Eric Lartigau’s La Famille Bélier has barely opened in cinemas in France and is already being hailed as THE French film of 2014. This is a feelgood movie à la française which piles on the schtick in the story of a family where all the members apart from the eldest daughter are deaf. It has French critics in raptures while…
For his eagerly awaited follow-up to Le Prénom (What’s in a Name), Matthieu Delaporte completely changes tack by directing an intriguing, dark thriller with the versatile Matthieu Kassovitz in the lead role. Un Illustre Inconnu raises a number of questions about identity and isolation in a tense, well-paced film, but avoids drowning under these weighty…
Director Alexandre Coffre is playing it safe with Le Père Noël, a Christmas film with definite shades of the US hit Bad Santa which had Billy Bob Thornton as the criminal who dresses up as Santa Claus to rob department stores on Christmas Eve. After last year’s disappointing Eyjafjallajokull, Coffre aims straight for the heart…
French director Philippe de Chauviron’s Qu’est ce qu’on a fait au Bon Dieu Serial (Bad) Weddings is the most successful French language film of 2104 chalking up over 12 million admissions in France so far – more than double its nearest rival Supercondriaque. But it’s not only French audiences who are flocking to see this tale of a…
For her third stint in the director’s chair Marie-Castille Mention-Schaar has again plunged into a story based on a real event to deliver Les Héritiers, one of the best films of the year. After the social unrest depicted in Bowling, Les Héritiers uses the backdrop of the Holocaust to call for racial and religious tolerance while at the same time sharply criticising the French education system.…
Apart from advertising a well-known brand of coffee alongside Hollywood celebrity George Clooney, Oscar winning actor Jean Dujardin has been largely absent from French screens. Now he’s back with the stylish thriller La French set in Marseille in the 1970s. Comparisons with The French Connection, starring Gene Hackman as Popeye Doyle, are hard to ignore,…
This is the second time director Jean-Jacques Zilbermann has tackled the true story of his mother’s relationship with the two women she met at Aushwitz concentration camp who became her lifelong best friends. The first was the documentary Irene and Her Sisters and now A la Vie which details the lives of the three woman as…