‘Nobody would forgive me if I told the truth’: new film about pacifist turned Nazi collaborator divides France

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In Les Rayons et les Ombres, Jean Dujardin plays a real-life press baron partying during the horrors of the second world war. Director Xavier Giannoli discusses bringing this still sensitive topic to light Xavier Giannoli’s new film Les Rayons et les Ombres (Rays and Shadows) is told from the postwar perspective of Corinne Luchaire, a French actor who was once hailed as “the new Garbo” but grew too close to the Nazis during the German occupation years. As Luchaire records her thoughts on a borrowed tape recorder, she struggles to reconcile her unfaltering devotion to her father, the once-powerful press baron Jean, with his 1946 execution for treason. Her wilful blindness collapses as the Jewish director who helped launch her career visits her cramped flat. When Corinne, played by newcomer Nastya Golubeva Carax, enquires after his sister, he reveals that she died in a concentration camp. “I didn’t know,” murmurs Corinne, only to be met with the devastating reply: “Did you even try to ...
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Santa Claus: The Movie review – Dudley Moore sparkles like a bauble in Elf prototype

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Playing an early iteration of the fish-out-of-water elf in the corporate world of New York, Moore has just enough perky charm to redeem an otherwise forgettable seasonal offering

Frankly, I would whisper a tiny humbug to a good deal of this gloopy Christmas movie from 1985, directed by Jeannot Szwarc and now rereleased; and only a sentimental loyalty to the seasonal spirit prevents me from demanding to know if there are no workhouses for the people who made it. The whole thing only comes to something resembling life halfway through, when Dudley Moore’s perky elf takes centre-stage.

There are many other and more deserving yuletide films which should be ahead of this one in the queue for a revival, but my own sweet tooth for Christmassy schmaltz won’t allow me completely to reject this admittedly eventful and bizarre origin myth for Santa Claus, starring David Huddleston as the chortling, bearded present-giver himself. He is a kind of vaguely Euro-Scandinavian guy called Claus, much given to distributing gifts to village children, called to his mythic destiny in a fatal snowstorm like Superman arriving at the Fortress of Solitude. Dudley Moore is his devoted elf Patch who suffers a profound vocational crisis, and Burgess Meredith is the ancient chief elf (mysteriously possessed of full human adult height) who in a very peculiar elf ceremony decrees that Claus is “the chosen one”.

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