17 November 2023. By Neptune HOW TO HAVE SEX *** This film by first-time director Molly Manning Walker should have been called ‘How NOT to Have Sex’. It’s about three English teenage girlfriends who go off to a Greek party resort to literally “get laid”. They’re terribly excited and the place is full of rowdy […]
FILM: A Century of Devotion
10 November 2023. By Neptune L’ABBÉ PIERRE – UNE VIE DE COMBATS (A Century of Devotion) ***1/2 (vo French) This man could be a modern-day St. Francis. Born to a wealthy bourgeois family in Lyon in 1912 as Henri Groués, he fought all his life for the poor and helpless people he saw around him. […]
FILM: MARIA DE BUENOS AIRES – go to the opera!
3 November 2023. By Neptune This week – an unfortunate film and a magnificent evening at the Opera… COMPLÈTEMENT CRAMÉ *1/2 (vo French) Three fine actors – Fanny Ardant, John Malkovich and Emilie Duquenne – are wasted here in a too clichéd, simplistic tale of an English gentleman who pretends to be a butler to […]
FILM: THE OLD OAK – a Ken Loach film
27 October 2023. By Neptune Two completely opposite films this week – the first about basic decency and humanity, the other about the cold life of a contract killer. Take your pick – they are both from top directors. THE OLD OAK *** One always recognises a Ken Loach film. There are the ordinary people, […]
FILM: ANSELM **** a masterwork on the subject of creativity
20 October 2023. By Neptune ANSELM **** Fantastic white dresses with paraphernalia coming out of the shoulders instead of heads. Bicycles with wings, totems in fields, hundreds of books with flapping pages, oversized paintings resembling crumbling worlds. And haunting, soaring music to accompany these visuals in a truly necessary 3D to enhance the deeper experience. […]
FILM: LE PROCÈS GOLDMAN ****
6 October 2023. By Neptune LE PROCÈS GOLDMAN **** (vo French) This is one powerful showpiece on the judgement of a man who admits to various burglaries that he has committed but has now been given a retrial for the murder charges of two pharmacists, which he has all along vehemently denied. Based on a […]
FILM: DOGMAN *** riveting in its intensity
29 September 2023. By Neptune DOGMAN *** Luc Besson is back, and as always his work is straight from the heart. Mostly innovative and accomplished, as with “Le Grand Bleu”, “La Femme Nikita”, “Léon” or the sensational “Fifth Element”, sometimes over-the-top, as happens when your heart leads your head. Here he gives us a mesmerizing […]
FILM: The Book of Solutions
22 September 2023. By Neptune LE LIVRE DES SOLUTIONS (The Book of Solutions) *** (vo French What a wild, crazy, refreshing comedy about artistic creation! Michel Gondry, the Oscar-anointed French director of “The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind”, has come back to his original language, and gives us quite a bit of his own […]
FILM: SUBTRACTION – a mysterious film reflecting a corner of modern Iran
15 September 2023. Neptune will be back in full force next week. In the meantime see last weeks review below: By Neptune SUBTRACTION ***1/2 (vo Farsi) A woman sees her husband getting on a bus in Tehran, though he has told her he is away on a business trip. She follows him to an apartment […]
FILM: GOLDA **** Israel’s female prime-minister
1 September 2023. By Neptune GOLDA **** The multi award-winning, indefatigable Helen Mirren is once again exceptional (and unrecognisable) in this film about Israel’s female prime-minister, Golda Meir. The ingenuity of this semi-biopic is that it concentrates mainly on the short but deadly 1973 Yom Kippur war when Israel was attacked on two fronts by […]
