Skip to main content
search
Tag

jacques audiard

Mar 27 2013
Love0

Review: Rust and Bone, A Lady in Paris and Jack the Giant Slayer

By Cinema, Reviews

It’s no dis­grace to come second at Cannes to Michael Haneke’s Amour, espe­cially so when your film is Rust and Bone. Writer-director Jacques Audiard has a track record of unset­tling and con­front­ing dra­mas, start­ing (for New Zealand audi­ences) with Read My Lips in 2001 and – most recently – pris­on drama A Prophet in 2009. Rust and Bone is equally rugged but with some beauty to bal­ance the viol­ence and despair.

Academy Award-winner Marion Cotillard is the big name on the mar­quee but the film really belongs to Matthias Schoenaerts who lays down a por­trait of wounded mas­culin­ity as riv­et­ing as any of De Niro’s clas­sic per­form­ances. He’s Alain, a drift­er and waster who lands in pic­tur­esque Antibes with his young son. He’s use­ful in a scrap but use­less as a par­ent and some of the most dif­fi­cult scenes in the film are of him fail­ing to look after the boy.

Read More

Sep 05 2012
Love0

Telluride Diary part five: The show (part two)

By Cinema, Travel

Saturday dawned early and I was grate­ful that the first screen­ing of the morn­ing was at the Chuck Jones’ in Mountain Village, barely a fif­teen minute shuttle from my accom­mod­a­tion. Time to grab a cof­fee and then wait in line for an 8.30am repeat of the Roger Corman Tribute from the night before. This time the host and inter­rog­at­or would be Leonard Maltin (famil­i­ar to all New Zealanders of a cer­tain age, I think) instead of Todd McCarthy.

20120904-190823.jpg

A fairly rep­res­ent­at­ive pic­ture of Mountain Village architecture.

Before Mr Corman was invited on stage, we got to see an excel­lent doc­u­ment­ary on his life and work, Corman’s World: Exploits of a Hollywood Rebel. After that, Corman entered the stage to a stand­ing ova­tion and we were treated to insights and stor­ies from an exceed­ingly well-educated and thought­ful entre­pren­eur and artist for almost an hour. The sur­prise for me was hear­ing about Corman’s lib­er­al polit­ics and how he might have steered his film­mak­ing in that dir­ec­tion if it had­n’t been for the com­mer­cial fail­ure of The Intruder (1962, star­ring William Shatner as a white supremacist).

Read More

Jan 01 2011
Love0

2010 Wellington Cinema Year in Review

By Cinema

So, after trawl­ing through the many thou­sands of words writ­ten about cinema in these pages this year, I sup­pose you want me to come to some con­clu­sions? Do some “sum­ming up”? Help guide you through the great video store of life? Well, alright then. Here goes.

We don’t do Top Ten lists here at the Capital Times – they are reduct­ive, facile and, frankly, you have to leave too many titles out. I have taken to divid­ing my year’s view­ing up into cat­egor­ies: keep­ers are films I want to have in my home and watch whenev­er the mood takes me; renters are the films that I could hap­pily watch again; then there are the films that I enjoyed but am in no hurry to repeat, the films I might have mis­judged first time around, the films I can’t get out of my head (for bet­ter or worse), the films I am sup­posed to love but you know, meh, and most import­ant of all – the films you should avoid as if your very life depends upon it.

First, the keep­ers: a sur­prise for some will be Fantastic Mr. Fox which was released after my 2009 Year in Review was sub­mit­ted and the only film in the list that I already own. Animal Kingdom was the film I most recom­men­ded this year – a stun­ning, tense piece of work that gripped me totally.

Read More

Sep 22 2010
Love0

Review: Un prophète, I Am Love, Centurion and The Runaways

By Cinema, Reviews

In a week when film fans are mourn­ing the passing of the French great Claude Chabrol (80 year old co-pioneer of the French New Wave) it’s pleas­ing to report that there’s still someone in France mak­ing watch­able movies. In fact, Jacques Audiard’s last two films have been abso­lute crack­ers (Read My Lips, The Beat My Heart Skipped) and his latest is eas­ily one of the best you will see this or any year.

In Un prophète (A Prophet), Audiard has man­aged to make an intim­ate epic, a film about grand themes while (for the most part) nev­er leav­ing the con­fines of the French pris­on where our hero is incar­cer­ated. He is Malik El Djabena (new­comer Tahar Rahim) and he’s a nine­teen year old petty crim­in­al inside for assault­ing a cop. In exchange for the pro­tec­tion of the Corsican mob lead­er who runs the joint (Niels Arestrup) he murders an Arab inform­er, an incid­ent that will lit­er­ally haunt him through­out the film.

Read More

Close Menu