Berlinale 2024: My New Friends (2024) (Les gens d’à côté)
★★★★☆
My New Friends written and directed by André Téchiné is an absorbing debate on a contemporary issue starring the wonderful Isabelle Huppert.
France
The Taste of Things (2023) (The Pot-au-Feu) (La Passion de Dodin Bouffant)
★★★★☆
The Taste of Things, directed by Tran Anh Hung is so, so French. It’s beautiful and it’s a 19th-century love story that is also food and beauty obsessed.
The Settlers (2023) (Los Colonos)
★★★☆☆
The Settlers is an angry, violent Western-type version of the brutal colonial birth of Chile by first-time filmmaker Felipe Gálvez.
The Lost Boys (2023) (Le Paradis)
★★★☆☆
Two teenage boys in a juvenile detention centre develop a passionate bond which is tested when one of them approaches his release in director and co-writer Zeno Graton’s The Lost Boys.
Driving Madeleine (Une Belle Course) (2022)
★★★★☆
Driving Madeleine is an endearing, very human French film starring Line Renaud and Dany Boon, directed by Christian Carion, with a dark undercurrent.
Passages (2023)
★★★★☆
Passages is Ira Sachs’ toxic European love triangle set in Paris, starring Franz Rogowski, Ben Whishaw and Adèle Exarchopoulos.
The Innocent (2023)
★★★★☆
The Innocent (L’Innocent), Louis Garrel’s fourth film, is a César-winning caper with a French accent.
Smoking Causes Coughing (2022) (Fumer Fait Tousser)
★★★☆☆
Smoking Causes Coughing, the brainchild of über-absurdist Quentin Dupieux, is bizarre, very, very silly, strangely disquieting and rather flimsy.
Mother and Son (2022) (Un Petit Frère)
★★★★☆
Mother and Son is an ★★★★☆
involving, compassionate film by Léonor Serraille that poignantly shows the difficulties and the effects on a family – both positive and negative – of immigration into a strange country.
La Syndicaliste (2022)
★★★★☆
Isabelle Huppert stars in Jean-Paul Salomé’s thriller and nuclear-industry investigation La Syndicaliste, based on the recent true story of French union official Maureen Kearney.
Cannes Film Festival 2023: Day 2: 17 May 2023
★★★★☆
Cannes Film Festival 2023: Day 2: 17 May 2023
Cannes Film Festival 2023: Day 1: Opening Film: Jeanne du Barry (2023)
★★★☆☆
Cannes Film Festival 2023: Opening film: Jeanne du Barry (2023)
The Eight Mountains (2022) (Le Otto Montagne)
★★☆☆☆
Felix Van Groeningen and Charlotte Vandermeersch’s The Eight Mountains, which they adapted from Paolo Cognetti’s novel Le Otto Montagne, tells the story of the friendship of Pietro and Bruno from boys to men in their 30s from the perspective of Pietro.
Love According to Dalva (2022)
★★★☆☆
Love According to Dalva, directed by Emmanuelle Nicot, features some extraordinarily intense performances in a paedophilia drama where the victim refuses to accept she is a child who has been abused.