| The Guardian - Culture: Film | | | | Earwig and the Witch review – Studio Ghibli's CGI debut fails to enchant | | by Simran Hans May 30, 2021 | | Clunky animation lets down Gorō Miyazaki’s tale of a quick-witted pigtailed orphan whose adoption has a magical twist Directed by Gorō Miyazaki, son of Hayao, Studio Ghibli’s first feature-length foray into computer-generated animation has a clunkiness to it. With her grumpy expression, mismatched socks and pigtails pricked up like antennae, enterprising orphan Earwig (dubbed by Taylor Henderson) is a cute enough creation, but there’s neither believable camaraderie between her and Dan Stevens’s rangy and taciturn black cat, nor sufficient antagonism between her and the blue-haired witch (Vanessa Marshall) who “adopts” and imprisons her. Everything moves a little too slowly, not least the shuffling animation. For a film about magic, there’s little sparkle to spare. Continue reading... | | | | | Frankie review – trouble in a Portuguese paradise with Isabelle Huppert | | by Simran Hans May 30, 2021 | | A spectacular setting and compelling performances lift Ira Sachs’s humourless drama about the woes of the wealthy The famously stylish Isabelle Huppert spends a stretch of this handsome drama on her hands and knees. In the verdant foothills of Sintra, Portugal, ailing actor Frankie (Huppert) searches for the €40,000 bracelet her only son, Paul (Jérémie Renier), has tossed into the woods, rejecting her offer of a valuable family heirloom that could be cashed in after her death. It’s that kind of film – one in which depressed rich people go on holiday to argue about death, inheritance tax, diamond jewellery and their deteriorating marriages. The approach taken by director Ira Sachs (Love Is Strange) is utterly sincere and so utterly humourless, though the performances are quietly compelling; Marissa Tomei brings a liquid warmth as Frankie’s American friend Ilene. Sachs plays on Huppert’s queenly presence too. It’s fitting that she gathers her nearest and dearest in a town that was once a sanctuary for the Portuguese nobility. Continue reading... | | | | | 'I wasn't what you'd call sensible': a walk on the wild side with Call My Agent's Liliane Rovère | | by Jonathan Romney May 30, 2021 | | The actor’s remarkable life fed into the character of Arlette in the Netflix hit, from growing up Jewish in occupied France, via Left Bank jazz and a relationship with Chet Baker, to global fame in her 80s If you’re an actor in the rare position of becoming internationally famous in your 80s, then it’s rather fitting to achieve it with a role that ripely resembles you. In recent years the world has come to know the veteran French actor Liliane Rovère as Arlette Azémar, the seasoned “impresario” – as she prefers to be known – in the French TV series Dix Pour Cent, AKA Call My Agent!. The show has become a global hit on Netflix, and Arlette has struck a chord as everyone’s ideal disreputable aunt with a repertoire of outrageous stories that she just might tell if the burgundy is flowing. She is the sly, sharp-tongued doyenne of top Paris talent agency ASK, who knows where the bodies are buried, and just when to dig them up. It is easy to imagine that Arlette is Rovère. You can just see Arlette reading Nietzsche while listening to Charlie Parker and smoking a joint – and if you dip into Rovère’s 2019 memoir, La Folle Vie de Lili, you’ll see that she depicts herself doing just that on the first page. Likewise, it came as no surprise in season two to learn that Arlette had supposedly had a youthful romance with jazz legend Chet Baker – a plotline that also came directly from Rovère’s own “wild life”. Continue reading... | | | | | Dream Horse: the true story of a Welsh village that raised a racehorse | | by Vanessa Thorpe May 30, 2021 | | Twenty years ago, one woman convinced her neighbours to buy, rear and train a thoroughbred racehorse, Dream Alliance. Now their unlikely story is relived in a feelgood film Ever felt stirred by a warm sense of connection to the world around you? Well, the Welsh have a word for that precious sensation: “hwyl”, sounding a little like “hoyle” to an English ear. And, as cinema projectors whirr into action again, there is one film above all others that aims to bring you this very emotion. Out on 4 June, Dream Horse is the true story of the extraordinary racehorse that brought a group of impoverished Welsh owners together and offered them fresh hope against all imaginable odds. And the concept of hwyl, a kind of mystic combination of those two more famous buzz words, the Irish “craic” and the Danish “hygge”, is right at the film’s core, according to director Euros Lyn. Continue reading... | | | | | 'My parents still have no clue what I'm doing': Lupin star Omar Sy on Hollywood, fame and fighting racism | | by Tom Lamont May 30, 2021 | | After a decade in Hollywood, French actor Omar Sy returned home to star in Netflix’s much-loved hit, Lupin. He talks about playing the charming thief, growing up with Arsenal’s Nicolas Anelka and his battle with racism Actors, obliged to exhaustively market their wares, will pose for hours in front of posters of their latest film or TV show. They’ll hop between city premieres, sit on dreary festival panels, tell rehearsed comic stories on night-time talkshows, then get up early to be on breakfast radio. Before meeting Omar Sy, a 43-year-old Frenchman who stars in the massively popular Netflix drama Lupin, I’d never heard of an actor picking up a bucket and brush to spend a day gluing up their own billboard posters on the Paris metro. Sy, who is 6ft 2in, born in a working-class Parisian suburb to West African parents, explains the thinking behind this unusual marketing stunt that took place just before the first series of Lupin debuted earlier this year. “A lot of people know me in Paris,” begins Sy, who worked as a comedian in France through his 20s before becoming a film star there in his early 30s. “Because people in France have watched me in stuff for years, I’m used to meeting strangers who recognise me and who already have smiles on their faces.” In Lupin, lightly adapted from the classic heist books by Maurice Leblanc, Sy plays a French-Senegalese man called Assane Diop, an anonymous Parisian who is used to being ignored and overlooked in his home town, but who is willing to use that to his advantage while robbing the city’s jet-set blind. “The show is entertainment and we want to have fun with it,” he says, “but at the same time we’re talking about something very serious: that some people in France are simply not seen.” Continue reading... | | | | | First Cow review – celebrating the milk of human kindness | | by Mark Kermode Observer film critic May 30, 2021 | | Kelly Reichardt’s offbeat gem about an unlikely friendship founded on biscuits is a satisfying fable of America’s past and present “The bird a nest, the spider a web, man friendship,” reads the William Blake quotation that opens Kelly Reichardt’s First Cow, setting the tone for a deceptively simple tale of man’s natural home – companionship – and the ongoing struggles of commerce verses comradeship. Reichardt’s intimate explorations of Oregon range from the modern drama Old Joy to the frontier western Meek’s Cutoff. Yet there’s still a profound element of discovery in this latest Oregon-based gem, a fable of land and freedom that serves as an up-close-and-personal portrait of friendship and a wider snapshot of America, rooted in the rich soil of the Pacific north-west. Continue reading... | | | | | |
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