‘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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Wish review – Disney’s throwback animation is missing some magic

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Oscar winner Ariana DeBose voices an all-singing heroine in an overstuffed yet underpowered attempt to replicate the success of Frozen

A decade ago, at a time when both Disney and Pixar’s animation output was not exactly unsuccessful but entirely unmemorable, Frozen became a sticky $1.2bn game-changer, a box office hit that turned into an all-consuming phenomenon. It won Oscars, produced earworms that burrowed (a little too) deep, spawned a $1.45bn sequel, led to a hit Broadway musical and showed Disney how to dust off the contemporarily critiqued princess narrative rather than throw it away completely.

Opening in the same Thanksgiving slot 10 years later, with a script co-written by Frozen’s Jennifer Lee, Wish is a bullishly positioned successor, another self-aware, formula-tweaking Disney Princess narrative with as many radio-friendly power ballads as there are Christmas-timed merchandising opportunities. But Wish feels less like Disney’s new Frozen and more like an off-brand rip-off, aesthetically inferior, hampered by a mostly uninspired and underpowered plot and, most deadeningly, lacking in magic. As grotesque as Disney might still be as one of the most effectively illustrative go-tos for the horrors of mass-market capitalism, it’s impossible not to feel that swell of wonder when the studio logo kicks in. While that feeling might have been more absent in recent films that follow, a lifetime of examples have taught us to naively hope for more of it and despite Wish serving us all of the old-fashioned trimmings, from storybook opener to soaring finale, there remains an absence.

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