Larry Oliver Film Reviews

  Contains spoilers. You wait for a film in which a married woman played by Vicky Krieps travels to a Nordic country and two arrive within twelve months. Krieps’ terrific central performance in co-writer-director Emily Atef’s French language drama, Plus Que Jamais ( More Than Ever ) is award-worthy by any reasonable measure of quality. It follows her lighter turn as a filmmaker in Mia Hansen-L ø ve’s Bergman Island , in which her character travelled to the late Ingmar Bergman’s home for inspiration, as well as her performance in the fanciful year-in-the-life of Empress Sisi in Marie Kreutzer’s Corsage . Krieps has more interesting roles in films by women directors than in the work of their male counterparts, Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread notwithstanding. Her achievements on screen have reached a purple patch. Co-written by Lars Hubrich, More Than Ever explores a simple truth more clearly than any film I’ve seen on the subject: the living and dying have nothing to say...

  What makes a person decide to become an artist? Usually, it is the kick out of showing work to others and receiving adoration in return. One can be funnelled towards writing, painting, composing or the other creative arts as a young person, but essentially the impulse to be an artist is no different from that of being an athlete. There is a high degree of narcissism and false modesty. The worst impulse is to believe that the art you create is meaningful to others and that it performs an important function. Your art can indeed be meaningful, in the sense of illuminating an issue that is little understood. It can undoubtedly give others pleasure. Whether it performs an important function is moot. A set of favourite films will tell you something about the person who chose them – about how they see themselves. ‘Important’ films, those with a strong moral imperative, are rarely on those lists because they tend to look at the darker aspects of humanity, the atrocities we are prepared t...