Mélanie Laurent

What is love? Love is a pain, love is death, love is a bitch. But friendship, that’s even worse. Friendship is nebulous; it’ll steal your affections, spread rumors about you, scrawl dirty lies on your locker. Life-affirming and, ultimately, life-ending, friendship is like coffee laced with slow-acting poison. At least that’s how it works in Melanie Laurent’s gorgeous Respire, an unsettling usurpation of your usual coming-of-age story, and one of the most confident sophomore films of recent memory.

“Some things are better left unexplained,” a character intones at one point in Now You See Me, a wise lesson that the film’s trio of screenwriters should’ve taken to heart. This heist film, in which a quartet of magicians are highly intelligent thieves (or are they?), becomes more nonsensical and inexplicable the more we learn about how these tricksters have robbed banks (or have they?) and sent federal agents on various wild-goose chases (or were…well, you get the idea).

The term ‘movie magic’ has, alas, lost much of its once proud luster. Film savvy folks can now read in-depth articles, watch online interviews with filmmakers and dive into the ogles of behind-the-scenes content available on home media formats that reveal the tricks of the trade in impressive detail.

The Day I Saw Your Heart Written and directed by Jennifer Devoldère France, 2011 In Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise, Julie Delpy prophetically describes what it means to be French. Delpy’s Celine, while philosophizing with Ethan Hawke’s Jesse, says, “Each time I wear black, or like, lose my temper, or say anything about anything, you know, …

Beginners Written by Mike Mills Directed by Mike Mills USA, 2011 “Indie,” as a signifier, has grown into something sinister in the post-Wes Anderson landscape. It’s come to represent cloying, predictable romantic dramedies about aimless young men and the insufferably quirky women who inspire them to “really live, man.” Despite possessing many of the genre’s …

I feel very compelled to write about foreign actresses. Many I admire, some are colleagues, and most are around my age. There is so much young female talent circling around France, my adopted home country. Someone had to write about it! So here is a list, and those to look out for in upcoming films, …