Larry Oliver Film Reviews

  Pictured : 'Are you tired, old man?' Divorced writer-turned-day labourer, Paul ( Bastien Bouillon ) works for less than UK minimum wage in the French social drama, ' At Work ' ( À Pied d’Oeuvre ), adapted from Franck Courtès ’ 2023 autobiographical account by Gilles Marchand and the film's director Valérie Donzelli . Still courtesy of Diaphana Distribution (France)  We see a perfectly beautiful stretch of patterned wallpaper, red on white. Then a mallet bursts through. Before long, the wall of a room in a house is rendered into dust, the rubble swept up into plastic sacks, one of which is loaded onto a truck by Paul Marquet (Bastien Bouillon), a bespectacled 42-year-old, divorced day labourer who is the protagonist of French director Valérie Donzelli’s eighth feature film, À Pied d’Oeuvre ( At Work ). Adapted from Franck Courtès’ 2023 autobiographical account of his own switch from photographer to handyman, Donzelli and her co-writer Gilles Marchand fashion a fi...

Pictured :  Raphael ( Bastien Bouillon ) invites conflicted chef  Cécile ( Juliette Armanet ) to applaud his motocross skills in the contemporary French musical, ' Partir Un Jour ', written with Dimitri Lucas and directed by  Amélie Bonnin . Still courtesy of Pathé . Partir un jour ( Leave One Day ), the opening film of the 2025 Cannes Film Festiva l, co-written (with Dimitri Lucas ) and directed by Amélie Bonnin , represents the opposite of glamour. ‘Top Chef’ winner turned restauranteur Cécile Béguin ( Juliette Armanet ) returns to L’Escale, the truck stop café in rural France where her parents work after her father, Gérard ( François Rollin ) has his third heart attack. Cécile wants him to retire, as does her mother Fanfan ( Dominique Blanc ), who has been taking Italian lessons and sitting in the front seat of a mobile home (clearly, she wants to go somewhere). However, for Gérard, the café is a source of pride. Steak and frites dominate the menu, but the customers ...