Lea seydoux

Not only is ‘Spectre’ Craig’s best Bond film, it’s the most definitive artistic statement on the super-spy since ‘On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.’

‘It’s Only the End of the World’ will begin shooting in May following his Cannes Jury stint.

Great film direction can reflect great fashion. Unlike its direct competition, the earlier 2014 film Yves Saint Laurent, director and co-writer Bertrand Bonello portrays the fashion mogul with saturated palettes of grandeur in Saint Laurent. The prior film is directed by actor-turned-filmmaker Jalil Lespert, who,having less directorial experience than Bonello, doesn’t quite transform the character of Laurent with the vision and divinity as its successor. Where Lespert is almost literal, Bonello is instead deep and as complex as the character himself, picking apart every detail of the icon and the space he walked in.

Skyfall and Casino Royale helped usher in such a vastly new appreciation for the James Bond franchise that with Sam Mendes returning to direct the still untitled Bond 24 and rumored to direct Bond 25, excitement remains high for any new details about the project. And though Daniel Craig has been much less the casanova since …

Expressing his appreciation for a painting of Proust’s bedroom, Yves Saint Laurent says, “There’s so much fidelity in it. The artist didn’t eclipse his subject.” Something similar can be said of Bertrand Bonello’s biopic of the iconic woman’s fashion designer, as the film seems content with offering fleeting glimpses of its subject drinking, smoking, pill-popping, and sketching in fervid bursts rather than trying to understand him. It doesn’t pontificate or wax philosophical or dig deeply into Saint Laurent’s psyche. It treats the man more like a piece of art to be displayed and observed. (To be fair, this year’s other Saint Laurent biopic, Yves Saint Laurent, does try to explain the man, and it fails pretty hard, so maybe Bonello has the right idea.)

In American cinema, fate is often presented as a path leading to success – especially when it comes to love.  People meet, fall head-over-heels for one another, experience a setback or two, then live happily ever after.  In films outside of Hollywood, love stories are more realistic, and more in tune with subjective experiences of …

Set against the imposing backdrop of a nuclear power station, Rebecca Zlotowski’s second feature is more a critique of France’s working class macho culture than the exploitative nature of the industry itself. The tremendous cooling towers dominate the screen like malignant remnants of the industrial age, but it is the young men themselves, unskilled, reckless and amoral, that appear to be the problem. Lured by the promise of easy money, they are happy to expose themselves daily to ‘the dose’ of radioactivity but show little respect for the danger this entails or for their fellow workers.

More than perhaps any other director, the work of Ernst Lubitsch has been the most noticeable influence on Wes Anderson’s style. Though the great German-American writer-director, most prolific in the 1930s and 1940s, was never quite so aesthetically bold in the look of his sets, he too was preoccupied with meticulous staging for comedy within his chosen locales, be they the titular Shop Around the Corner or the Parisian hotel of Ninotchka; The Grand Budapest Hotel is set in a fictional European country, the Republic of Zubrowka, another Lubitsch trait from works like The Merry Widow and The Love Parade, though The Shop Around the Corner happens to be set in the city Anderson’s mountaintop lodging house takes its name from. He garnered the descriptor of ‘the Lubitsch touch’ thanks to the moving sincerity that always made itself evident within even his more broad comedic premises, and Anderson’s own best work is that in which a recognisable humanism always makes itself known and potent even within the stylised stiltedness through which most of his characters are written and performed.

France ruled the film world in 2013, producing some of the most critically acclaimed and controversial titles. La Vie D’Adele took home the Palme D’Or and has since been subject to intense debate around the ethics of the film’s production and its depiction of sexuality. Among the other highlights was Alain Guirandie’s L’Inconnu du lac, …

Simultaneously distant and distinct, unfamiliar and knowing, Blue is the Warmest Color is an emotionally raw yet mildly troublesome epic drama. This year’s winner of the Palme D’Or at the Cannes Film Festival is but two chapters in the life of its lead character, Adèle, spanning years, houses, life changes, and relationships, all of which pile up like cigarettes worn down to the nub.

In director Abdellatif Kechiche’s absorbing Blue is the Warmest Color Adele (newcomer Adèle Exarchopoulos) is a teenager whose growing pains are amplified by her attraction to women which she rightly sees as something a few of her classmates won’t be able to accept.

Sister Directed by Ursula Meier Written by Antoine Jaccoud and Ursula Meier Switzerland, 2012 If acting is difficult for adults, the task may be roughest and most challenging for children. Some children have a naturally showy personality, an overly precocious sensibility that is, depending on your attitude, immensely endearing or obnoxious. But capturing what it’s …

Though time will only tell if Baz Luhrmann is the right filmmaker to tackle The Great Gatsby, I remain a skeptic. The material may suggest a certain grandiosity that Luhrmann has proved to be able to bring to life but the story remains fundamentally simple and down to earth. The novel is highly critical of …

Midnight in Paris Written by Woody Allen Directed by Woody Allen USA/Spain, 2011 It has been a long while since Woody Allen has been a reliably strong filmmaker in spite of his yearly output of festival fodder. Midnight in Paris remains lightweight and cannot hold a candle to his best work of the last ten …