Succès des Quais
Some of the best films of the past year screening in the 19th arrondissement
Until August 31, the MK2 cinemas at Quai de Loire and Quai de Seine are putting on a selection of morning screenings of their best films from the last year. For €6.50, you can see titles like 'Django Unchained' and 'Beasts of the Southern Wild' again on the big screen. Check out our selection, with reviews and trailers, below.
For the full programme, click here.
MK2 Quai de Loire, July 10-August 31
Tabu
Portuguese director Miguel Gomes’s ‘Tabu’ takes its title from F W Murnau’s 1931 swansong, and more besides: both pictures are divided into two chapters, one set in a version of paradise, the other after its loss; both are concerned with nature and colonialism, desire and elopement, the body and the social contract...
No
This is the third film from Chilean filmmaker Pablo Larraín – after ‘Tony Manero’ and ‘Post Mortem’ – to offer a sideways view of life in 1970s and ’80s Chile under the dictator General Pinochet. This time, the mood is lighter and less macabre, even if the politics remain deadly serious. It’s 1988, and likeable...
The Place Beyond the Pines
American independent movies are regularly compared to Bruce Springsteen songs – so much of the DNA is the same, from blue-collar angst to simmering daddy issues, from passion and heartbreak to petty crime and prison time. At a sprawling 140 minutes, the third feature...
Beasts of the Southern Wild
True originals are hard to come by in cinema, but this heart-on-sleeve, deeply eccentric tale of life, love and loss in the flood waters of New Orleans truly merits the label. First-time feature filmmaker Benh Zeitlin has adapted a one-act play by fellow American Lucy Alibar into a dreamy but strikingly immediate...
Looper
The first thing you notice is Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s face. Has the star of ‘Inception’ lost a fight with an orbital sander? His nose is oddly flat, his forehead unnaturally smooth. It’s distracting – which is a problem, because ‘Looper’ offers the kind of head-bending sci-fi that you don’t want to be distracted from. Look away...
Mud
The Beach Boys’ feelgood jukebox standard, ‘Help Me, Rhonda’ is played twice in ‘Take Shelter’ director Jeff Nichols’s third feature, amplifying the sense of sunkissed nostalgia present throughout this amiable but over-familiar coming-of-age story – it’s not set in the 1960s, but save a stray mobile phone or two, you could be...
Django Unchained
In the past decade there were those who – perfectly reasonably – assumed that Quentin Tarantino’s time had passed. Following the exhaustive movie-geek sprawl of the ‘Kill Bill’ movies, the crass indulgence of ‘Death Proof’ and the diverting but directionless ‘Inglourious Basterds’, it seemed like the ultimate fanboy...
Camille redouble
No mindless high school comedy, this. 40-year-old alcoholic divorcée Camille finds herself propelled back in time to age 16 and the beginning of the school year, and tries desperately to change the destiny she knows awaits her younger self. Sparkling, funny and sincere...
MK2 Quai de Seine, July 10-August 31
Rengaine
In modern-day Paris Dorcy, a young Christian black man, wants to marry Sabrina, a young Arab woman from the Maghreb. It would all be fine if Sabrina didn't have four brothers, and if the marriage didn't challenge the deeply-ingrained prejudices of the two communities. The eldest brother, Slimane, is the guardian...
Starbuck
This French-Canadian high-concept comedy yields a couple of laughs and warm moments but its story is formulaic and undisciplined, while its tone is mildly reactionary and hugely sentimental. In 1988, David (Patrick Huard) is said to have fathered 533 children. Well, we all do daft things when we’re young. But his fecundity...
Argo
It’s a little-known fact that Ben Affleck – celebrity totty, tabloid bait and esteemed filmmaker – has a degree in Middle Eastern affairs from the University of Vermont. It’s a qualification he puts to good use in ‘Argo’, a nail-biting thriller based (fairly loosely) on real events which, for the majority of its length, manages to...
Laurence Anyways
French-Canadian wunderkind Xavier Dolan’s third feature is his most operatic, and not just for its running time. As in ‘I Killed My Mother’ and ‘Heartbeats’, the 23 year-old filmmaker forges a moving account of a relationship using dry humour, expressionistic flourishes, a bravura soundtrack...
Ernest et Célestine
For conventional bears, it's not done to be friends with a mouse. Nevertheless Ernest, a big lonely bear, welcomes Célestine into his home...
The We and the I
Michael Gondry shifts away from the mainstream likes of ‘The Green Hornet’ for this low-key tale of a bunch of mouthy Bronx teenagers on a school trip...