Tom Dawson

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…

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…

Interview - Olivier Assayas

17 Jul 2008

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

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…

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…

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…

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)…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…