Mathieu Amalric

A Private Life

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Lilian looking up some files

A Private Life is the “Jodie Foster speaks French shock!” movie, and it’s a funny old beast, as if the plot of Jane Austen’s Emma – the fixer who cannot fix her own life – had been re-written by Agatha Christie and then weirded-up with a plot involving past lives. Another way of looking at it is that it’s a 1940s noir, as refracted through Robert Altman’s 1970s update of Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye. But let’s go to cold hard facts and leave the analysis to work itself out. Foster is Lilian Steiner, a Jewish American psychotherapist based in France who seems to be having trouble keeping hold of patients. Her son … Read more

The Phoenician Scheme

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Zsa-Zsa Korda in the bath

Symmetrics. Opulence. Screwball comedy pacing. Whimsy. Deadpan. A nostalgic evocation of old Hollywood. The Phoenician Scheme must be a Wes Anderson movie and if nothing else it finally does with Bill Murray what should have been done long ago. It casts him as God. Wes Anderson. By now about 50 per cent of his potential audience have had enough of the tableaux vivants and the mid-century-modern sets and candy colours, the endless digressing, and films that seem longer than they actually are (The French Dispatch and Asteroid City were both only about 1 hour 45 minutes, but felt longer). But fear not, The Phoenician Scheme has pace, it has jokes and it has … Read more