Cannes: Maïwenn & Johnny Depp in "Jeanne Du Barry"

Elisa Giudici reporting from Cannes!

It is fascinating how carelessly Maïwenn gives her detractors such easy targets and ways to tear apart her work. She is the director, screenwriter, and lead actress of Cannes opener Jeanne Du Barry. The biopic takes place in Versailles in the years when both the old king Louis XV and the young and naive future queen Marie Antoinette walked through the halls and the gardens of the magnificent French court. The focus here though is elsewhere. The film centers on the elderly king's favorite, the low-born, sensual, and witty Jeanne. Multi-hyphenate Maïwenn shares Jeanne's giggly confidence, playing the protagonist with Johnny Depp as the aging Louis XV.

If you're thinking of Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette, you’re not alone. It’s the same realm of extreme luxury, absurd etiquette, and incredible loneliness, but viewed from a different side of the royal playground... 

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Review: Virginie Efira is miraculous in "Other People's Children"

by Cláudio Alves

Watching Rebecca Zlotowski's Other People's Children, I was reminded of a discussion I once had with a professor. Despite the class focusing on theater, we talked about cinema and what stories deserve to have the camera pointed at them. In short, we debated the merits of dramatizing ordinary people. For me, there's plenty of interest in exploring individuals whose lives are entirely un-dramatic, maybe even anti-dramatic. Great art can be created by investigating the complexities of the simplest-seeming experiences. Just because something appears anodyne or common doesn't mean there aren't beguiling specificities or that we should be above it. My professor disagreed.

At the time, a great deal of the conversation centered around the films of Chantal Akerman, but Zlotowski's latest effort feels like an up-to-date if more conventional, example. Indeed, I imagine my former pedagogue would hate the thing if he ever set eyes on Other People's Children…

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César Nominations: "L'Innocent" leads and David Fincher will receive the Honorary César

by Arnaud Trouvé

Louis Garrel & Noémi Merlant in "L'Innocent", the nomination leader

The 48th César awards have released their list of nominations, and guess what? Just like the Oscars, an oddball family comedy leads with 11 nominations, including nearly the same acting breakdown (1 lead, 2 Supporting Actress, 1 Supporting Actor). L'Innocent is nowhere near as eccentric as Everything Everywhere All at Once, but it's a pleasant heist movie and the first box-office hit for director Louis Garrel (who also stars, his biggest hits in the US have been Greta Gerwig's Little Women and Bernardo Bertolucci's The Dreamers).

I mentioned L'Innocent's box-office on purpose given that French cinema is having an existential crisis: for the first time in decades, no national production managed to crack our yearly top 10 box-office...

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Review: "One Fine Morning" is the gentlest of gut punches

by Cláudio Alves

Autofiction isn't a new phenomenon, whether in film or other arts. Nevertheless, more and more directors are dipping their toes into pools of navel-gazing introspection. For some auteurs, however, there has never been another way of making art. Take Mia Hasen-Løve as an example. Her cinema has always manifested as a reflection of lived experience, pulling from personal details in gradations of openness, extrapolating narrative honesty as a conduit for building humanistic pieces. Empathy is the tenet of her cinema, not just between audience and characters but between the filmmaker and her creation. At least, that's the feeling that persists after one leaves the theater, still dazed by the director's work. 

Within this context, it means a great deal to state that One Fine Morning, Mia Hansen-Løve's latest, might be her most personal project to date…

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NYFF: The Human Body tenderized in 'De Humani Corporis Fabrica'

by Jason Adams

Do you ever find yourself zoning out to one of those surgery shows they sometimes have on basic cable? Titles like Botched or Plastic Surgery: Before and After where they stick their reality-show cameras into people’s literal guts and poke around? Yeah me neither. A lurid dramatization like the series Nip/Tuck I could handle, but the real stuff’s always been a bridge too far. But then I’ve always had that line drawn in the sand when it came to Horror Movies as well – I’ll watch all sorts of gruesomeness as long as I know it’s fake but you’d have to tie me down to get me to watch one of those Faces of Death videos. 

So why then did I find myself so lulled into hypnotic contemplation by directors Véréna Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor’s surreal-ish surgery documentary De Humani Corporis Fabrica (meaning “Of the Structure of the Human Body” and named after the legendary 1555 anatomical texts) at the New York Film Festival this week?

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