Benoît Poelvoorde

Beating Hearts

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Adèle Exarchopoulos as the grown-up Jackie

Beating Hearts is a French gangster-origin story, a noirish Goodfellas with more preamble. Let’s just cut through the flim-flam and say that it’s got some serious problems, yet the actors are so good. The concept isn’t bad either – Scorsese with some West Side Story ambitions, plus a bit of Tarantino stirred in, or that’s what director Gilles Lellouche says. It splits pretty neatly down the middle into two halves, with the first half meant to set us up for the second, which it doesn’t. In part one, 1980s bad boy Clotaire meets swotty, smart and attractive Jackie, and is instantly smitten. Doubly smitten when he tries to flirt with her with a lippy … Read more

Smoking Causes Coughing

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The Tobacco Force

Smoking Causes Coughing. Of course it does. It might be the only bit of sense there is in Quentin Dupieux’s latest film, a drama-free but quirk-heavy work of surreal flippancy centring on a gang of superheroes who call themselves the Tobacco Force. In their tight suits and helmets, this gang look like the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers but as we meet them they appear to be fighting a character who’s escaped from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, a gigantic upright Tortoise called Tortusse (the film is in French, which explains the tortoise’s name, and the film’s original one, Fumer Fait Tousser). Struggling, even five to one, the Tobacco Force decide to combine their … Read more

Man Bites Dog

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Benoît Poelvoorde in Man Bites Dog

A movie for every day of the year – a good one 4 October Belgium is created, 1830 On this day in 1830, the state and kingdom of Belgium was created, after a revolution against the rule of King William I which saw the southern, mostly Catholic, significantly French-speaking states break away from the largely protestant, significantly Flemish-speaking United Kingdom of the Netherlands. Though ostensibly linguistic and religious in origin, the revolution was in fact fuelled by economics – the “Belgian” territories were more populous though far poorer, more rural, less well represented in government, than the northern “Dutch” territories. On being granted independence by the Treaty of London in 1830, the Belgian … Read more