Parallel Tales review – Isabelle Huppert pens furtive sexual fantasy for Vincent Cassel in Asghar Farhadi’s latest

Cannes film festival: Iranian auteur Asghar Farhadi returns to France with this intriguing middleweight meta-drama featuring a cameo from Catherine Deneuve Asghar Farhadi is the Iranian auteur whose film-making style has always shown the high European influences of Antonioni and Haneke. He has in fact made two films in Europe: The Past in France and Everybody Knows in Spain. Now he returns to France and the French language for this diverting, middleweight meta-drama about betrayal and about a supposed link between voyeurism and creativity: do writers spy on the characters they have brought to life? Continue reading... from Film | The Guardian https://ift.tt/9kWXKsO via IFTTT

Chuck Chuck Baby review – whimsy and realism combine in big-hearted romance

Louise Brealey is put-upon Helen, a chicken factory worker who gets a second chance at love, in Pugh’s generous and gritty film

Here’s a rousing empowerment-anthem of a movie that’s not afraid to paint its romance plotline in big, bold brushstrokes; occasionally it overdoes things but the rush of emotion carries everything along in its path, helped by the deployment of radio-friendly standards by Neil Diamond and the like that turns the film into an impromptu musical and allows writer-director Janis Pugh to stage (relatively) elaborate dance sequences and big emotional scenes.

The central figure is put-upon chicken-processing factory worker Helen (played by Louise Brealey) who has a complicated domestic situation: she lives in the same crummy terrace as her oafish husband Gary, from whom she is separated but seemingly not actually divorced, and shares the place with his new, much younger, girlfriend Amy (Emily Fairn) and their newly arrived baby. Also on the premises is Gary’s terminally ill mother Gwen (Sorcha Cusack), for whom Helen acts a carer but is the quasi-maternal figure that Helen appears to long for. There’s also a rowdy Greek chorus of Helen’s fellow factory workers who are perhaps designed as a counterpoint to Helen’s introverted, clenched unhappiness, at least at first.

Chuck Chuck Baby screened at the Edinburgh film festival

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