Movie Review: Amour (2012)

These are the days

Georges and Anne are an elderly couple living in Paris seem to be enjoying their golden years when Anne begins having health issues.   A stroke leads to an operation which leads to further issues.  Georges finds himself caring for Anne, something which he finds exasperating at times.  This very realistic, un-Hollywood look at love, relationships, and what it means to be committed to someone is beautiful at times, painful at others.  It is gorgeously shot and the acting is incredible.  This film won multiple awards including the Palme D'or at Cannes in 2012 and the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film in 2013.

Amour gets 5 out of 5 stars!

Director: Michael Haneke
Writer: Michael Haneke
Starring: Jean-Louis Trintignant, Emmanuelle Riva, Isabelle Huppert
Rotten Tomatoes: 93%
Metacritic: 94%

Poulet aux Prunes (Chicken with Plums) 2011))

Ready to die

Nassar Ali Khan is a well known violinist who has decided to die.  His career is stalled, his marriage is suffering, and he pines for a long lost love.  This whimsical, humorous, and sad story tells of lost loves and relationships gone bad.  I love the visuals in this films and am reminded of films such as Bunny and the Bull and The Science of Sleep. 

Poulet aux Prunes gets 3/5 out of 5 stars!

Director: Vincent Paronnaud, Marjane Satrapi
Writer: Vincent Paronnaud, Marjane Satrapi
Starring: Mathieu Amalric, Edouard Baer, Maria de Medeiros
Rotten Tomatoes: 74%
Metacritic: 70%

Holy Motors (2012)

Weird, wonderful and, well, just weird

Holy Motors is actually hard to describe, so watching it is a must.  This surrealistic romp through the city of Paris is a beautiful piece of storytelling.  Essentially it is several short stories pieced together in a very creative fashion.  Holy Motors is bizarre, to say the least, but still accessible to the average film watcher.  The director (Leos Carax) manages to avoid the traps that other directors have fallen into thus keeping it from feeling like a bad student film.  At the end of it all, I was left asking questions like, what was real.

Holy Motors gets 5 out of 5 stars!

Director: Leos Carax

Writer: Leos Carax

Starring: Denis Lavant, Edith Scob, Eva Mendes

Rotten Tomatoes: 91%

Metacritic: 84%

Incendies (2010)

 One plus one equals one

When the mother of a set of adult twins passes away, she leaves them with some bizarre final instructions.  They are instructed to find their father and their brother, both of whom they've never met.  The interwoven narrative moves seamlessly between the past and the present to tell the story from two perspectives - the perspective of the twins in the present and their mother's perspective in the past.  This is a very engrossing film.  It is hard to pigeonhole into one genre.  It has some thrilling elements, a lot of drama, but there is also some mystery.  Overall, I love this film because of the strong story and the way the story is told.  Plus its in French!

Incendies gets 4 out of 5 Poblanos!

Director: Denis Villeneuve
Writer: Wajdi Mouawad, Denis Villeneuve
Starring:  Lubna Azabal, Mélissa Désormeaux-Poulin, Maxim Gaudette
Rotten Tomatoes: 92%
Metacritic: 82 out of 100

Mesrine: L'Instinct de mort (2008)

Dehors ou mort!

When Jacques Mesrine returns home from the army to start a new life, he falls in with some unsavory characters.  Then he becomes an unsavory character as well - a murderer, bank robber, and fugitive from the law.  Part one of a 2-part story, this film is well written, beautifully shot and powerfully acted.  Plus I am a big fan of Vincent Cassell (Black Swan, Eastern Promises).  He is a great actor, but came to life in this role in a way I'd never seen him come alive before.  Fans of films based on true stories and gangster movies will love this one.  I can't wait to see part 2, Mesrine: L'ennemi public no. 1.

Mesrine: L'Instinct de mort gagne 4 de 5 Poblanos!

Director: Jean-François Richet
Writer: Abdel Raouf Dafri
Starring: Vincent Cassel, Cécile De France, Elena Anaya, (The Skin I Live In (2011)and Gérard Depardieu
Rotten Tomatoes: 82%
Metacritic: 71 out of 100

1981 (2009)

The misadventures of Ricardo Trogi

Written and directed by the adult Trogi, 1981 recounts young Ricardo's move to a new neighbourhood.  I love, I repeat, absolutely love movies about childhood.  The Goonies and Stand By Me are the standards followed closely by The Sandlot.  1981 holds its own against those classics.  This film is really funny and very poignant.  It is also a French Canadian film and is heavy on the dialect.  Ricardo's mom has such a thick accent that I could hardly catch a word she said.  To me that makes her even funnier.

1981 is one of those rare, near perfect films and earns its 5 out of 5 Poblanos!

Director: Ricardo Trogi
Writer: Ricardo Trogi
Starring: Jean-Carl Boucher, Claudio Colangelo and Sandrine Bisson
Rotten Tomatoes: 68%
Metacritic: Not Reviewed

Frontiere(s)

Get out while you still can
With looting and rioting happening in Paris, a group of hoodlums flees to the countryside.  They find themselves besieged by a family of neo-nazis.  This film was actually not as bad as it sounds, or at least not as bad as it could have been.  Think Hostel, but in French.  Having seen The Divide also by Xavier Gens, I had an inkling of what kind of film this would be.  Some of the visuals were very striking.  Gens managed to create a fair amount of tension.  The story is decent, but quite predictable.  Worth a watch if you like horror flicks. 

Frontiere(s) gets 3 out of 5 Poblanos

Director: Xavier Gens
Writer: Xavier Gens
Starring: Karina Testa, Aurélien Wiik and Patrick Ligardes
Rotten Tomatoes: 55%
Metacritic: 44 out of 100

Dante 01 (2008)

What just happened?
A group of scientists cohabit a space station with convicted criminals who live as prisoners.  The scientists do research on the prisoners.  One of the newly arrived prisoners has some kind of mystical powers.  Beyond that, I'm not sure what the point of this film is.  Some of the visuals are impressive and there is one particularly strong visual sequence towards the end, but it takes more than effects to make a good film.  The story of Marc Caro's solo directorial debut is weak, and the characters are little more than caricatures.

Dante 01 is a little lost in space with only 2 out of 5 Poblanos!

Director: Marc Caro (co-director of Delicatessen and La Cite des Enfants Perdu)
Writer: Marc Caro, Pierre Bordage
Starring: Lambert Wilson (Of Gods and Men), Linh Dan Pham and Dominique Pinon (La Cite des Enfants Perdue, Micmacs)
Rotten Tomatoes: 33%
Metacritic: not reviewed

OSS 117: Le Caire Nid d'Espions (OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies) (2006)

How's the veal stew?
French secret agent OSS 117 is dispatched to Cairo to investigate the murder of his colleague.  His local contact, Larmina aids his investigation.  A tale of covert ops and counter intel, this is a spoof of the spy film genre, in the vein of Austin Powers.  Created by the same team that brought us the Oscar winning The Artist, this film is good clean fun at its best (I had this on my Netflix queue for awhile before I figured out the connection between it and the aforementioned Oscar winner).  However, far from being left in the shadow of that other film, OSS 117 stands up well on its own.  And unlike so many spoof movies, this one is actually funny.  Not just amusing either, but laugh out loud funny. 

OSS 117 gets 4 out of 5 Poblanos!

Director: Michel Hazanavicius
Writer:  Jean-François Halin, Michel Hazanavicius
Starring: Jean Dujardin, Bérénice Bejo, François Damiens, and Aure Atika
Rotten Tomatoes: 76%
Metacritic: 62 out of 100

Vampires (2009)

Twilight meets Spinal Tap
These documentary filmmakers follow a vampire family to  learn about vampire life.  Did I mention that this is also a dysfunctional vampire family?  This tongue in cheek mockumentary, set mostly in Belgium and partly in Quebec, is very refreshing especially in the face of all the serious, angsty vampire fare out there.  The film doesn't take itself or the subject too seriously.  It is a pretty dang funny film - goofy, quirky, ridiculous.

With lots of laughs, Vampires kills with 4 out of 5 Poblanos!

Director: Vincent Lannoo
Writer: Vincent Lannoo, Frédérique Broos
Starring: Carlo Ferrante, Vera Van Dooren, Pierre Lognay  and Fleur Lise Heuet
Rotten Tomatoes: no review
Metacritic: no review

Ne Le Dis a Personne (Tell No One) 2006

It ain't over 'til its over

Dr Alexandre Beck's wife Margot is killed mysteriously. Eight years later he gets a cryptic email leading him to believe she is still alive. Then a video of Margot shows up in his inbox confirming that fact.  Alexandre is left trying to figure out what is happening. This is a good old-fashioned whodunit movie that twists and turns until the payoff. And the payoff is as good or better than many that I've seen. The French know how to make good movies.  They also know how to make great bread, coffee, wine, cheese, soccer players, and cyclists.  Viva la France!!!

Tell No One pays off with 4 out of 5 Poblanos!

Director: Guillaume Canet

Writer: Guillaume Canet, Philippe Lefebvre,

Starring: François Cluzet, Marie-Josée Croze, (Munich, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly) Kristin Scott Thomas (Mission Impossible, Gosford Park, Sarah's Key)

Rotten Tomatoes: 93%

Metacritic: 82 out of 100

Enter the Void (2009)

Imagining the hereafter

French director Gaspar Noé takes us on a journey through the mind in Enter the Void. Oscar and his sister Linda live in Tokyo. Oscar is a drug dealer and user. His sister is an exotic dancer. Oscar's death and life play out before the viewer in a non-linear sequence of events. Little by little, we learn how he got to where he was in life. The film is a wild ride of a movie that showcases Noé's technical prowess - long shots, flyovers, first person POV shots - but after a while the film becomes repetitive.  45 minutes or more could have pared off to improve the pacing and make a good film into a superior one. Enter the Void loses points for repetitiveness and numerous scenes that fail to advance the story.

A mind altering 3 out of 5 Poblanos!

Director: Gaspar Noé

Writer: Gaspar Noé & Lucile Hadzihalilovic

Starring: Nathaniel Brown, Paz de la Huerta and Cyril Roy

Rotten Tomatoes - 72%

Metacritic: 69 out of 100