Charlotte Gainsbourg Page 2

Two decades is a long time to wait for a sequel, especially one starring much of the original cast. (The record may go to the 32 years between Return of the Jedi and The Force Awakens.) But clearly filmmakers Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin have long wanted to follow up their 1996 blockbuster hit Independence Day. The result is a big, fast sci-fi action thriller that lacks both the original movie's enjoyably raucous tone and its break-out star Will Smith.

After the events of 20 years ago, America has taken alien technology to heart, improving transportation and military defence, including creating a base on the moon to keep an eye out for returning tentacled baddies. Then an orb-shape ship appears, followed by a new mothership so large that it spans the entire Atlantic Ocean. President Lanford (Sela Ward) turns to the surviving heroes of the previous invasion for help: scientific expert David (Jeff Goldblum), former president Whitmore (Bill Pullman) and mad genius Brakish (Brent Spiner). Meanwhile, a young team of next-generation pilots dives into the fray, including Dylan (Jesse T. Usher playing Will Smith's now-grown son), Jake (Liam Hemsworth), Patricia (Maika Monroe as Whitmore's daughter and Jake's fiancee) and Charlie (Travis Tope).

The film is assembled in standard disaster movie style, quickly introducing characters and their personal little melodramas before throwing them into the mad chaos of this new invasion. Emmerich is an expert at this structure, using it to hugely entertaining effect from Independence Day to Godzilla, The Day After Tomorrow, 2014 and White House Down. So it's odd that this film feels so lifeless by comparison. The story rushes past at a breathless pace that never allows the characters or events to gain any real traction with the audience. The only sharp wit on hand this time comes from throwaway one-liners apparently improvised by Goldblum. And the action feels eerily derivative, rehashed from Emmerich's filmography with added elements from Star Wars and Apocalypse Now.

Continue reading: Independence Day: Resurgence Review

At four hours long, this drama is as confrontational as anything we've seen by Lars von Trier (Melancholia), but it's also perhaps his most humane and hopeful film yet. This is a challenging, complex exploration of human sexuality, but it's told with a surprisingly light touch, allowing humour and warmth to seep in around the edges. So even if it's darkly haunting and occasionally shocking, violent or sexually explicit, it's so recognisably honest that we can't help but be moved.

This is the story of Joe (played as a teen by Martin and as an adult by Gainsbourg), who is found near death in an alleyway and nursed back to health by the kindly Seligman (Skarsgard). While she recovers from her injuries, she tells him about her life, which has been defined by sex since she was 2 years old. She loses her virginity as a teen to the greasy biker Jerome (LaBeouf), who will re-enter her life two more times over the following decades. Through the years she struggles to understand love, which she sees as lust plus jealousy. Then when she suspects that love might be the secret ingredient for good sex, her subsequent experiences take her down an unexpected road.

Flashbacks to Joe's life are sequential, so as she narrates her story we experience it along with her. This includes her riotous teen years preying on men as a game, protesting with her friends against a love-fixated society. Getting sex is easy, but making sense of it is something else. She tries being randomly cruel to men, and having a master (Bell) physically abuse her. She experiences love and motherhood, and eventually finds a career as an enforcer for a loan shark (Dafoe). Along the way, Martin and Gainsbourg deliver unflinching performances that let us see Joe's soul. And Skarsgard takes our breath away in an unusually introspective, wrenching role.

Continue reading: Nymphomaniac Review

As she celebrates her 80th birthday, the iconic French filmmaker compiles an impressionistic collage of photographs, home movies, new scenes and clips from the classic films she had a hand in. She recounts her career alongside Godard and the Nouvelle Vague, and links her memories together with beaches from near her birthplace in Belgium to Los Angeles by way of Cuba and Cannes. She also installs a beach on a Paris street, occupied by female members of her staff.

Continue reading: The Beaches Of Agnes [Les Plages D'Agnes] Review

At first, he's a young, train-hopping wanderer who has taken the name Woody (Marcus Carl Franklin), from his hero Woody Guthrie. He also plays a guitar with "This Machine Kills Fascism" painted on it. Later, the man appears as an aged Billy the Kid (Richard Gere) who can't understand why the locals are being bullied out of their land by a decrepit Pat Garrett (Bruce Greenwood). Fitfully, the sequences are shot in the dusty browns of Peckinpah and the hippie westerns of the late 1960s and 1970s. Both stories, along with the others, are consistently interrupted by a press conference with poet Arthur Rimbaud (Ben Whishaw), who speaks in a particularly American sarcasm while scrutinizing everyone who questions him, half-mumbling with cigarette in hand.

Continue reading: I'm Not There Review

Alain Getty (Laurent Lucas) has a nice job at an engineering firm where he is designing a new kind of webcam that can help in everyday tasks. His wife Benedicte (Charlotte Gainsbourg) hasn't found a job yet and is still unpacking their things when Alain agrees to allow his boss and his wife to come over for a dinner. His boss, Richard (Andre Dussollier), arrives at the house with a jovial aura but his wife (Charlotte Rampling) has the disposition of a scorpion. That night, they find an injured lemming in their sink pipe. Since a lemming tends to only live in Scandinavia, it freaks Alain out big time. Things don't get any better when the boss' wife commits suicide in the Gettys' house, which prompts Benedicte to take a very strange turn in mood.

Continue reading: Lemming Review

Made in 1985, Claude Miller's film focuses on a bratty girl (Charlotte Gainsbourg, only 14 at the time) wasting away a month after school is out and before she goes on summer holiday. Charlotte becomes obsessed with a child piano prodigy and through a ridiculous coincidence, ends up encountering her en route to getting her piano stool repaired. Charlotte then hangs around the metal shop in order to try to get closer to Clara, the prodigy, and hopefully spend her holiday with the young girl.

Continue reading: L'Effrontée Review