Film, Tom Dawson

Her Name is Sabine

21 Aug 2008

DOCUMENTARY As an actress, Sandrine Bonnaire has worked with some illustrious French filmmakers including Maurice Pialat, Agnes Varda, Jacques Rivette and Claude Chabrol. Her Name is Sabine, her own impressive directorial debut, is an intimate and…

Interview - Olivier Assayas

17 Jul 2008

The French filmmaker talks to The List about his globalisation drama, Summer Hours.

Summer Hours

17 Jul 2008

DRAMA (12A) 102min In summer sunshine in the countryside north of Paris it’s the 75th birthday of widowed matriarch Helene (Edith Scob), and attending the celebrations are her three children, university economist Frédéric (Charles Berling)…

Mes amis, mes amours

3 Jul 2008

COMEDY/ROMANCE (15) 106min Mes Amis, Mes Amours resembles a Gallic version of a Richard Curtis movie, set in an affluent, quarter of London and peopled by French expats: it’s less a romantic comedy than a sentimental fantasy of city living among an…

Couscous - Abdel Kechiche interview

19 Jun 2008

‘With Couscous, which is set in the southern French port city of Sète, I wanted to represent a social milieu, which I knew very well because I’d grown up there, and which hasn’t been represented on screen before. I think that when you make a film about…

Un Secret

5 Jun 2008

DRAMA (15) 106min Veteran French writer-director Claude Miller (Garde à Vue, La Petite Voleuse) revisits France’s traumatic experiences under German Occupation during World War II in this polished and suspenseful melodrama. Adapted from Philippe…

Profile - Pierre Salvadori

5 Jun 2008

Name Pierre Salvadori Born Tunisia, 1964 Background A former actor and TV sitcom writer, Salvadori made his feature debut with Wild Target in 1993, a deadpan farce concerning a middle-aged hit man (Jean Rochefort) and his young apprentice…

California Dreamin’ (Endless)

22 May 2008

DRAMA/COMEDY (15) 154min Tragically Cristian Nemescu, the 27 year-old writer-director of California Dreamin’ died in a car crash whilst working on the post-production of this richly ambitious film (together with his sound designer Andrei Toncu), hence…

Barbet Schroeder

22 May 2008

‘I don’t like being called an auteur’, explains the 67-year-old maverick filmmaker Barbet Schroeder. ‘I just like jumping between different projects.’ Certainly the Iranian-born Schroeder has enjoyed a richly varied cinematic career, starting out in the…

Tovarisch, I Am Not Dead

22 May 2008

DOCUMENTARY (15) 83 min Back in 1980, a Polish-born Jewish doctor Garri Urban published an autobiographical account Tovarisch, I Am Not Dead of his remarkable experiences in Eastern Europe during World War Two. Having fled the Nazis, who massacred…

Caramel

8 May 2008

DRAMA (PG) 95min Dedicated ‘to my Beirut’, the charming, bitter-sweet debut feature of writer-director Nadine Labaki centres upon the ‘Si Belle’ beauty parlour in the Lebanese capital. The 30-year-old proprietor Layale (Labaki herself) is guiltily…

Manufactured Landscapes

8 May 2008

DOCUMENTARY (U) 86min Beginning with a bravura eight-minute lateral tracking shot through a giant Chinese factory, Canadian director Jennifer Baichwal’s thoughtful documentary explores the work of the photographer Edward Burtynsky, whose large-scale…

Smart People

8 May 2008

COMEDY DRAMA (15) 94min Another week and another dysfunctional American family comedy. Scripted by novelist Mark Poirier and directed by newcomer Noam Murro, Smart People examines the improbable rejuvenation of widowed, middle-aged English professor…

The Last Mistress

8 May 2008

DRAMA (15) 114min Despite suffering a cerebral haemorrhage in 2004, the French filmmaker Catherine Breillat has returned with her most entertaining and accessible work to date. Based on the 19th century novel by the controversial writer Jules-Amédée…

Under the Bombs

8 May 2008

DRAMA/ROMANCE (15) 98min This heartfelt road movie from Lebanese writer-director Philippe Aractingi was filmed during Israel’s 33-day bombardment of Lebanon in the summer of 2006. It follows a wealthy Shiite woman Zeina (Nada Abou Farhat) and a…

Beaufort

24 Apr 2008

WAR/ACTION/DRAMA (15) 125min The Beaufort of the title refers to a castle built by the Crusaders during the 12th century in southern Lebanon. In 2000 this mountaintop fortress is occupied by IDF (Israeli Defence Force) troops, who are preparing to…

Three and Out

24 Apr 2008

COMEDY (15) 106min Heard the one about the suicidal 50-something Irishman Tommy (Colm Meaney) and the London tube driver and aspiring novelist Paul (Mackenzie Crook), who needs somebody to throw themselves under his train in order to collect a…

Assembly

10 Apr 2008

WAR (15) 123min Chinese director Feng Xiaogang delivers an impressive anti-war epic based on a true story from the Chinese Civil War (1927-1950). The story begins in the winter of 1948 in northeastern China, where Captain Gu Zidi (Zhang Hanyu) leads…

Four Minutes

10 Apr 2008

DRAMA (15) 115min How about this for an enjoyably overwrought contemporary German melodrama? Traude Kruger (Monica Bleibtreu) suffered the trauma of seeing her female communist lover hung by the Nazis during WWII, and has spent the last 60 years…

Profile - Krisztina Goda

27 Mar 2008

Name Krisztina Goda Born Budapest, 1970 Background Having grown up in Budapest, where both her parents were doctors, Goda studied directing and editing at the National Film and Television School in Beaconsfield, and then won a scholarship to…

You, the Living

27 Mar 2008

COMEDY/DRAMA (15) 93min In an unnamed Nordic city a moustachioed tuba-player starts talking about savings and pensions, while making love to his wife who is wearing a military helmet. A dog is dragged along a pavement, attached to the walker of its…

Back To Normandy

13 Mar 2008

DOCUMENTARY (12A) 113min For this quietly compelling, multilayered documentary, French filmmaker Nicholas Philibert (Etre et Avoir) returned to the same Normandy agricultural community where, some 30 years earlier, he had served as an assistant…

Children Of Glory

13 Mar 2008

DRAMA (15) 120min Made to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the doomed Hungarian uprising against Soviet rule in 1956 (which cost some 5000 lives including that of the executed prime minister Imre Nagy), director Krisztina Goda’s Children of Glory…

Interview - Céline Sciamma

13 Mar 2008

‘I wrote the screenplay for Water Lilies while I was studying screenwriting at La Femis film school in Paris, and the director Xavier Beauvois, who was on the graduation committee, told me I had to make the film myself. My starting point was that I…

Hotel Harabati

(15) 94min

31 Jan 2008

In a recent article in Sight and Sound, the critic Michael Atkinson described a cinematic micro-genre that had emerged from France in recent years. His term was the ‘absurdist-anxiety thriller’, and he gave the examples of Dominik Moll’s Lemming…

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly - interview with Marie-Josée Croze

31 Jan 2008

‘When I first met the director Julian Schnabel to discuss being in his version of Jean-Dominique Bauby’s memoir The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, I remember that Julian was wearing these beautiful silk pyjamas. They were the same pyjamas that Bauby…

The Savages

17 Jan 2008

DRAMA (15) 114min Nine years after her 1998 feature debut Slums of Beverley Hills, writer-director Tamara Jenkins returns with this richly observed and terrifically acted character study. The Savages of the title are a pair of intellectual…

Lady Godiva

17 Jan 2008

ROMANCE (12A) 95min According to legend, Lady Godiva was the wife of an 11th century nobleman, who rode naked through the streets of Coventry in a successful act of protest against her husband’s taxation of his subjects. Here, in her debut…

Laura Linney

17 Jan 2008

Breezing into a Soho hotel room on a sunny autumn morning during the London Film Festival, a smiling Laura Linney exudes a patrician charm and confidence. One of her fingers is encased in a splint, the result of a bathroom accident that very morning…

4 Months, 3 Weeks And 2 Days

4 Jan 2008

DRAMA (15) 113min The winner of last year’s Palme d’Or at Cannes, writer-director Cristian Mungiu’s impressively acted 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days explores a long, dark night of the soul in late 1980s Romania, unfolding towards the end of Nicolae…

Les Chansons d’Amour - profile of Christophe Honoré

13 Dec 2007

PROFILE Name Christophe Honoré Born 10 April 1970, Cahaix, France. Background Having grown up in Brittany, Honoré studied literature and cinema at Rennes university, before moving to Paris in his mid-20s, where he contributed to Cahiers du…

Anna M

15 Nov 2007

French writer/director Michel Spinosa’s Anna M is a psychological thriller which blends the clinical and the mystical in its portrait of a female erotomaniac. A rare book restorer at Paris’s Bibliotheque Nationale, who still lives with her mother, the…

I Do

1 Nov 2007

ROMANTIC COMEDY (PG) 90min Meet Louis Costa (Alain Chabat from The Science of Sleep). He’s a 40-something Parisian perfumier, happily content with his bachelor existence. Yet, the women in his family – specifically domineering mother Genevieve…

The Band's Visit

1 Nov 2007

COMEDY/DRAMA (12A) 87min The band in question is the Alexandria Ceremonial Police group, which has come to Israel to perform at the opening of an Arab cultural centre in Petach Tivka, north-east of Tel Aviv. Unfortunately for them there’s no one to…

In their own words

18 Oct 2007

Project Catwalk Filmmaker Rodolphe Marconi discusses his new documentary about the enigmatic fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld ‘For several years I’ve wanted to make an intimate film portrait of someone who I found fascinating and funny, and I thought…

Copying the past

4 Oct 2007

When the Austrian actor Karl Markovics was first sent the screenplay for the Holocaust thriller The Counterfeiters by his friend the director Stefan Ruzowitzky, he spent a week pondering whether or not to accept the central role of Salomon ‘Sally…

Born and Bred

4 Oct 2007

One of the key figures in the New Argentine Cinema, writer-director Pablo Trapero follows up his freewheeling road movie Familia Rodante with this poignant study of a middle-class man consumed by guilt and grief. Following a tragic accident involving…

Reprise

4 Oct 2007

A relative of Lars von Trier, Norwegian writer-director Joachim Trier makes his feature debut with this breezily ambitious contemporary melodrama, which chronicles the highs and lows experienced by a pair of 20something middle-class best friends, Erik…

Ecoute Le Temps

20 Sep 2007

MYSTERY/CRIME (15) 87min There are echoes of Brian de Palma’s superb 1981 thriller Blow Out in this low-budget, high-concept drama from writer/director Alanté Kavaïté. A documentary sound engineer Charlotte (Émilie Dequenne, best known for her debut…

Xavier Giannoli

20 Sep 2007

The French director Xavier Giannoli can pinpoint the moment cinema entered his life. He was five years old and asleep in his parents’ flat in Paris, when he woke up to the sound of tanks and machine guns. It turned out that the noise was coming from the…

Lady Chatterley

23 Aug 2007

Showjumping’s loss is cinema’s gain. As a teenager Marina Hands was a sufficiently accomplished equestrienne to feature in the French junior national team, along with the future actor-director Guillaume Canet. ‘We weren’t good enough to become…

Les Witnesses (Les Temoins)

16 Aug 2007

French director Andre Téchiné (Strayed, Alice et Martin) returns with this urgent and compelling relationship drama, which is terrifically acted by its ensemble cast. Split into three parts, and beginning in Paris during the summer of 1984, it swiftly…

The Legacy

16 Aug 2007

Writer/director Géla Babluani heads back to his native Georgia for the follow-up to his gripping debut feature 13. A trio of French tourists and their local interpreter venture deep into the mountains to track down a property one of them has inherited…

Bernadette Lafont

9 Aug 2007

The veteran French actress Bernadette Lafont is casting her mind back 50 years and recalling her first ever film role. It was in a short called Les Mistons (The Brats), made by a tyro filmmaker called François Truffaut. Shot in her hometown of Nimes…

Longing (Sehnsucht)

9 Aug 2007

Following on from the exorcism drama Requiem and the Stasi surveillance thriller The Lives of the Others, Longing is further evidence of the current resurgence in German cinema.

The Walker

(15) 109min

9 Aug 2007

‘I’m not naive, I’m superficial’, smiles Carter Page III (Woody Harrelson), the latest in a memorable line of existential loners created by Paul Schrader.

Private Fears in Public Spaces (Coeurs)

16 Jul 2007

DRAMA PRIVATE FEARS IN PUBLIC SPACES (COEURS) (12A) 125 min What is it about those French New Wave filmmakers? Godard, Rivette, Chabrol and Rohmer all continue to make films, and here 84-year-old Alain Resnais returns with this elegant and…

Close to Home

21 May 2007

DRAMA Written and directed by a pair of female filmmakers, Dalia Hager and Vidi Bilu, Close to Home has the distinction of being the first ever Israeli film to focus on the experiences of women in the country’s armed services. The rebellious Smadar…

My Best Friend (Mon Meilleur Ami)

7 May 2007

COMEDY

Bamako

7 May 2007

DRAMA

The Lives Of Others

(12A) 138 mins

11 Apr 2007

COLD WAR DRAMA The masterful debut feature of writer-director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, The Lives of Others is the first major German film to examine the activities of the Stasi in the former East Germany. Where the likes of Wolfgang Becker’s…

The Family Friend

(15) 102min

26 Mar 2007

DRAMA The Neapolitan writer-director Paolo Sorrentino follows up his sleek Mafia thriller The Consequences of Love with the wonderfully eccentric and unpredictable The Family Friend, which he has described as ‘a dive into humanity and its…

Climates

(15) 101min

13 Mar 2007

DRAMA/TRAGEDY Written and directed by the Turkish auteur Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Climates charts the breakdown of a relationship between a middle-aged university professor Isa (played by Ceylan) and his younger girlfriend Bahar (the director’s real-life…

Esma's Secret

(15) 95min

13 Mar 2007

DRAMA The past haunts the present in this coming-of-age drama from Bosnian writer-director Jasmila Zbanic, which won the a prize at last year’s Berlin festival. The film’s original title Grbavica: The Land of My Dreams refers to a Sarajevan suburb…

Iraq In Fragments

(15) 94min

13 Mar 2007

DOCUMENTARY Photographed, edited and directed by the American filmmaker James Longley over a two year period following the US invasion of Iraq in April 2003, this haunting documentary doesn’t take the familiar perspective of the occupying forces.

Old Joy

(15) 73min

13 Mar 2007

DRAMA Less is more in this rueful and sensitively observed study of male friendship undermined by the passing of time. Written and directed by Kelly Reichardt (River of Grass, Ode), and accompanied by a melancholic Yo La Tengo soundtrack, Old Joy…

Orchestra Seats

(12A) 105min

12 Feb 2007

COMEDY ‘A comedy about people who are suffering’, is how director and co-writer Danièle Thompson describes Orchestra Seats. In fact, this predictable slice of middlebrow entertainment resembles a Gallic Love Actually. Set in and around Paris…

Glasgow Film Festival - Half Nelson - Ryan Gosling interview

School daze

31 Jan 2007

GLASGOW FILM FESTIVAL Named after a wrestling hold in which an opponent’s strengths are turned against themselves, the US indie Half Nelson is undoubtedly one of the highlights of the Glasgow Film Festival. The directorial debut of Ryan Fleck, whose…

Glasgow Film Festival - Half Nelson - Ryan Gosling interview

School daze

30 Jan 2007

GLASGOW FILM FESTIVAL Named after a wrestling hold in which an opponent’s strengths are turned against themselves, the US indie Half Nelson is undoubtedly one of the highlights of the Glasgow Film Festival. The directorial debut of Ryan Fleck, whose…

Notes on a Scandal

(15) 91min

29 Jan 2007

DRAMA Barbara Covett (Judi Dench) - note that grasping surname - is not a popular figure at the North London comprehensive where she teaches history. To the staff and the students she is, in her own words, ‘a battleaxe’, and to the headmaster, she is…

Play

(12A) 105min

29 Jan 2007

ROMANCE/DRAMA ‘Times were hard but they were modern’ runs the unattributed Italian proverb at the beginning of this vibrant debut feature from young Chilean writer-director Alicia Scherson, which provides a real tonic for jaded cinematic palates.

Ghosts

(15) 98min

15 Jan 2007

REAL LIFE/DRAMA Documentary-maker Nick Broomfield’s first dramatic feature since his ill-fated toff murder tale Diamond Skulls some 17 years ago, Ghosts traces the events leading up to the drowning of 23 Chinese cockle-pickers in February 2004 off…

Prairie Home Companion, A - review

A Prairie Home Companion

20 Dec 2006

SWANSONG ‘The death of an old man is not an occasion for tragedy,’ concludes the master of ceremonies Garrison Keillor in A Prairie Home Companion and it’s hard not to hear in these words the voice of the film’s director Robert Altman, who died a few…

I Saw Ben Barka Get Killed

(15) 102min

7 Dec 2006

CRIME/THRILLER Ex-Cahiers du Cinema critic-turned-director Serge Le Péron revisits the intriguingly murky circumstances surrounding one of Gaullist France’s greatest political scandals. On 29 October 1965, an exiled Moroccan dissident Mehdi Ben Barka…

Gabrielle

(15) 90min

6 Dec 2006

DRAMA/ROMANCE ‘I love her as a collector does his most prized possession’, announces Jean (Pascal Greggory), a wealthy publisher in pre-WWI Paris, of his socialite wife of ten years Gabrielle (Isabelle Huppert). The husband’s arrogant self-regard is…

Italian Film Festival

The Italian Film Festival

13 Nov 2006

5 REASONS TO VISIT 1. The return of Nanni Moretti Five years after the Palme d’Or-winning The Son’s Room, Italian actor-writer-director Nanni Moretti returns with the multilayered The Caiman (pictured). Set in contemporary Rome, it’s the study…

Johanna

(15) 86min

13 Nov 2006

DRAMA/MUSICAL ‘She cures me and I don’t need my pacemaker any longer,’ sings an elderly patient in this expressionistic film opera, directed by the Hungarian filmmaker Kornel Mundruczo (Pleasant Days) and composed by frequent collaborator Zsófia…

Eros

(15) 105min

30 Oct 2006

TRIPTYCH On paper the prospect of three internationally feted directors each contributing to a trilogy of half hour films about erotic love might seem an enticing prospect, but this portmanteau project veers from the sublime to the…

Krisana (Fallen)

Krisana (Fallen)

30 Oct 2006

DRAMA Shot on digital video in high-contrast black-and-white, this uncompromising existential parable from German auteur Fred Kelemen (Frost, Abendland) concerns a lonely Latvian archivist Matiss (Egons Dombrovskis), who is consumed by guilt at…

Page Turner, The

The Page Turner

30 Oct 2006

DRAMA Imagine a vintage Chabrol thriller set in the rarefied world of classical music and you’ll have a sense of this cleverly understated revenge drama from French writer-director Denis Dercourt, who is himself a professional musician. It begins…

Stray Dogs

(12A) 93min

17 Oct 2006

DRAMA Samira Makhmalbaf’s At Five in the Afternoon can legitimately claim to have directly inspired two other films. Firstly, there was her sister Hana’s shrewd behind-the-scenes portrait Joy of Madness, and now her stepmother Marziyeh Meshkini’s…

Mountain Patrol (Kekexili)

(15) 85min

18 Sep 2006

ACTION/DRAMA Unfolding against the stunning mountainous backdrops of the Qingzang Heights in Tibet’s Kekexili region, this epic drama relates real-life events from a decade ago, when an armed team of Tibetan volunteers attempted to protect the…

Driving Lessons

(15) 100min

1 Sep 2006

COMEDY There’s going to be no holiday fun for vicar’s son Ben (Harry Potter’s flame-haired Rupert Grint) in the North London suburbs. Just bible classes and helping out his domineering mother (Laura Linney) with her do-gooding Christian tasks, while…

Little Miss Sunshine

(15) 102min

1 Sep 2006

COMEDY/DRAMA Meet the Hoover clan from Albuquerque, New Mexico. There’s bankruptcy-facing motivational speaker Dad (Greg Kinnear), a highly stressed Mum (Toni Collette), a Nietzche-obsessed adolescent son Dwayne (Paul Dano) undertaking a vow of…