Tag Archives: french

by - 0 comments

Arès (2016) – Review

Review Arès

According to Arès, Paris will be quite different from now in the year 2035. There no longer is a government and society has changed. There are 15 million people without work and many of them live in the streets in tents. Laws have changed and people are allowed to sell their bodies or part of it or participate in life threatening experiments. This also has had a big influence on sports. Fighting has become the sport everyone loves to watch and bet on. Arès is one of the men who has been fighting for a long time using smartdrugs to enhance himself. He once was at the top of the leaderboard, but his life has changed and he has left the fighting cage behind him. When his sister is arrested and is viewed as a terrorist the only way he can make sure she is set free is to pay the people holding her. To earn money he can only do one thing: Get back into the cage and take a high dose of an enhancement drug which has previously killed everyone who tried. Continue reading →

by - 1 Comment

Girlhood (2014) – Review

review girlhood

Based purely on the title you could assume that this is the sequel to Richard Linklater’s Boyhood, a movie which personally didn’t move me as much as it seems to have done to other reviewers. Besides the title though, this movie doesn’t have many similarities. Girlhood is set in France and follows sixteen-year-old Marieme (Karidja Touré). Continue reading →

by - 0 comments

Les cowboys (2015) – Review

Review Les Cowboys

If you have kids then you have the natural instinct to watch them, be there for them and protect them. Nevertheless, from the start you should already slowly let go so that they can learn from the mistakes they make and ultimately spread their wings. However, when you see that the freedom you give them is a bit too much, you’ll have to restrict it again to make it safe.

It is a constant process that I’m constantly working on myself, but the older your children get, the more you realize that you can’t and shouldn’t try to check everything. There is a chance that it all goes incredibly wrong. I regularly read about parents who left their child home alone and they ended up inviting friends who brought alcohol and they had to be hospitalized for alcohol poisoning. With those stories in mind it is important to inform rather than to limit so that you keep talking to each other instead of having a teenager who shuts you out and starts having secrets for you. That is exactly what the main character from Les Cowboys realises. A secret that will affect the whole family deeply. Continue reading →

by - 5 Comments

Playtime (1967)

Review Playtime

Les vacances de Monsieur Hulot was my first experience of watching Jacques Tati and his most famous character Monsieur Hulot. THat movie really didn’t have much story to it, but felt almost like a comedic documentaire about the events that take place in a hotel near a beach. The DVD set of his movies also had his fourth movie Playtime in it, which has been on my to watch list for years. I had gotten very curious about it and was interested to find out how it would compare to Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot. Continue reading →

by - 6 Comments

Sleepless Night (2011)

Sleepless Night review

As you probably know by now, I’m a big fan of French thrillers. Have seen a couple of them lately and they all were really amazing. I heard about this movie on the Slashfilm podcast and it was described as “Die Hard in a nightclub”, so I was immediately interested. So is this movie worth watching or were my hopes too high? Continue reading →

by - 16 Comments

Tell No One (2006)

review

France sure know how to make a good thriller. After recently seeing Point Blank I read about this movie on someone else’s blog (sorry I can’t remember who it was, but I follow so many). Since it also starred François Cluzet, who I really loved in The Intouchables (which you really should see immediately if you can) I had to check it out. So is it any good? Continue reading →

by - 0 comments

Un prophète (2009)

This French movie tells the story about a criminal called Malik. He has to go to jail where he experiences the tensions between the various groups (Corsicans/Muslims). Very soon he gets mixed up in the politics of it all.

The movie reminded me a lot of Scarface. Not that there are many similarities with it (although this movie also contains it’s fair share of crime and violence), but this story is also about a nobody who slowly grows in the environment he ends up in. In this movie you feel like you are under the skin of Malik. You feel the effects of prison life on him (pay attention on the airport scene, where it’s clear how much the prison system has had an effect on him). You are there when he has to struggle with some dilemmas. The length of the movie is 2 and half hours, but doesn’t feel too long at all. It’s a movie which I could immediately watch a second time. The last scene of the movie seems to be a tribute to a scene from the Godfather. You’ll have to watch it to see if you recognise it.

Score: 9