Review: "Madeleine Collins" confirms this is Virginie Efira's Year

by Cláudio Alves

Belgian-born French actress Virginie Efira has been on an upward path since around 2016, when she supported Isabelle Huppert in the Oscar-nominated Elle and dazzled as the titular lawyer in Justine Triet's Victoria. The latter part earned the thespian her first César nomination, followed by citations for Sink or Swim, An Impossible Love, Bye Bye Morons, Benedetta, and, finally, a victory thanks to Revoir Paris. And yet, beyond the Francoshpere, Efira is probably best known for Verhoeven's mad nun and little else. That's going to change fast. After 2023, there's no stopping her rise to international stardom. 

This week, American cinemas welcomed Madeleine Collins, Efira's third release of the year, following career-best work in Other People's Children and Revoir Paris. Just the Two of Us and All to Play For are still awaiting distribution making for a titanic body of recent work. In a just world, this next awards season would see Virginie Efira on critics' ballots everywhere.

For all that Madeleine Collins is the Virginie Efira show, the film begins without her...

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Doc Corner: Claire Simon's 'Our Body'

By Glenn Charlie Dunks

It isn’t too common for subjects in observational documentaries to turn to the camera and say, “I love cinema.” It’s even less common for this to happen as the subject in question lays on a medical table ready to be pulled under by anaesthesia and be operated on. None of the many, many subjects filmed by director and cinematographer Claire Simon in her new film Our Body (Notre corps) seem to mind all that much that a camera is gazed upon them in trying times. Filming through the gynaecological ward of a hospital in her home of France, her subjects often bare their souls as well as their flesh in the pursuit of landing upon something remarkably humane.

This is why I love cinema, and especially documentaries.

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Review: "The Beasts" of Galicia

by Cláudio Alves

Rodrigo Sorogoyen's The Beasts opened at last year's Cannes Film Festival to thunderous acclaim, beginning  a global trip through film festivals and the odd commercial market. Its greatest success came in Spain and France, the two nations that coproduced the film, whose troubled relation toils the land and souls of a narrative inspired by real-life tragedy. If you're an awards obsessive, you might remember The Beasts from news about the Goyas and César, for the film was a sweeper in the former and won Best Foreign Film against mighty competition in the latter – including the Oscar-nominated Triangle of Sadness, EO, and Close. 

Regarding this bounty, it's easy to feel some skepticism creeping in, though, after you've seen The Beasts, the voters' fervor feels somewhat fair. As the film finally enjoys a limited release in American theaters, let's explore its tale of xenophobia and violence in modern Galicia, where monsters rove, feigning humanity…

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Review: "Revoir Paris"

by Cláudio Alves

2023 is shaping out to be the year of Virginie Efira, at least as far as American audiences are concerned. Other People's Children blessed theaters in March, and Madeleine Collins will arrive in August, all lauded leading roles for the Belgian star. This month, Revoir Paris comes to satiate Efira fans, gleaming with the promise of César gold, for this picture finally won her the prize oft called the French Oscar. Written and directed by Alice Winocour in tribute to her brother, the film, also known as Paris Memories, considers the aftermath of a terrorist attack not unlike those that befell the French capital in November 2015…

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Review: Pietro Marcello's "Scarlet" is a picture out of time

by Cláudio Alves

Whether documentary or fiction, Pietro Marcello's films always convey the quality of artworks lost somewhere between modernity and an undefined past. 2019's much-lauded Martin Eden took this aspect to its peak, evoking the palpable authenticity of Neorealist cinema while playing fast and loose with history in its design. That film's relationship with the past circumvents reactionary nostalgia. The anachronistic scenography suggests an atemporal milieu, breaching the porous membrane separating the narrative's period and the viewer's sense of now. This further underlined the piece's political gestures, turning retrospective into a direct address. In comparison, Scarlet represents a more conventional object though it shares many qualities with its predecessor. 

Like Martin Eden, Scarlet is a literary adaptation looking back to Europe in the first half of the 20th century. The raw material is Alexander Grin's 1923 novella Scarlet Sails, once brought to the big screen by Soviet filmmaker Alexandr Ptushko. In Marcello's film, the Russian setting is transposed to rural Normandy…

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