences (or is it fate?). As stylized as it is heartwarming, it is an unexpected love story set against the magical backdrop of Paris, with every movement, from a roasted red pepper on the loose, to a love… Read More »
AS ABOVE SO BELOW
Whatever else AS ABOVE SO BELOW has to recommend it, and it has several things that eminently do so, it has breathed a little fresh air into the found footage genre of horror film. This is a tidy little horror film heavy on mood, light on gore, and bursting with a refreshing originality of story… Read More »
Bertrand Bonello and Gaspard Ulliel Resurrect SAINT LAURENT
Fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent rocked the fashion world of the 1960s and 70s, and he designed his image as carefully as he did any of his haute couture. When making a bio-pic about a legend like this, the trick is to say something that hasn’t been said before. That was the first thing I… Read More »
JULIE & JULIA
If Julia Child had not chosen the right moment to powder her nose at an embassy party in Paris, she might never have met Simone Beck, and there might never have been the classic cookbook, Mastering the Art of French Cooking. If Julie Powell, at the end of a particularly trying day as a government… Read More »