The Latest Reviews For The Language French (Page 6)

In the decade since his cult hit Rubber, French provocauteur Quentin Dupieux has been churning out small, absurd movies at a steady clip. Mandibles – his third U.S. release since the start of the pandemic – is yet another wonky tale of le ridicule, clocking in at a mere 77 minutes. Beach bum Manu (Gregoire Luig) is hired by a rich benefactor to transport a mysterious suitcase; specifically told he must do so in a car, he stumbles on an unlocked, dusty yellow Mercedes, and picks up his buddy Jean-Gab (David Marsais). Everything’s going smoothly until the pair notice an odd rumbling emanating from the trunk of their stolen automobile. Turns out, they’ve been riding around with an enormous, disgusting fly.  Continue Reading →

At this point, the mechanics of a Fast and Furious movie are no secret. Running on an engine of blistering sincerity, the over-the-top action inevitably finds Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel) pulled in for “one last job.” You’ll see a street race populated by women in bikinis. Fancy cars will defy the laws of physics as they inevitably crash, fly, or crash while flying. Roman (Tyrese Gibson) shall vamp and riff to kingdom come. Coronas will be consumed and, in the end, family will emerge victorious. Continue Reading →

80 minutes into Michael Bay’s Pearl Harbor, the titular surprise attack finally arrives. It is, without a doubt, one of the most virtuosic action set pieces ever committed to the screen, a flawlessly orchestrated symphony of carnage that burns for close to 40 minutes. Everything that you could possibly hope for from a maximalist, hyperkinetic blockbuster spectacle is here. There’s fire cascading, plumes of black smoke rising, bullets and bombs raining down, planes tumbling from the skies, boats being torn asunder, and bodies being flung about like ragdolls. Annihilation and national tragedy have never looked so stunning or—and it feels gross saying this—felt so exhilarating. Continue Reading →

Cruella de Vil is an A-List villain in a B-List franchise. Sure, 101 Dalmatians and its spinoffs have their charms, but no other aspect in the franchise has the staying power of Cruella and her iconic theme song. It’s no surprise that Disney would release an origin story for the character with Craig Gillespie’s Cruella. It’s a logical step for the company to take, but the iconic villain presents a major stumbling block: how can you make a villainess whose traditional motivation is to kill dogs for a coat into a likable hero, or at least an antihero? Continue Reading →

Film Comment used to run a semi-regular feature entitled “Guilty Pleasures” in which they would invite someone to write a piece about films that have often been ignored or reviled by critics and the public but for which they still maintain a deep love for any number of reasons.  These articles were always fun to read but I must confess that the notion of a so-called “guilty pleasure” is one to which I have never quite subscribed. My feeling is that if a movie gives you some form of pleasure—either because it is genuinely good or because of its camp value—you should be able to celebrate it without feeling any guilt over whether or not it conforms to general standards of artistic acceptability. Continue Reading →

Pulsating at the heart of Twixt are pains all too familiar to legendary writer-director Francis Ford Coppola. Third-string horror novelist Hall Baltimore (Val Kilmer), the “bargain-basement Stephen King,” arrives for a book signing in the town of Swann Valley, where, unappreciated and unable to overcome a case of writer’s block, he’s forced to confront his insignificance, his sullied legacy, and the feeling that he has nothing valuable left to say or give. Continue Reading →

After long and celebrated careers, certain directors reach a point where they’ve accomplished most of what an artist could reasonably hope to accomplish. They’ve gotten at one time or another critical acclaim, commercial success, popular recognition, and hopefully personal satisfaction. And with time, they become that fabled thing – the Old Master. They may, at this point, lack the industry clout or the financial resources that they once had, but they retain an immortal distinction, a legacy that can’t be erased. Some of them, like George Lucas, openly fantasize about using their tremendous wealth to turn away from popular movies and into experimental work. Others, like Martin Scorsese, hold enough influence to keep making major films, but often it seems like they’re unable to make a small film again. Francis Ford Coppola went ten years without directing before returning, in his seventies, to the game with Youth Without Youth and in his 2009 film Tetro he made a most interesting thing – a young man’s film.  Continue Reading →

If you were looking at a catalog of Francis Ford Coppola’s films, The Rainmaker probably wouldn’t stand out next to widely beloved pictures like The Godfather or Apocalypse Now, but it’s a rare gem of a movie that sadly often gets overlooked. A straightforward legal drama that feels more like a hardboiled detective story, The Rainmaker might feel more Raymond Chandler than John Grisham. Coppola himself adapted the screenplay after picking up a copy of Grisham’s novel in the airport, tapping Apocalypse Now writer Michael Herr to assist in writing Rudy Baylor's (Matt Damon) running narration. Continue Reading →

Look, we all love Dominic Cooper and slim-cut suits, and Dominic Cooper IN slim-cut suits, but are we all just a little tired of spies?  Continue Reading →

Every month, we at The Spool select a filmmaker to explore in greater depth — their themes, their deeper concerns, how their works chart the history of cinema, and the filmmaker’s own biography. For April, we revisit both the game-changing hits and low point misses of Francis Ford Coppola. Read the rest of our coverage here. Burrow into a man’s soul and see what you find. You may discover a darkness beyond comprehension or a light as bright as the flares that cut against the night sky. But if you mangle that soul in the throes of war, maim it through acts of killing, expose it to enough raw horror to blight mind and body, you can never really know. The parts of ourselves we hold dear become wrenched and twisted within that grim crucible, until they become unrecognizable. That’s the overwhelming feeling that washes over you during Apocalypse Now, Francis Ford Coppola’s seminal 1979 masterpiece. Set during the Vietnam War, the film sees Captain Willard (Martin Sheen), a U.S. Army assassin, dispatched to travel upriver into Cambodia and take out the infamous Colonel Kurtz (Marlon Brando). Kurtz is a decorated officer who’s gone rogue and cultivated a following all his own, one which strikes fear into the hearts of all sides of this conflict. In that framework, the movie peers into the souls of these two men and considers what, if anything, can be gleaned from their war-ravaged psyches. Continue Reading →

The first lesson for 15-year-old Lyz Lopez (Noée Abita) in Slalom is an appropriately harsh one, considering the film’s subject matter. To become a world-class skiing champion, she has to overcome all fear, all under the guidance of an overbearing coach (Jérémie Renier) who grooms her in more ways than one.  Continue Reading →

If repression is the ultimate aphrodisiac, there are few films that make such a case for it than Wong Kar-wai’s sumptuous 2000 masterpiece In the Mood for Love, one of the most passionate, delicately rendered on-screen odes to yearning cinema has ever produced.  Continue Reading →

Two old flames reuniting, a harried nursing home worker, and Dante Basco's family affair mark SXSW's Narrative Spotlight. (This dispatch is part of our coverage of the 2021 SXSW Film Festival.) One year ago, the idea of doing a virtual version of the South by Southwest film festival would have sounded like an insurmountable task. Now, it’s just one more piece of “normal” life that we take for granted. For the second year in a row, SXSW has gone online and though that’s led to a lot of changes, that hasn’t altered the fact that the festival is still home to distinctly-rendered indie projects. Some of those films can be found in the Narrative Spotlight section of the festival, which kicked off with a trio of titles, including See You Then. Continue Reading →

Xavier Beauvois' procedural offers intriguing day-in-the-life police work, despite an abrupt late-film shift into melodrama. (This review is part of our coverage of the 2021 Berlin Film Festival.) Drift Away (Albatros), the eighth film from French filmmaker Xavier Beauvois, contains such abrupt shifts in focus and tone that one’s degree of enjoyment towards it will depend largely on rolling with the punches.  Continue Reading →

Director Quentin Dupieux understands that the surreal blooms in a short period of time. Like Dupieux’ Deerskin (Le daim), Keep An Eye Out (Au poste) slowly pulls back thin leaves of logic before chaos springs out. Masterfully (and perhaps mercifully) just as we realize and appreciate the world’s full confusing splendor, the film ends.  Continue Reading →

One early scene in Natasha Kermani’s horror-thriller Lucky features a tracking shot following protagonist May (played by screenwriter Brea Grant) walking to her car in an empty parking garage. There's a foreboding sense that May is not alone even as the garage is seemingly deserted; a contemporary counterpart to the haunted gothic mansion. Fear and danger are everywhere, and nowhere.  Continue Reading →

Céline Sciamma's followup to Portrait of a Lady on Fire is a graceful tale of rediscovered childhood. (This review is part of our coverage of the 2021 Berlin Film Festival.) In the wake of the international success of her hypnotic, Gothic-infused romantic drama Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019), it would have been natural to assume that Céline Sciamma's next film would be a major project and the center of great scrutiny. Perhaps recognizing and preferring to avoid that template, Sciamma instead went the other way. She not only follows up Portrait with the decidedly small-scale Petite Maman, she shot it so quickly and in such secrecy that most people didn't even know she was working on anything until its world premiere at Berlinale was announced.  Continue Reading →

Dan Stevens stars as a seductive but malfunctioning robot companion in Maria Schrader's refreshing, tender exploration of longing. (This review is part of our coverage of the 2021 Berlin Film Festival.) It’s nearly impossible to not think of Spike Jonze’s romantic drama Her while watching Unorthodox creator Maria Schrader’s third feature I’m Your Man. Granted, both movies focus on a relationship between a lonely, messy human being and an AI. But where Jonze’s film tells the story from the male gaze, Schrader flips the narrative and gives the room to a complicated female character. The result is not only refreshing but also more tender and meditative, exploring love, loneliness, and longing over the technological ethics that tend to occupy these kinds of films. Continue Reading →

An icon of the 20th-century jazz scene, Billie Holiday was an icon of Black culture, haunted by abuse and addiction. Her song “Strange Fruit”, based on a poem that describes a lynching, propelled her to fame – but also got the attention of the federal government, taking dramatic steps to stop her from singing the song in an effort to racialize the War on Drugs. In The United States vs. Billie Holiday, Lee Daniels tracks Holiday as the Federal Department of Narcotics begins to pursue her toward that end, in a film that ends up being a waste of potential. Continue Reading →

I am a great lover of camp media. I love the over-the-top, the ridiculous, the melodramatic, and the ostentatious. I love storytelling that delves so far into the extremes of the human experience that it departs from reality altogether. Unfortunately, camp can backfire, and when it doesn’t work, it can become so ridiculous that it’s hard to watch.  Continue Reading →

Pelé is the kind of sports figure it feels like you’re just sort of born having some knowledge of. I couldn’t tell you why I know who Pelé is, particularly as an American with a serious aversion to sports, but I knew he was one of the greatest, if not the greatest, soccer players of all time. I seemed to have absorbed the information out of the ether. But the new Netflix documentary Pelé (not to be confused with the 2016 biopic) corrected that. Continue Reading →