Larry Oliver Film Reviews

  Pictured :  Christine ( Garance Marillier , left) adjusts the dress modelled by South Sudanese model,  Ada ( Anyier Anei , right) in a scene from the Paris Fashion Week-set drama, 'Couture', directed by Alice Winocour from a screenplay co-written by  Jean-Stéphane Bron . Still courtesy of Signature Entertainment (UK) Couture , French writer-director Alice Winocour’s fifth feature, is inessential viewing. Set during Paris Fashion Week, it focuses on four women who participate in the event as model, seamstress, make-up artist and video director respectively. The film is notable for the presence of Angelina Jolie as Maxine Walker, a Los Angeles-based film director fascinated by vampires, whose video opens one particular show, and who, while in Paris, receives some devastating news. Missing from the ensemble is a fashion designer, the individual whom the four women – and many others - are beholden; the film was made in collaboration with the fashion house, Chanel, but...

  Switzerland was late in giving women the right to vote. This was only achieved in 1971 following a public referendum. In other countries female suffrage was achieved through Act of Parliament. The first country to give women the right to vote was New Zealand in 1893. This was followed by Australia in 1902 (though not, sadly Aborigines until 1962), Finland in 1906 and Norway in 1913. The UK offered women with land the right to vote in 1918, before universal suffrage was declared in 1928. American women got the right to vote in 1920. In France, the land of liberty, fraternity and equality, women got the right to vote in April 1944. Even in Pakistan, women got the vote in 1947, reaffirmed in 1956, when elections took place. Why in Switzerland did it take so long? The country had something called direct democracy, which is to say, that if you pass a law and people weren’t very happy about it, you could amass 50,000 signatures and compel a referendum. The people – that is, up unti...

  You are driving down a quiet country road at 30, maybe 40 miles an hour. All of a sudden, a young woman runs out from behind a tree. You swerve and crash the car. But your problems don’t end there. This is the opening of ‘Raw’, the uber-confident debut cinema feature of writer-director Julia Ducournau that puts new blood – quite literally – into the horror genre. Ducournau’s other credits include the ninety-minute TV movie ‘Mange’ (Eat) and a short film ‘Junior’. By her own admission, Ducournau makes films about transformations – young women seen as unthreatening assume a confidence and strength that is terrifying. ‘Raw’ is about cannibalism, in which a young first year veterinary school student, Justine (Garance Marillier) discovers a hitherto suppressed taste for flesh, after eating meat for the first time and then being exposed to the human variety. Her nightmare begins from the moment she is dropped off by her parents. Justine’s possessions are turned out of her dorm. F...