Larry Oliver Film Reviews

  Pictured : 'Are you tired, old man?' Divorced writer-turned-day labourer, Paul ( Bastien Bouillon ) works for less than UK minimum wage in the French social drama, ' At Work ' ( À Pied d’Oeuvre ), adapted from Franck Courtès ’ 2023 autobiographical account by Gilles Marchand and the film's director Valérie Donzelli . Still courtesy of Diaphana Distribution (France)  We see a perfectly beautiful stretch of patterned wallpaper, red on white. Then a mallet bursts through. Before long, the wall of a room in a house is rendered into dust, the rubble swept up into plastic sacks, one of which is loaded onto a truck by Paul Marquet (Bastien Bouillon), a bespectacled 42-year-old, divorced day labourer who is the protagonist of French director Valérie Donzelli’s eighth feature film, À Pied d’Oeuvre ( At Work ). Adapted from Franck Courtès’ 2023 autobiographical account of his own switch from photographer to handyman, Donzelli and her co-writer Gilles Marchand fashion a fi...

  Pictured : 'It's the end of my world and I know it.' Nino ( Théodore Pellerin ) attends his surprise birthday party twenty-four hours after being told that he has throat cancer in a scene from writer-director  Pauline Loquès ' Paris-set film, ' Nino '. Still courtesy of Curzon (UK) Nino Clavel (Théodore Pellerin) the soon-to-be 29-year-old protagonist of French writer-director Pauline Loquès’ feature debut, Nino , faces his worst-ever birthday weekend. Visiting a Paris clinic on Friday to collect a sick note, he is told that he has throat cancer. Nino had complained of fatigue and a pain in his throat but did not expect the diagnosis of papillon carcinoma, the result of a sexually transmitted disease he contracted when he was younger.   However, he is being fast-tracked for treatment. He needs to have someone to accompany him on Monday morning for the first appointment. He is told that the treatment will not result in hair loss but will reduce his sperm count...

  Pictured : B est friends Alex ( Aviva Wrede ) and Laura ( Embla Ingelman-Sundberg ) arrive in Warsaw at the start of Swedish writer-director Fanny Ovesen 's super-excellent feature debut,  Leva Lite  ( Live A Little ).   Still courtesy of Breaking Glass Pictures / Scandinavian Film Distribution    Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth. This sentiment is attributed to boxer Mike Tyson but could equally apply to best friends Alex (Aviva Wrede) and Laura (Embla Ingelman-Sundberg), the young protagonists of Swedish writer-director Fanny Ovesen’s super-excellent feature debut, Leva Lite ( Live A Little ) . For two years, they have planned an interrail trip across Europe, stopping at the capital cities Warsaw, Prague, Berlin and Paris; you could call their trip ‘Caps Lock’. However, they come unstuck while following the advice, ‘don’t think, just drink’, threatening to unravel not just their friendship but Laura’s relationship with her lo...

Contains spoilers In her third collaboration with director Claire Denis, Avec Amour et Acharnement (‘With Love and Fury’, re-titled in English as Both Sides of the Blade ), Juliette Binoche plays Sara, a radio talk show host who is torn between two men, her partner Jean (Vincent Lindon), an ex-con and former rugby player whose bi-racial son from his first marriage, Marcus (Issa Penca) is raised by his mother, Nelly (Bulle Ogier) and her ex, François (Grégoire Colin) who re-appears in her life first outside the offices of the radio station where she works and then as he goes into business running an agency for young rugby players. Unusually, Denis doesn’t make Sara her principal viewpoint character. Rather, she gives equal screen time to Jean, this also being Lindon’s third film with Denis. Outdoing both of them, Colin re-unites with Denis for their seventh film together, after Nenette et Boni , Beau Travail , Vendredi Soir , The Intruder , 35 Shots of Rum and Bastards . If nothing ...

  Director Catherine Corsini’s Paris-set comedy-drama, La Fracture (English title: ‘The Divide’) begins with the sound of snoring. At first you think, ‘it must be someone in the audience’. Then we see a twitchy foot emerging from the bottom of a duvet. The foot belongs to Raf (Valeria Bruni Tedeschi), a needy cartoonist who is hammering out texts – I love the French word ‘texto’ – to her long-time and soon-to-leave-her partner, Julie (Marina Fo ï s). Raf qualifies the words she is writing, replacing one harsh descriptor with something more balanced. No sooner has she sent one text than she hammers out another, cancelling out the first. The joke is that the recipient is lying right next to her, snoring away. ‘Did you get my texts?’ Raf asks the next morning with perfect sweetness (Bruni Tedeschi does sweetness rather well). ‘What?’ replies Julie, ‘The one sent at 5:42, 5:46, or 5:48?’ Raf is clearly too much. She and Julie have fought before but Julie, who has decided to find her o...

  Ah to be sixteen again and revel in insecurity. To shave for the first time and watch the blood flow. To sweat and barely notice my glasses sliding down my nose. To have little sense of how my clothes shaped people’s impressions of me. However, I am writing to celebrate the accomplishment of Suzanne Lindon, who completed her first film, Seize Printemps ( Spring Blossom ) at the age of twenty. As if this wasn’t enough, the film was selected for inclusion in the 2020 Cannes Film Festival. Admittedly, the festival didn’t take place, but the honour (and the logo at the start of the film) remains. Lindon is easily the youngest writer-director whose work I have written about in this series and she’s taken a leaf out of the Orson Welles school of self-promotion by giving herself the leading role. Apparently, the film solely exists to showcase Lindon’s acting talents – she is the daughter of Vincent Lindon and Sandrine Kiberlain, both of whom continue to have successful careers in Fre...

Pictured : Jaded journalist Arthur ( Benjamin Biolay ) reacquaints himself with refugee advocate Mathilde ( Camille Cottin , right) who introduces him to Afghan refugee Daoud ( Amrullah Safi , centre) in the French comedy drama,  Quelques Jours Pas Plus ( Just a Couple of Days ), co-written and directed by Julie Navarro . Still courtesy of BAC Films (France) Just a Couple of Days ( Quelques Jours Pas Plus ), the feature debut of casting director turned actual director, Julie Navarro , is an appealing comedy-drama about a music-loving journalist, Arthur ( Benjamin Biolay ) and a lawyer turned activist, Mathilde ( Camille Cottin ) who circle one another in a will-they-won’t-they relationship orbiting Daoud ( Amrullah Safi ), an Afghan refugee whom Arthur agrees to accommodate for the ‘couple of days’ of the title. Navarro, who co-wrote the script with Marc Salbert , on whose research the film is based, gives us a series of cliches that nevertheless prove an agreeable gateway to ma...