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...

  Contains spoilers from the outset Julia Ducournau would have been the last director to expect to win the Palme D’Or at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival for a film , Titane , about a female serial killer who has rough sex in the backseat of a car with the car itself. Since when did realism and serious intent get neglected by the jury? It turned out that Jury President, Spike Lee, forgot that he was supposed to wait until the end of the ceremony before announcing the Grand Prize, but then Spike doesn’t do anything conventionally. Titane gets more outrageous the longer it goes, with the protagonist’s nipples leaking oil rather than milk as she pretends to be a fire chief’s missing son whilst battling to contain her pregnant belly. The film retains a dark sense of humour and finally a point of human connection as the protagonist makes a sacrifice (of sorts) to the father she never knew she needed. The film pays homage to the so-called cinema du papa , a contentious French genre th...

  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...