Zazie last year has seen 80 films, coming from every corner of the planet.
Of all of them, she can’t stop thinking about the following ones:
10 - '71 by Yann Demange (UK/Northern Ireland)
A young British soldier left in the middle of the Belfast Catholic enclave in the ‘70s.
It is breathless, superbly filmed and played by an actor whose name you’ll often hear in the future:
Jack O’Connell.
Angélique has been a stripper all her life and she had different children from different men. Now she’s old, but this doesn’t mean she is wiser. You can love her or you can hate her, but you can’t forget about her. And, détail qui tue: this is a true story, played by the real Angélique, filmed by one of her sons.
Caméra d’Or at the last Cannes Film Festival. You bet!
Louis Bloom is looking for a job and he finds one: he patrols LA streets at night searching for accidents, fires, dead people. He films everything without a shadow of emotion.
He is a modern monster, a product of contemporary society, an adept of the "business plans".
Jake Gyllenhaal delivers the performance of his life as this (in)human vulture.
1962. Anna has never left the Polish convent where she spent all her young life. Before taking the perpetual vows, she visits her only relative, aunt Wanda. Together with her, she will venture into the real world and into their family history, discovering a dark secret.
Essential, filmed in a magnificent black & white, an incredible portrait of two amazing women.
Sandra, a Belgian mother just recovered from a nervous breakdown, has only two days to convince her colleagues to renounce to a bonus in order to have her re-integrated at work. The Dardenne brothers deal with the economic crisis in their way: a simple but powerful story where the most important thing is people’s solidarity. Marion Cotillard proves once again that she's an actress of a superior kind.
The weirdest cinema object of these last years: a young woman drives in her car through the Glasgow streets. She is looking for men, but sex is not her final purpose. It is very slow, it is very strange, it is maybe going nowhere but you follow Scarlett Johansson in the cold and gloomy Scottish land as there was no tomorrow. So unpredictable that it gets under your skin, as the title promises.
Everybody would like to live in Wes Anderson’s Grand Budapest Hotel: it is full of bizarre and fascinating characters, the décor is to die for, the rhythm is frantic and the concierge, M. Gustave, is the classiest and the most reliable man ever. Ralph Fiennes shines brighter than anybody else in this irresistible and glamorous whirligig.
As a modern Antoine Doinel, young Mason is followed by the camera of Richard Linklater from the age of 5 till the age of 18. We see him and his family (divorced father and mother and an older sister) growing up and aging literally in front of our eyes. It is life (and cinema) at its best: true, emotional, intelligent and funny. We are not alone in this world: it is so good to know it!
Watching a movie by Nuri Bilge Ceylan means something more than simply watching a movie. You are carried away in a parallel world: it is like reading a Tolstoj novel in the space of 3 hours. The psychological portrait of all the characters is so profound, complex and real, that you are submerged by a new kind of gratitude. The one you feel in front of masterpieces.
Palme D'Or at the last Cannes Film Festival. You bet (twice!).
Have a look at the picture here below. This guy is about to do the most revolutionary and jubilant cinematic gesture of 2014. I'm lacking words to describe the effect that this movie has on me.
Xavier Dolan is a larger-than-life director whose talent will grow in the years to come.
He's a force of nature, a forerunner, a genius.
Lovers of minimalism in life and movies, please keep off, we're busy crying on a Céline Dion song.
And, damn, we love it!
I preferred to watch Mommy twice.
Do you know what I mean?
