
Victoria
The best thing about Victoria isn’t actually its technical prowess—it’s the lead performance from the mesmerizing Laia Costa as the title character.
The best thing about Victoria isn’t actually its technical prowess—it’s the lead performance from the mesmerizing Laia Costa as the title character.
As a piece of social satire, Knock Knock winds up being not just toothless but anticlimactic.
"The Ballad of Narayama" is a Japanese film of great beauty and elegant artifice, telling a story of startling cruelty. What a space it opens…
Patrice Leconte's "Monsieur Hire" is a tragedy about loneliness and erotomania, told about two solitary people who have nothing else in common. It involves a…
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A report about Chaz Ebert's upcoming appearance on OWN's "Where Are They Now?" program.
A FFC review of "The Look of Silence."
A review of "A Girl at My Door".
On the set of "The Knick"; Swedish cinema gives women a bigger role; When Amazon dies; Stories of "Star Wars" extras; Chatting with Abi Morgan.
Eight films to check out before Guillermo Del Toro's "Crimson Peak" comes out Friday.
"Beloved" is a labyrinth of French love stories that wind their way from 1968 to the near-present, pausing along the way to employ the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia and the 9/11 attacks as historical backdrops. It uses Catherine Deneuve and her real-life daughter Chiara Mastroianni as Madeleine and her daughter Vera, and Ludivine Sagnier as a younger version of Madeleine.
The film opens with a French cover of Nancy Sinatra's "These Boots Are Made for Walking," as a narration by Vera explains how her mother stole a pair of high-fashion shoes and was mistaken for a hooker. Madeleine paused a moment, thought why not? and later tells Vera that the shoes were responsible for making her a prostitute. In this new career, she meets a young Czech doctor named Jaromil (Rasha Bukvic), falls in love with him, breaks up, follows him to Czechoslovakia, marries him and has their daughter, Vera. Later in life, he reappears, now played by Czech director Milos Forman.
Are you with me? One of the charms of "Beloved" is the way it uses movie legends. Deneuve and Forman you know. You also know Chiara Mastroianni, whose father was Marcello Mastroianni. After dozens of movies, I am so intensely familiar with the faces of Deneuve and Mastroianni that it is a thing of beauty to see both their faces reflected in hers. No one would ever say "she looks like her father" or "her mother." She looks like both, the heiress of cinematic royalty.
What does the writer-director Christophe Honoré do with these characters and their casting? With the casting, he has no problem. His actresses are all wondrous to behold, and Forman is surprisingly engaging as the doctor. But the plot of "Beloved," I'm afraid, may try your patience.
Both Madeleine and Vera have a gift for choosing unreliable men. With Vera, it is a gay American named Henderson (Paul Schneider) and Clement (Louis Garrel), her patient best friend. They choose them, and choose them again and again, and spend the movie steeping in melancholy and futility.
There is another problem. Honoré puts his film on hold six or seven times while the characters half-sing, half-recite the lyrics to banal songs explaining the meaning of what we've just seen, which is all too comprehensible the first time around.
"Beloved" evokes some of the fine moments in the careers of Deneuve and Marcello Mastroianni, but it doesn't re-create them.
This message came to me from a reader named Peter Svensland. He and a fr...
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