"Sensual. Intimate. Sophisticated. Beautiful." Janus Films has unveiled an official trailer and a new poster for the 4K restoration re-release of Chocolat, the feature directorial debut film from acclaimed French director Claire Denis. This originally premiered at the 1988 Cannes Film Festival and launched the career of this talented female filmmaker. Not to be confused with Lasse Hallström's film Chocolat, which earned five Oscar nominations, this one is an entirely different film - set in Africa. A French woman returns to her childhood home in Cameroon - formerly a colonial outpost - where she's flooded by memories, particularly of Protée, her servant from her time there growing up. Starring Mireille Perrier, Isaach De Bankolé, Giulia Boschi, and François Cluzet. This new 4K digital restoration being released by Janus Films was supervised & approved by director Claire Denis, with a mono soundtrack. Restoration is by the laboratory Eclair Classics from the original...
- 2/21/2023
- by Alex Billington
- firstshowing.net
We were all holding our breath to see which film would be included in this year's Main Comp (there were rumors that Brillante Mendoza and Andrey Zvyagintsev respective films were fighting for a final spot) it is the filmmaker behind Oss 117 spoofs that will see his Out of Comp selected The Artist make the odd jump from "not good enough" to "perfectly suited to accompany the masters of cinema" slot. And while Zvyagintsev's Elena didn't make the Main Comp cut -- it has thankfully been accepted as the closing film in the Un Certain Regard category -- which basically means the Russian filmmaker who gave us The Return (Venice 2003) and The Banishment (Cannes 2007) will be working the film until the very last minute with the story of an elderly woman who has lived with her rich husband in a large, comfortable home tries to rescue her alcoholic son from poverty...
- 5/4/2011
- IONCINEMA.com
The 2011 Cannes Film Festival has added the Michel Hazanavicius-directed The Artist to the competition roster, which is now made up of 20 films. The festival has named the Andrey Zvyagintsev-directed Elena to screen at the closing night ceremony of the Un Certain Regard category. The Un Certain Regard jury has been set, with Emir Kusturica presiding, and French actress Elodie Bouchez, UK Guardian critic Peter Bradshaw, Tribeca Enterprises chief creative officer Geoffrey Gilmore and Morelia Festival director Daniela Michel making up the jury. As for the Camera d'or jury, Bong Joon-Ho will preside over a jury that consists of French critic Daniele Heymann, Magyar Filmunio head Eva Vezer, cinematographer Robert Alazraki, Cinedia laboratory manager Daniel Colland, director Jacques Maillot, and critic Alex Masson.
- 5/4/2011
- by MIKE FLEMING
- Deadline
Kilometre Zero
It's a road picture with a MacGuffin. Yet in this powerful, contemporary case, it's no standard generic product: The road is the dusty backways of Iraq, and the MacGuffin is a dead Iraqi soldier whom our battling, nonbuddy heroes must transport to his family. Although generically structured, Kilometre Zero offers a searing look into the horrors the people of Iraq, specifically the Kurds, suffered under the brutish tyranny of Saddam Hussein.
Its most hospitable U.S. venue might be 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., since this Competition entrant personalizes the freedom one Kurdish family attains as a result of the U.S. liberation of Iraq and the downfall of Hussein. Unfortunately, Kilometre's powerful message is delivered with often blunt aesthetics, and commercial prospects are negligible unless the Republican Party gets into the film distribution racket.
Set in 1988 amid the Iraq-Iran war, we follow a young Kurdish husband and father, Ako (Nazmi Kirik), as he is conscripted into the Iraqi Army and thrust into the front lines. Army life is brutal and hellish, and the real enemies, it seems, are his sadistic superior officers. With awful equipment, no training and boneheaded strategy, the "grand army" bungles along on its belly, generally entrenched under enemy bombardment. However, the god of the military bureaucracy shines on Ako when he is assigned to accompany a fellow soldier's corpse to his family and temporarily leave the mayhem. With a flag-wrapped coffin atop an orange GMC vehicle, Ako and an Iraqi cab driver (Robert Alazraki) set out on their mission.
Ako and the driver exchange hostile words: The hatred between the Arab and the Kurd is emblematic of the ethnic strife in that tyrannized land. Unfortunately, writer-director Hiner Saleem's filmmaking skills are not always sufficient for his theme and story. The dialogue is often expositional and the visuals somewhat crude. The epiphany these men finally reach is muddled by Saleem's uneven storytelling. Eventually, it jumps forward to the present and a maudlin last shot of Ako and his family gazing at the Eiffel Tower, representing freedom -- a bit cheeky, one might add, given France's opposition to the conflict in Iraq.
In certain instances, the film resembles a rough cut, but there is a diamond of a story beneath its modest budget constraints. A cortege of coffin-bearing cabs as they wind across the horizon is a searing correlative for the sad horrors of life in Iraq. A sobering, running gag is a towering statue of Saddam Hussein on a flatbed truck that seems to shadow our travelers' transport. There is also some contrapuntal comedic hilarity as the bombastic military music of the Iraqi Army blasts from the cab radio.
Under Saleem's hand, the technical contributions are frequently eloquent, specifically composer Nikos Kipourgos' baleful score, amplified with the wails of a sad people's plea.
KILOMETRE ZERO
Memento Films Distribution
Memento Films Production/La Cinefacture, Hiner Saleem Prods.
Credits:
Screenwriter-director: Hiner Saleem
Director of photography: Robert Alazraki
Production designer: Kamal Hamarash
Music: Nikos Kipourgos
Editor: Anna Ruiz
Sound: Freddy Loth
Cast:
Ako: Nazmi Kirik
Salma: Belcim Bigin
Taxi driver: Robert Alazraki
No MPAA rating
Running time -- 91 minutes...
Its most hospitable U.S. venue might be 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., since this Competition entrant personalizes the freedom one Kurdish family attains as a result of the U.S. liberation of Iraq and the downfall of Hussein. Unfortunately, Kilometre's powerful message is delivered with often blunt aesthetics, and commercial prospects are negligible unless the Republican Party gets into the film distribution racket.
Set in 1988 amid the Iraq-Iran war, we follow a young Kurdish husband and father, Ako (Nazmi Kirik), as he is conscripted into the Iraqi Army and thrust into the front lines. Army life is brutal and hellish, and the real enemies, it seems, are his sadistic superior officers. With awful equipment, no training and boneheaded strategy, the "grand army" bungles along on its belly, generally entrenched under enemy bombardment. However, the god of the military bureaucracy shines on Ako when he is assigned to accompany a fellow soldier's corpse to his family and temporarily leave the mayhem. With a flag-wrapped coffin atop an orange GMC vehicle, Ako and an Iraqi cab driver (Robert Alazraki) set out on their mission.
Ako and the driver exchange hostile words: The hatred between the Arab and the Kurd is emblematic of the ethnic strife in that tyrannized land. Unfortunately, writer-director Hiner Saleem's filmmaking skills are not always sufficient for his theme and story. The dialogue is often expositional and the visuals somewhat crude. The epiphany these men finally reach is muddled by Saleem's uneven storytelling. Eventually, it jumps forward to the present and a maudlin last shot of Ako and his family gazing at the Eiffel Tower, representing freedom -- a bit cheeky, one might add, given France's opposition to the conflict in Iraq.
In certain instances, the film resembles a rough cut, but there is a diamond of a story beneath its modest budget constraints. A cortege of coffin-bearing cabs as they wind across the horizon is a searing correlative for the sad horrors of life in Iraq. A sobering, running gag is a towering statue of Saddam Hussein on a flatbed truck that seems to shadow our travelers' transport. There is also some contrapuntal comedic hilarity as the bombastic military music of the Iraqi Army blasts from the cab radio.
Under Saleem's hand, the technical contributions are frequently eloquent, specifically composer Nikos Kipourgos' baleful score, amplified with the wails of a sad people's plea.
KILOMETRE ZERO
Memento Films Distribution
Memento Films Production/La Cinefacture, Hiner Saleem Prods.
Credits:
Screenwriter-director: Hiner Saleem
Director of photography: Robert Alazraki
Production designer: Kamal Hamarash
Music: Nikos Kipourgos
Editor: Anna Ruiz
Sound: Freddy Loth
Cast:
Ako: Nazmi Kirik
Salma: Belcim Bigin
Taxi driver: Robert Alazraki
No MPAA rating
Running time -- 91 minutes...
- 5/12/2005
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
Born Romantic
Losers need romance too. So in "Born Romantic", writer-director David Kane presents an ensemble of rueful loners in London -- daft, driven and often wanting in social skills. They all hang out at a salsa club where they hope to bump into the right partner. It's "Marty" to a Latin beat.
Kane has come up with enough twists and surprises to give the somewhat stagnant comedy the appearance of forward movement. While you sense the writer lurking behind these twists and oddball moments, the film is not without its shaggy charm. However, the United Artists domestic pickup will need more promotion than it has gotten so far if "Romantic" is to be discovered by adult audiences Stateside.
The backdrop to the comedy is a London as it is lived in by its inhabitants rather than seen from a tourist's viewpoint in movies like "Notting Hill". Kane establishes a milieu where people manage to get through the day in order to relax at an upstairs salsa club where a kind of fantasy life takes over: One might not find Mr. or Ms. Right, but the beat and rhythms are so hypnotic, you wake up the next day to the realization you had a good time.
Another key location is a cafe/cab stand where the principal characters mainline caffeine and hail taxis. One inexplicable curio in the movie is how its seemingly unemployed males can afford taxis, which are quite expensive in London. Anyway, the movie soon enough isolates three couples and one cabbie to occupy our interest.
Scruffy and bearded Fergus (David Morrissey) searches for Mo (Jane Horrocks), the Liverpudlian sweetheart he jilted a week before their wedding some eight years prior. When he finds her, he finds a woman in an emotional mess thanks to him.
Frankie (Scottish comic Craig Ferguson), living with a bitter ex-wife in a flat they cannot sell because it is, literally, sinking, is smitten with Eleanor (a coolly beautiful Olivia Williams), an art restorer who throws up many barriers to intimacy despite being lonely as hell.
Eddie (Jimi Mistry), a thief, ducks into the club one night to escape police. Almost against his will, he falls for the hypochondriac Jocelyn (Catherine McCormack), whose job is tending grave sites for people who have moved out of the London area. Everyone at one time or another jumps into a cab driven by Jimmy (Adrian Lester), who listens, watches, then dispenses sage advice from the front seat.
Kane offers the spectacle of three obsessed men pursuing women who want nothing to do with them and after a while want even less to do with them. Things fall into a predictable pattern where learning how to dance proves the way to these women's hearts.
The male actors, fortunately, make few concessions to the tawdry nature of their characters. These women really do deserve better. Yet the men explore their shortcomings with a kind of honesty that makes one empathetic at the very least. And the women respond accordingly.
The female roles are undernourished. You "get" them in the sense that the writer has left enough clues as to their hangups and reasons for low self-esteem. Yet these explanations feel beside the point. Having cast his movie with good-looking, savvy actresses, Kane then wants you to believe these women have no other options than a thief, an emotional coward and a dolt under the thumb of his ex-wife.
Technical credits are excellent for the modestly budgeted film. Robert Alazraki's nighttime cinematography gives an air of danger to the romance. Sarah Greenwood's production design from the overheated salsa club to Frankie's sliding flat reflects in witty ways the inner turmoil of the story's characters.
BORN ROMANTIC
United Artists Films
BBC Films and Harvest Pictures
present a Kismet Film Co. production
Producer: Michele Camarda
Screenwriter-director: David Kane
Executive producers: David M. Thompson, Alistair Maclean-Clark, Melvyn Singer
Director of photography: Robert Alazraki
Production designer: Sarah Greenwood
Music: Simon Boswell
Costume designer: Jill Taylor
Editor: Michael Parker
Color/stereo
Cast:
Fergus: David Morrissey
Mo: Jane Horrocks
Eddie: Jimi Mistry
Jocelyn: Catherine McCormack
Frankie: Craig Ferguson
Jimmy: Adrian Lester
Eleanor: Olivia Williams
Running time -- 96 minutes
MPAA rating: R...
Kane has come up with enough twists and surprises to give the somewhat stagnant comedy the appearance of forward movement. While you sense the writer lurking behind these twists and oddball moments, the film is not without its shaggy charm. However, the United Artists domestic pickup will need more promotion than it has gotten so far if "Romantic" is to be discovered by adult audiences Stateside.
The backdrop to the comedy is a London as it is lived in by its inhabitants rather than seen from a tourist's viewpoint in movies like "Notting Hill". Kane establishes a milieu where people manage to get through the day in order to relax at an upstairs salsa club where a kind of fantasy life takes over: One might not find Mr. or Ms. Right, but the beat and rhythms are so hypnotic, you wake up the next day to the realization you had a good time.
Another key location is a cafe/cab stand where the principal characters mainline caffeine and hail taxis. One inexplicable curio in the movie is how its seemingly unemployed males can afford taxis, which are quite expensive in London. Anyway, the movie soon enough isolates three couples and one cabbie to occupy our interest.
Scruffy and bearded Fergus (David Morrissey) searches for Mo (Jane Horrocks), the Liverpudlian sweetheart he jilted a week before their wedding some eight years prior. When he finds her, he finds a woman in an emotional mess thanks to him.
Frankie (Scottish comic Craig Ferguson), living with a bitter ex-wife in a flat they cannot sell because it is, literally, sinking, is smitten with Eleanor (a coolly beautiful Olivia Williams), an art restorer who throws up many barriers to intimacy despite being lonely as hell.
Eddie (Jimi Mistry), a thief, ducks into the club one night to escape police. Almost against his will, he falls for the hypochondriac Jocelyn (Catherine McCormack), whose job is tending grave sites for people who have moved out of the London area. Everyone at one time or another jumps into a cab driven by Jimmy (Adrian Lester), who listens, watches, then dispenses sage advice from the front seat.
Kane offers the spectacle of three obsessed men pursuing women who want nothing to do with them and after a while want even less to do with them. Things fall into a predictable pattern where learning how to dance proves the way to these women's hearts.
The male actors, fortunately, make few concessions to the tawdry nature of their characters. These women really do deserve better. Yet the men explore their shortcomings with a kind of honesty that makes one empathetic at the very least. And the women respond accordingly.
The female roles are undernourished. You "get" them in the sense that the writer has left enough clues as to their hangups and reasons for low self-esteem. Yet these explanations feel beside the point. Having cast his movie with good-looking, savvy actresses, Kane then wants you to believe these women have no other options than a thief, an emotional coward and a dolt under the thumb of his ex-wife.
Technical credits are excellent for the modestly budgeted film. Robert Alazraki's nighttime cinematography gives an air of danger to the romance. Sarah Greenwood's production design from the overheated salsa club to Frankie's sliding flat reflects in witty ways the inner turmoil of the story's characters.
BORN ROMANTIC
United Artists Films
BBC Films and Harvest Pictures
present a Kismet Film Co. production
Producer: Michele Camarda
Screenwriter-director: David Kane
Executive producers: David M. Thompson, Alistair Maclean-Clark, Melvyn Singer
Director of photography: Robert Alazraki
Production designer: Sarah Greenwood
Music: Simon Boswell
Costume designer: Jill Taylor
Editor: Michael Parker
Color/stereo
Cast:
Fergus: David Morrissey
Mo: Jane Horrocks
Eddie: Jimi Mistry
Jocelyn: Catherine McCormack
Frankie: Craig Ferguson
Jimmy: Adrian Lester
Eleanor: Olivia Williams
Running time -- 96 minutes
MPAA rating: R...
- 7/8/2004
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
Born Romantic
Losers need romance too. So in "Born Romantic", writer-director David Kane presents an ensemble of rueful loners in London -- daft, driven and often wanting in social skills. They all hang out at a salsa club where they hope to bump into the right partner. It's "Marty" to a Latin beat.
Kane has come up with enough twists and surprises to give the somewhat stagnant comedy the appearance of forward movement. While you sense the writer lurking behind these twists and oddball moments, the film is not without its shaggy charm. However, the United Artists domestic pickup will need more promotion than it has gotten so far if "Romantic" is to be discovered by adult audiences Stateside.
The backdrop to the comedy is a London as it is lived in by its inhabitants rather than seen from a tourist's viewpoint in movies like "Notting Hill". Kane establishes a milieu where people manage to get through the day in order to relax at an upstairs salsa club where a kind of fantasy life takes over: One might not find Mr. or Ms. Right, but the beat and rhythms are so hypnotic, you wake up the next day to the realization you had a good time.
Another key location is a cafe/cab stand where the principal characters mainline caffeine and hail taxis. One inexplicable curio in the movie is how its seemingly unemployed males can afford taxis, which are quite expensive in London. Anyway, the movie soon enough isolates three couples and one cabbie to occupy our interest.
Scruffy and bearded Fergus (David Morrissey) searches for Mo (Jane Horrocks), the Liverpudlian sweetheart he jilted a week before their wedding some eight years prior. When he finds her, he finds a woman in an emotional mess thanks to him.
Frankie (Scottish comic Craig Ferguson), living with a bitter ex-wife in a flat they cannot sell because it is, literally, sinking, is smitten with Eleanor (a coolly beautiful Olivia Williams), an art restorer who throws up many barriers to intimacy despite being lonely as hell.
Eddie (Jimi Mistry), a thief, ducks into the club one night to escape police. Almost against his will, he falls for the hypochondriac Jocelyn (Catherine McCormack), whose job is tending grave sites for people who have moved out of the London area. Everyone at one time or another jumps into a cab driven by Jimmy (Adrian Lester), who listens, watches, then dispenses sage advice from the front seat.
Kane offers the spectacle of three obsessed men pursuing women who want nothing to do with them and after a while want even less to do with them. Things fall into a predictable pattern where learning how to dance proves the way to these women's hearts.
The male actors, fortunately, make few concessions to the tawdry nature of their characters. These women really do deserve better. Yet the men explore their shortcomings with a kind of honesty that makes one empathetic at the very least. And the women respond accordingly.
The female roles are undernourished. You "get" them in the sense that the writer has left enough clues as to their hangups and reasons for low self-esteem. Yet these explanations feel beside the point. Having cast his movie with good-looking, savvy actresses, Kane then wants you to believe these women have no other options than a thief, an emotional coward and a dolt under the thumb of his ex-wife.
Technical credits are excellent for the modestly budgeted film. Robert Alazraki's nighttime cinematography gives an air of danger to the romance. Sarah Greenwood's production design from the overheated salsa club to Frankie's sliding flat reflects in witty ways the inner turmoil of the story's characters.
BORN ROMANTIC
United Artists Films
BBC Films and Harvest Pictures
present a Kismet Film Co. production
Producer: Michele Camarda
Screenwriter-director: David Kane
Executive producers: David M. Thompson, Alistair Maclean-Clark, Melvyn Singer
Director of photography: Robert Alazraki
Production designer: Sarah Greenwood
Music: Simon Boswell
Costume designer: Jill Taylor
Editor: Michael Parker
Color/stereo
Cast:
Fergus: David Morrissey
Mo: Jane Horrocks
Eddie: Jimi Mistry
Jocelyn: Catherine McCormack
Frankie: Craig Ferguson
Jimmy: Adrian Lester
Eleanor: Olivia Williams
Running time -- 96 minutes
MPAA rating: R...
Kane has come up with enough twists and surprises to give the somewhat stagnant comedy the appearance of forward movement. While you sense the writer lurking behind these twists and oddball moments, the film is not without its shaggy charm. However, the United Artists domestic pickup will need more promotion than it has gotten so far if "Romantic" is to be discovered by adult audiences Stateside.
The backdrop to the comedy is a London as it is lived in by its inhabitants rather than seen from a tourist's viewpoint in movies like "Notting Hill". Kane establishes a milieu where people manage to get through the day in order to relax at an upstairs salsa club where a kind of fantasy life takes over: One might not find Mr. or Ms. Right, but the beat and rhythms are so hypnotic, you wake up the next day to the realization you had a good time.
Another key location is a cafe/cab stand where the principal characters mainline caffeine and hail taxis. One inexplicable curio in the movie is how its seemingly unemployed males can afford taxis, which are quite expensive in London. Anyway, the movie soon enough isolates three couples and one cabbie to occupy our interest.
Scruffy and bearded Fergus (David Morrissey) searches for Mo (Jane Horrocks), the Liverpudlian sweetheart he jilted a week before their wedding some eight years prior. When he finds her, he finds a woman in an emotional mess thanks to him.
Frankie (Scottish comic Craig Ferguson), living with a bitter ex-wife in a flat they cannot sell because it is, literally, sinking, is smitten with Eleanor (a coolly beautiful Olivia Williams), an art restorer who throws up many barriers to intimacy despite being lonely as hell.
Eddie (Jimi Mistry), a thief, ducks into the club one night to escape police. Almost against his will, he falls for the hypochondriac Jocelyn (Catherine McCormack), whose job is tending grave sites for people who have moved out of the London area. Everyone at one time or another jumps into a cab driven by Jimmy (Adrian Lester), who listens, watches, then dispenses sage advice from the front seat.
Kane offers the spectacle of three obsessed men pursuing women who want nothing to do with them and after a while want even less to do with them. Things fall into a predictable pattern where learning how to dance proves the way to these women's hearts.
The male actors, fortunately, make few concessions to the tawdry nature of their characters. These women really do deserve better. Yet the men explore their shortcomings with a kind of honesty that makes one empathetic at the very least. And the women respond accordingly.
The female roles are undernourished. You "get" them in the sense that the writer has left enough clues as to their hangups and reasons for low self-esteem. Yet these explanations feel beside the point. Having cast his movie with good-looking, savvy actresses, Kane then wants you to believe these women have no other options than a thief, an emotional coward and a dolt under the thumb of his ex-wife.
Technical credits are excellent for the modestly budgeted film. Robert Alazraki's nighttime cinematography gives an air of danger to the romance. Sarah Greenwood's production design from the overheated salsa club to Frankie's sliding flat reflects in witty ways the inner turmoil of the story's characters.
BORN ROMANTIC
United Artists Films
BBC Films and Harvest Pictures
present a Kismet Film Co. production
Producer: Michele Camarda
Screenwriter-director: David Kane
Executive producers: David M. Thompson, Alistair Maclean-Clark, Melvyn Singer
Director of photography: Robert Alazraki
Production designer: Sarah Greenwood
Music: Simon Boswell
Costume designer: Jill Taylor
Editor: Michael Parker
Color/stereo
Cast:
Fergus: David Morrissey
Mo: Jane Horrocks
Eddie: Jimi Mistry
Jocelyn: Catherine McCormack
Frankie: Craig Ferguson
Jimmy: Adrian Lester
Eleanor: Olivia Williams
Running time -- 96 minutes
MPAA rating: R...
- 10/1/2001
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
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