SEAN PRICE WILLIAMS NEW YORK INDEPENDENT CINEMA IN PICTURES
A strange Alice-in-Wonderland-style stroll through suburban, downtrodden America, where the shadow of Trumpism still looms large, “The Sweet East” is the first film from the coolest of American cinematographers, Sean Price Williams. American cinema always seems capable of surprising us. A case in point is this scathing comedy of wild freedom and creativity discovered at […]
FOUR TIMES SALVADOR DAAAAAALI
The thirteenth film by the prolific Quentin Dupieux, whose career as a filmmaker has now far outstripped that of a musician (known as Mr. Oizo), Daaaaaali! is a surrealist love-letter tribute to the legendary painter’s mad personality, “too big for one man”, and thus embodied by several actors. Four actors (Gilles Lellouche, Édouard Baer, Jonathan […]
THE MELANCHOLY ACTOR
Sweet, tender and sad, Andrew Haigh’s “Without Ever Knowing Each Other” is a film where grief and love intertwine, through the meeting of two lonely beings, formidably played by Andrew Scott and that most melancholy of contemporary actors, Paul Mescal. It’s a moving story of love, loneliness and grief, carried by the formidable but too-rare […]
Hollywood icons under the eye of Douglas Kirkland
The Fahey/Klein Gallery in Los Angeles opens the year 2024 with a fine exhibition by Douglas Kirkland (1934 -2022), whose sixty-year career has captured the essence of iconic personalities through his lens. Brigitte Bardot, Charlie Chaplin, Judy Garland, Peter Sellers, Sigourney Weaver… Numerous icons light up the walls of the Californian space. The man who […]
BERTRAND BONELLO, ROMANTIC FILMMAKER
Director-musician, literary filmmaker and painter, Bertrand Bonello has for the past twenty-five years been ploughing a distinctive furrow in the history of French cinema, blending the freedom of the Nouvelle Vague with the style of German painters and English poets. Bertrand Bonello, a romantic filmmaker with the look of a cursed artist, was first discovered […]
SUR LES ROUTES DU CINEMA, AN INVITATION TO TRAVEL
Halfway between a cinema book and a travel guide, Guillaume Evin’s “Sur Les Routes du Cinéma” (On the Roads of Cinema) covers nearly 400 pages of film locations and natural settings from several hundred films. The longest of all cinephile road-trips. Planning a trip to Havana? A chance to visit the filming locations of Laurent […]
RAUL GONZO, BETWEEN PHOTOGRAPHY AND CINEMA
The work of Californian and Latin American photographer and film-maker Raul Gonzo plunges us into a world of acid colours, sets, costumes and whimsical narratives. A cinematic universe strengthened over the years, just waiting to be explored. Director and photographer since 2010, Raul Gonzo works with colour and the illusion of a child constructing the […]
THE STRANGE WORLD OF POOR CREATURES
After committing suicide, a young woman named Bella (Emma Stone) is brought back to life by Dr. Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe). Her brain replaced by that of an unborn child, she becomes entrenched in the life of a shrewd but debauched lawyer (Mark Ruffalo) and, by advocating her freedom, rediscovers the world. A strange, motley, […]
ANIMAL – AN ENDLESS SUMMER
The second feature from Greek director Sofia Exarchou, Animal paints an almost documentary-like portrait of a group of entertainers at a vacation resort. It’s summer at an all-inclusive resort on a Greek island. Backstage at the hotel, the performers are rehearsing: every evening, dance shows of various genres are offered to tourists. Animal recounts the […]
JACOB ELORDI, THE KING
He’s Elvis in Sofia Coppola’s “Priscilla”. Portrait of a young actor discovered on platforms and on television, who is making his way in American auteur cinema. He hasn’t changed much since his iconic role as Nate, a high school soccer star with the look of an American Apollo in the series “Euphoria”. Just his voice […]
CINEMA IN COLOUR
Charles Bramesco’s beautiful book “Les Couleurs du Cinéma” (published by Pyramyd) offers detailed but synthetic notes that make you want to see dozens of films again and again, offering them up for analysis as paintings and flat tints of colour. Fans of the photographic cinema of Wes Anderson, Stanley Kubrick or Agnès Varda often refer […]
ANTARCTICA, GETTING TO KNOW THE ICE
In a new documentary that is more artistic than educational, Luc Jacquet once again returns to Antarctica. In magnificent black and white, the colour of emperor penguins, he shares his passion for this world of ice and sky. “Many years later (…), Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to recall that distant afternoon when his father took […]
PHILIPPE R. DOUMIC, THE CINEPHILE’S NOSTALGIA
This could be the perfect holiday gift if you’ve ever dreamed of living in a 1960s French film. Philippe R. Doumic, l’œil du cinéma, with its 200 black and white portraits, is the souvenir book of an eternally youthful era. All the icons of the 1960s French cinema have passed before his lens: Anna Karina, […]
SEEING WONG KAR-WAI AGAIN
Before “The Grandmaster 2046” and “In The Mood for Love”, Wong Kar-wai was already an immense filmmaker with a well-honed style. Rediscover four of his films in cinemas from December 20th . The stories in Wong Kar-wai’s films sometimes seem to resemble each other: a little violence and a few guns, the traditional heritage of […]
CAREY MULLIGAN, WITH MASTERY
This winter, we’ll see her as Felicia Montealegre, Costa Rican actress and wife of Leonard Bernstein, in Bradley Cooper’s Maestro, available from December 20 on Netflix. But over the past fifteen years, Carey Mulligan has carved out a special place for herself in American cinema. We sometimes forget that Carey Mulligan is British. Indeed, we’ve […]
A FEW DAYS BEFORE THE HAIFA FILM FESTIVAL
Just before the start of a new conflict between Israel and Palestine, the country’s biggest film festival, the Haifa International Film Festival, was held. We report In early October, the port city of Haifa in northern Israel hosted the 39th edition of the Hebrew state’s oldest and biggest film festival. A not-to-be-missed event for […]
MARCO BELLOCHIO FACING HISTORY
With The Kidnapping and the documentary “Marx Can Wait“, Marco Bellocchio completes a rich filmography of great stories and intimate dramas. With “The Abduction”, filmmaker Marco Bellocchio once again turns his attention to a dark episode in Italian history. The year is 1853, in Bologna. Men from the Vatican burst into the home of a […]
DANIEL SACKHEIM, IN PRAISE OF FILM NOIR
The Emmy Award-winning Hollywood director and producer plunges us into his photographic explorations through stories hidden behind the opaque shadows of the cradle of film noir. He is a big name behind the scenes of the Hollywood industry. Daniel Sackheim’s career in film and television spans more than thirty years. From directing to producing, he […]
AUGURE BACK TO CONGO
Using the codes of magic realism to create a virtuoso and spectacular mise-en-scène, Augure is a beautiful first film, portraying a contemporary Africa torn between tradition and modernity. The first film by Congolese-born Belgian rapper Baloji, Augure takes as its starting point a return to his homeland, that of Koffi (Marc Zinga), who has returned […]
“HOW TO HAVE SEX” THEIR SIXTEENTH BIRTHDAY IN CRETE
“How to Have Sex” is a very personal debut film, chronicling the vacation of a group of British teenagers on a vacation to a seaside resort in Crete. It’s a seaside town in Greece, but everyone speaks English. The tourists are almost all teenagers or very young adults, here to drink, party and drink some […]
SUPERMODELS: A HISTORY OF THE 1990S
Available since the end of September on Apple TV+, the four-part series Les Supermodels narrates the revolutionary destinies of 1990s legends Linda Evangelista, Christy Turlington, Naomi Campbell and Cindy Crawford. We discover the particular destinies of four women who are now in their fifties and who have spent – as Naomi Campbell puts it – […]
IN THE SOFIA COPPOLA ARCHIVES
With the beautiful collector’s book Sofia Coppola Archives (published by Mack Books), the American director offers us rare and generous access to her archives and memories of almost twenty-five years of cinema. With Priscilla, her eighth feature film, just presented at the Venice Film Festival, Sofia Coppola opens up her personal archives to Mack Books, […]
THE POD GENERATION, THE PARENTS OF TOMORROW
Part dystopian fable, part sci-fi comedy, Sophie Barthes’ “The Pod Generation”, starring Emilia Clarke and Chiwetel Ejiofor, poses a delicate question: what if it were possible to outsource pregnancies and have babies born in “pods”? In a future described as “very near”, where artificial intelligence is everywhere, a couple – Rachel and Alvy […]
LOST IN THE NIGHT, IN THE SHADOW OF THE DESERT
After penning several episodes of the Netflix series “Narcos: Mexico”, Mexican filmmaker Amat Escalante returns to the cinema of his choice with the beautiful “Lost in the Night”: a visually rich genre and auteur film about contemporary Mexico. The fifth film by Mexican director Amat Escalante (Heli, La Région Sauvage), “Lost in the […]