Shéhérazade (2018)
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Jusqu'à la garde (2018)
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Mademoiselle de Joncquières (2018)
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Les Chatouilles (2018)
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Plaire, aimer et courir vite (2018)
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L'Homme fidèle (2018)
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Sauvage (2018)
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En liberté! (2018)
In En liberté!, director Pierre Salvadori pays homage to the masters of American comedy (Billy Wilder, Howard Hawks and Ernst Lubitsch) with a mix of comedy thriller and rom-com that positively bubbles with wit and energy. Unlike too many of his contemporaries, Salvadori knows that the key to great comedy is that it must be anchored in reality if it is to have any effect. This is reflected most strongly in his choice of lead actors, Pio Marmaï and Adèle Haenel, who are more naturally inclined towards straight drama than comedy. The casting choice proves to be pure inspiration and the film is one of the director's best to date.Read full review...
L'Amour flou (2018)
Like many others couples, Romane Bohringer and Philippe Rebbot have had to deal with the problem of sparing their children pain when they decide to go their separate ways. As it turned out, they came up with a novel solution, which they present in the first film they have directed, based on their own real-life experiences. Far from being a vanity project L'Amour flou proves to be an engaging little film that addresses one of the abiding concerns of our time with compassion and intelligence.Read full review...
La Prière (2018)
La Prière is an unusual film for director Cédric Kahn, although it deals with themes (social alienation and inner conflict) that are key to his work. In contrast to much of the director's work to date, where the main protagonist is driven ever downwards by forces beyond his control, this time the trajectory is upwards. The film is concerned with a wild young man (played with incredible conviction by Anthony Bajon in his first major role) who attempts to overcome his heroin addiction by joining a rehab centre of the most austere and exacting kind. By discovering God, the seemingly irredeemable druggie finds a release from his personal hell, but is he merely swapping one addiction for another?Read full review...
Un amour impossible (2018)
Director Catherine Corsini followed up to her acclaimed 2015 drama La Belle saison with another intense portrayal of enduring love, this time between a mother and daughter whose lives are blighted by the same odious self-absorbed male. Un amour impossible is adapted from a novel of the same title by Christine Angot, one of a series of books in which the author draws on her own experiences to construct some powerfully moving explorations of the human psyche. Whilst Corsini is perhaps too doggedly faithful to the original novel, her film still manages to be a compelling drama that resonates with human feeling. With its shocking account of a man taking advantage of the power he has over the female protagonists the film chimes with contemporary outrage over male exploitation of women.Read full review...
Pupille (2018)
Pupille is Jeanne Herry's second feature (after her enjoyable black comedy Elle l'adore), an insightful and moving account of France's system of anonymous adoption. The film offers both a near-documentary presentation of the tortuous mechanism of adoption and a fictional narrative which shows us the human side of the equation - the concerns of those who work in the adoption and child welfare services, and the psychological anguish experienced by the prospective parents of adopted children. Few other French films of 2018 had quite the emotional impact of Pupille.Read full review...
La Douleur (2018)
La Douleur is a lavishly produced adaptation of an autobiographical novel that the great French writer Marguerite Duras published near the end of her life. Director Emmanuel Finkiel has some success in conveying the writer's anguish after being separated from her husband at the time of the Nazi occupation of France, but the film's epic scale tends to get in the way, particularly in its languorous second half. Strong lead performances from Mélanie Thierry and Benoît Magimel give the film a powerful emotional punch in its first half, which focuses on Duras's seemingly perverse love affair with an agent of the Gestapo.Read full review...
Un couteau dans le coeur (2018)
With Un couteau dans le coeur, second-time director Yann Gonzalez indulges his passion for slasher thrillers of the 1970s with a wild abandon. This is a film that ingeniously uses the tropes of such lurid exploitation fare in a way that compels us to ask ourselves just why we are drawn to this demeaning form of lowbrow entertainment. The film was inspired by the true-life story of pornographic film producer Anne-Marie Tensi, who had some success in the 1970s before alcoholism and changing tastes took their toll. In Gonzalez's film, the lead actress Vanessa Paradis models her portrayal on biographical accounts of Tensi, and in doing so she gives us to what is possibly the most complex and convincing of her screen roles to date..
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Nos batailles (2018)
In Nos batailles (Our Struggles), director Guillaume Senez follows up his debut feature Keeper (2015) with another well-drawn slice-of-life depicting an ordinary man facing up to the responsibilities of fatherhood. In this, he is assisted by a cast of professional and non-professional actors headed by the indispensable Romain Duris, who achieves yet another screen metamorphosis, convincingly projecting himself as a single parent struggling to raise his children whilst battling against employee exploitation in his workplace. With its honest depiction of the precariousness nature of family life and its damning allusions to the misery caused by large corporations, Nos batailles is a timely film with a powerful social resonance..
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Le Monde est à toi (2018)
After the failure of his first feature Notre jour viendra (2010), Romain Gavras is on far safer ground with his second film, a jaunty caper movie headed by the ever-popular stars Isabelle Adjani and Vincent Cassel. Le Monde est à toi is a shameless commercial enterprise, a far cry from the serious thrillers made by the director's illustrious father, Costa-Gavras. Despite the abundance of uninhibited silliness on display, the film manages to be hugely entertaining, thanks mainly to the sheer comic verve of the principal cast, who seem to revel in the opportunity of stamping their feet down on the comedy accelerator. What the film lacks in originality and coherence it more than makes up for in good natured fun.Read full review...
Première année (2018)
With Première année, director Thomas Lilti concludes a trilogy of medicine-oriented films in which he draws on his own experiences as a medical practitioner. A kind of prequel to his 2014 film Hippocrate, it follows a pair of amiable students (Vincent Lacoste and William Lebghil) through their challenging first year at medical school, knowing that less than one in ten of the student in-take are likely to pass their end-of-year exams. The film serves as a timely indictment of the 'Numerus clausus' system in France that guarantees a ludicrously high attrition rate in the training of medical professionals.Read full review...
Un peuple et son roi (2018)
With its 17 million euro budget, lavish production values and star-studded cast, Un peuple et son roi obviously intended to be the French blockbuster of the year, althought it ended up as an embarrassing flop for its director Pierre Schoeller. Visually stunning the film may be but it is a pretty hollow exercise in historical reconstruction, and by trying to cram far too much incident into one two-hour epic (covering the run of the French Revolution from 1789 to 1793) it was bound to end up as a pretty incoherent jumble. Fortunately, the film boasts a distinguished cast and has had so much effort lavished on its design that it still manages to impress, inspite of the lumbering narrative.Read full review...
Le Grand bain (2018)
For his first solo bash as a director, Gilles Lellouche takes his inspiration from the classic British movie The Full Monty (1997) but ends up delivering an aquatic ensemble buddy movie that only just manages to keep its head above water. Le Grand bain was one of the French mainstream hits of 2018, thanks in no small measure to its big name ensemble which comprises Mathieu Amalric, Jean-Hugues Anglade, Guillaume Canet, Benoît Poelvoorde, Marina Foïs and Virginie Efira. Lellouche's mise-en-scène shows far more promise than his writing. It is hard not to be wowed by the balletic fluidity of the camerawork, which brings an arresting visual poetry to a number of sequences.Read full review...
L'Apparition (2018)
With L'Apparition (The Apparition), his most ambitious film to date, director Xavier Giannoli takes an unusual diversion into Carl Dreyer territory, latching onto the mysteries of faith and how these can impact on individuals whose needs go beyond the purely material. The film concerns a world-weary journalist (Vincent Lindon, superb as ever) who is sent on a quest for faith which is both personal and professional. The conflict that ensues from these competing aims is the most interesting and successfully handled aspect of the film. Unfortunately, Giannoli is not content with limiting the scope of this film in this way, so he broadens it out and ends up overwhelming us with a sprawling thriller that, whilst expertly executed, is somewhat lacking in credibility and focus.Read full review...
Continuer (2018)
Writer-director Joachim Lafosse continues his series of dark studies concerning repressed conflict between family members with a sober adaptation of a novel by Laurent Mauvignier. Continuer borrows the trappings of the classic western and road movie in its delicate exploration of the complex relationship between a reluctant mother and her estranged late-teens son. Despite being set entirely in the wide open spaces of Kyrgyzstan, the film manages to be every bit as tense and oppressive as Lafosse's previous work.Read full review...
Une part d'ombre (2018)
With Une part d'ombre Belgian filmmaker Samuel Tilman shows how dangerously infectious suspicion can become if you happen to be near the scene of a murder. In this tense psychological drama, a seeming innocent quickly becomes enmeshed in a web of suspicion and it isn't long before everyone he knows - including his devoted wife - has reason to think him capable of murder. A fairly pedestrian screenplay is handsomely redeemed by Tilman's slick direction, some imaginative suspense-laden photography and the utterly compelling performances from the lead actors Fabrizio Rongione and Natacha Régnier.Read full review...