The Furniture: Cracked Mirrors, Double Lover

by Daniel Walber

Few things were more inevitable than a Francois Ozon film in which Jérémie Renier makes out with himself, however briefly. It’s the erotic cherry on top of a career of rule-breaking sexual escapades and pastel pastiche. Double Lover often feels like a return to some the director’s early ideas, including the effervescent camp of Sitcom and the throbbing sexual ambition of Criminal Lovers.

Yet this newest feature does at least begin with a grounded plot than these earlier films. Chloé (Marine Vacth) is a young woman with a recurring, potentially psychosomatic stomach problem. Naturally, she goes to therapist, the affable and reassuringly-sweatered Dr. Paul Meyer (Renier). Chloe sinks into one of his welcoming leather chairs, settles her feet on the fuzzy carpet, and tells him her story. The sessions go so well that, before you know it, they’ve moved in together...

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Soundtracking: "Girl Crazy"

by Chris Feil

The Gershwin musical Girl Crazy was immortalized on screen by Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland in 1943, shortly after it arrived on Broadway and brought with it a handful of legendary numbers from the songwriting duo. George and Ira Gershwin are part of the American musical fabric, having crafted a treasure trove of a songbook where the source material has become irrelevant to the legacy of the songs themselves. Indeed, Girl Crazy would later be expanded and reconfigured to make one of the first jukebox musicals Crazy For You.

So even with screen legends like Garland and Rooney, the legendary tracks still only compare to decades of plentiful versions we have heard since. And while neither star (both carrying essentially the entire film’s musical weight) create definitive versions of these Gershwin songs, how could you? Part of the film’s charms from a contemporary perspective is how the musical numbers don’t feel encumbered by having to match a legacy...

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Fantasia 2018: Fleuve Noir

by Jason Adams

There's a real effortfully cool 70s vibe to Fleuve Noir (aka Black Tide), the new crime thriller by Erick Zonca (his first movie since 2008's terrific Julia starring Tilda Swinton) - if you think Vincent Cassel might at some point sit in a seedy apartment and play some saxophone like he's Gene Hackman in The Conversation you wouldn't be straining nearly as hard as the movie is to make you think of that. Cassel, looking like a cigarette that gained sentience and put on an overcoat, plays Commandant Visconti, a detective (but don't call him a detective please!) on the case of a missing teenage boy...

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Fantasia 2018: Cold Skin

by Jason Adams

The only child in me always dreams about and delights in films about people who've run away from the world of man to make a go of it by their lonesomes. They're duking it out with their own personal demons in the wilderness, of whatever sort, mano a mano. There's no greater fantasy of this sort than the Lighthouse Keeper. They wear thick-knit sweaters and write in their diaries and stare sadly into the distance at hella stormy seas - it's my fetish writ ten-fold. The old-timier the better - give me strange instruments and dials, knickers and elaborate mustaches, tweed piled to heaven, please and thank you.

Nobody tossed these fantasies into the abyss better than HP Lovecraft and Cold Skin, the new Lovecrafitan tale of terror from Frontier(s) and Hitman director Xavier Gens (it's actually based on a 2002 book by Albert Sanchez Pinol), is made of that same slippery stuff...

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Doc Corner: 'Scotty and the Secret History of Hollywood'

Amy Winehouse died seven years ago today and several years removed from its Oscar win and box office success, Asif Kapadia’s Amy lingers in the public consciousness. A popular work of non-fiction due to its remarkable access to the story of a spiralling genius. For me, however, Amy remains a personal bug bear; an unethical and cruel work of documentary filmmaking that uses the words of its dead subject against her.

It was purely coincidental then that I thought about Amy while watching Matt Tyrnauer’s Scotty and the Secret History of Hollywood. The two films definitely do not share the same world, but this revealing piece of Inside Hollywood muckraking does raise questions about ethics all its own. I admit I got a bit of a salacious thrill out of it, but that doesn’t stop me questioning whether I ought to have.

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