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...

  Why do film directors, when dealing with historical subjects, stray from the truth? Usually, it is for commercial reasons. You take a real figure and imagine a romance that they never had in order to give a hook to your narrative. Emily , Frances O’Connor’s biopic of Emily Bront ë, is an example of this. Corsage , Austrian writer-director Marie Kreutzer’s fifth feature, does this to an extreme. The inference, at the end of the film, set between December 1877 and the autumn of 1878, is that its subject, Empress Elizabeth of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, committed suicide by throwing herself from the prow of a ship, aged 40. In reality, Elizabeth lived until 1898, when she was assassinated by an Italian anarchist. Kreutzer’s film doesn’t just feature one historical indiscretion. It imagines Elizabeth (Vicky Krieps), known affectionately as Sisi, meeting the father of cinema, Louis Le Prince (Finnegan Oldfield), in Northumberland in the spring of 1878. She then becomes the subject of...

Pictured : Amin ( Tahar Rahim ) and Alpha ( Mélissa Boros ) in a scene from ' Alpha ', the third feature film from writer-director Julia Ducournau . Still courtesy of Neon (US), Curzon (UK), Diaphana Distribution (France) French writer-director Julia Ducournau has made two bold, kinetic horror films, Raw and Titane in which women behave very badly. She fuses ‘out there’ elements, like a car impregnating a woman or bloodsucking at a medical school, with family dynamics. In those first two movies, not only are no f-ks given, none are offered. Alpha , her third feature, which returned empty handed from the Cannes Film Festival, the site of her 2021 unexpected triumph with Titane , is different. The genre elements – specifically a disease that turns people into crumbling statues – don’t emanate from the protagonist, thirteen-year-old Alpha (Mélissa Boros). Rather, they are observed from without. Ducournau employs flashbacks in which Alpha’s father, Amin (Tahar Rahim) struggles...