French director of Nazi collaborator film rejects ‘historical gaslighting’ claims

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Xavier Giannoli says criticism that Les Rayons et les Ombres invites sympathy for characters is ‘profoundly dishonest’ The director of a box office hit film about Nazi collaboration and its Oscar-winning star have described criticisms they have whitewashed wartime atrocities as dishonest and “a scandal”. Xavier Giannoli and the actor Jean Dujardin were responding to a bitter row that has divided French historians over the film Les Rayons et les Ombres (Rays and Shadows), which recounts the story of the wartime press baron Jean Luchaire. Continue reading... from Film | The Guardian https://ift.tt/xCyd0Vg via IFTTT
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Raging Grace review – scary movie suffers an absence of scares

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An undocumented Filipino cleaner is employed at a vast, remote mansion to care for a bedridden David Hayman, while hiding her daughter Grace

There are interesting ideas – and a tremendous final choir sequence – in this scary movie; it offers a critique of British colonialism, and also plays with the text of Rudyard Kipling’s 1899 poem The White Man’s Burden that urged the United States to assume the thankless imperial task of civilising and subjugating the people of the Philippines, and nobly overlooking how ungrateful they are going to be. There is ingenuity here, and good acting, but the film for me feels flawed by its strained melodrama, an absence of scares and by a very odd scene of almost unreal, farcical absurdity.

Joy (Max Eigenmann) is a Filipino woman in the UK with a young daughter, Grace (Jaeden Paige Boadilla); Joy is doing undocumented work as a cleaner and faces racism and exploitation and imminent expulsion. But then she is employed by the haughty Katherine (Leanne Best) to work in a remote, vast mansion as a housekeeper to Katherine’s bedridden and ailing uncle, Mr Garrett, played with relish by David Hayman. Katherine has no idea about Joy’s daughter and there are some weirdly Feydeau-ish scenes when Joy has to hide the girl and somehow distract Katherine from spotting her.

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