michel piccoli

Mauvais Sang

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Juliette Binoche covered in shaving cream

French neo-noir at its most stylish, Mauvais Sang (confusingly it also goes by the titles The Night Is Young and the more literally translated Bad Blood) was Leos Carax’s second feature, the enfant terrible of French cinema still only a youthful 26 in 1986 when the film was made. The majority of his cast are pretty young too. We’re seeing early outings for Denis Lavant (25), Juliette Binoche (22) and a very young Julie Delpy (she’s about 15 here, having debuted the year before for Jean-Luc Godard in Detective). If you read any plot precis it’ll tell you that the action is set in some version of the future, where a virus is … Read more

Danger: Diabolik

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Diabolik and Eva in front of a white E type Jaguar

Arsène Lupin, Fantomas and James Bond all come together in Danger: Diabolik, the first screen appearance of the Italian masked master criminal. A flop on its initial release in 1968, it’s now regarded as something of a cult classic. The reasons for that are hard to ignore. This is prime mid-1960s kitsch, a psychedelic, phantasmagoric, frequently silly, almost always entertaining dollop of schlock elevated by the superb eye of director Mario Bava and a soundtrack by Ennio Morricone at his most poptastic – twangy guitars, wordless choirs, drums thrashing, a harpsichord, the sonic equivalent of Bava’s colour-soaked, bright, stylish and slightly demented visuals. Italian audiences were familiar with Diabolik (also the film’s original … Read more

You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet

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Mathieu Amalric in You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet

A movie for every day of the year – a good one 9 April Oldest recording of a voice, 1860 On this day in 1860, Edouard-Léon Scott de Martinville made what is the oldest recording of a human voice still in existence. The recording was made on a machine called a phonautograph which Scott had invented and patented in 1857. It worked by emulating the human ear – sound travelled down a funnel, hit a membrane and was transferred to a stylus (pig bristle) which transmitted the vibrations onto smoke blackened paper or glass, the two-dimensional results being used to study amplitude and waveforms. No one at the time the recording was made … Read more

We Have a Pope

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Michel Piccoli as the pope, flanked by the Swiss Guard in We Have a Pope

A movie for every day of the year – a good one 11 October Second Vatican Council convenes, 1962 On this day in 1962, Pope John XXIII formally opened the Second Vatican Council. The first Vatican Council had been held nearly 100 years before, the most remembered of its declarations being that the Pope was infallible, when speaking ex cathedra. But back, or forward, to the Second, its aim being, broadly, to work out what the hell to do with the 20th century. The solution was to modernise. Out went the insistence that the Catholic church was the only way to sanctification and truth. Out went the Latin mass. In came a renewed … Read more