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...

  The traumatic effect of a terrorist attack is explored in French director Alice Winocour’s fourth feature, Revoir Paris ( Paris Memories ). Co-written by Winocour, Jean-St é phane Bron and Marcia Romano, the film stars Virginie Efira as Mia, a journalist turned translator, who having lost her appetite in one restaurant – her surgeon partner, Vincent (Gr é goire Colin) having been unexpectedly called back to hospital (‘my intern is swamped’) – dines in another, L’Etoile D’Or (‘Golden Star’) – when, as she leaves, two women are gunned down in front of her by a terrorist, before more indiscriminate killing ensues. Mia survives but has lost some of her memory of the incident. Returning to the restaurant, she is accused by another traumatised survivor of locking herself in the bathroom and allowing others, unable to take cover, to be killed. Mia is determined to understand what she did that evening, even as it leads to the disintegration of her relationship and takes her into the wor...

  Most films about space travel tend to be high-concept action adventures. In director Michael Bay’s 1998 film Armageddon, starring Bruce Willis and Ben Affleck, for instance, a team of oil drillers are sent into space to neutralise an asteroid that threatens to devastate the planet. By contrast, Alice Winocour’s third film as director, Proxima, shot on location in actual space training facilities, is a much smaller, more intimate affair.   Co-written by Jean-St é phane Bron, with whom Winocour collaborated on her previous film, the PTSD bodyguard thriller, Disorder , it shows French astronaut Sarah Loreau (Eva Green) in her final preparations for departure from Earth for a minimum one-year mission to Mars. She could not be more excited. However, she is leaving behind her young daughter, Stella (Z é lie Boulant-Lemesle). Stella is a sullen child, having been diagnosed with dyslexia, dyscalculia and dysorthographia, which means she has difficulty reading, understanding mat...