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...

  Based on the 1868 and 1869 pair of novels by Louisa May Alcott, the film Little Women tells the story of the March sisters, so-called because they have a spring in their step or, perhaps because they march towards social progress. Jo (Saoirse Ronan) is a budding author, whom we first see in New York framed by a publisher’s door. She gives her handwritten manuscript to a potential author (Tracy Letts) who proceeds to edit it in front of her (‘too long’), then says, ‘we normally pay twenty-five or thirty-five for this sort. I offer you twenty.’ Jo, who has never been published by Volcano Press before, accepts. She runs through the crowded street elated. In time, her work will be in print, though her reader, a fellow boarder, Friedrich Bhaer (Louis Garrel) withholds his approval. Meanwhile in Paris, her sister, Amy (Florence Pugh) is accompanying a rich aunt (Meryl Streep) on her travels. Aunt March believes that the fate of the March family will depend on Amy’s choice of husband. A...

  The title Mal de Pierres refers to stone disease, an abdominal pain caused by the presence of a kidney stone. Kidney stones typically occur when a person is dehydrated, so people living in hot climates are more likely to develop them. You can also develop kidney stones if you have too much calcium and you are consuming way too many oxalates – vegetables like beetroot, asparagus or rhubarb – that prevent your body from absorbing it. Chocolate is also an oxalate. Before seeing Mal de Pierres , I had done zero research into kidney stones or excessive calcium, so at the very least director Nicole Garcia’s film encouraged me to learn about them. Put that on the film poster: ‘An overwrought tale of amour fou’, Wendy Ide, The Guardian ; ‘Sent me straight to NHS Direct’, Larry Oliver, Bitlanders . Re-titled From the Land of the Moon in the UK – you can’t really sell a film called ‘Kidney Stones’ – Mal de Pierres is adapted by Garcia and co-writers Jacques Fieschi and Natalie Carter...