There’s a moment in Jean-Luc Godard’s The Image Book where the forerunner of Nouvelle Vague (French New Wave) takes home footage of a young girl who—perhaps for the first time in her life—watches an incoming train coming to a station.…
Movie Review: The Son of Joseph
If Robert Bresson had an obsession with hands as metaphors and symbols, then Eugène Green displays a similar preoccupation with feet in his new film The Son of Joseph. There are many static, ground level shots of feet walking into…
Movie Review: ‘Dheepan’ disappoints, doesn’t deserve the Palme
Well, the Powers That Be certainly took their sweet time releasing Jacques Audiard’s Dheepan. You’d think being the recipient of the 2015 Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival would have been enough to fast-track any film into wide release.…
Ally’s Movie Review: Breathe
Friendship can be intoxicating and in the case of Mélanie Laurent’s newest film Breathe, it can be dangerous. Charlie (Josephine Japy) lives an ordinary life as a French suburban teenager. Shy at school, and having to listen as her mother…
The Film Canon: Pépé le Moko (1937)
Nestled deep in the heart of Algiers is a labyrinthine honeycomb of passages and staircases. Terraces and ceilings melt together into a giant roof that stretches in all directions for miles; streets become roads, roads become alleys, alleys become dead…
The Film Canon: Les Diaboliques (1955)
It is no more possible to discuss the importance and impact of Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Les Diaboliques without diving into spoilers than it is to examine Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) without mentioning Janet Leigh’s brutal murder. And yet Clouzot’s masterpiece has…