What the Hellenic! Why is Christopher Nolan’s new Greek epic entirely devoid of Greeks?

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Set to be this year’s biggest blockbuster, The Odyssey’s cast has been selected to ‘represent the world’. Fair enough – except that one key country seems to have gone completely unrepresented … There are the American accents, gleaming body suits and a muddy Dunkirk palette. And then there is Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy, a casting choice that recently drew racist attacks from the usual moaners of the internet , including Elon Musk, who complained it wasn’t authentic. Authenticity matters. He’s just focusing entirely in the wrong place. To many Greeks, what concerns us most about the first look at Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of Homer’s Odyssey is the whereabouts of Billy Zane. Zane, like other beloved members of the Greek diaspora in Hollywood, has recently appeared on “Alternative Odyssey” lists on the Greek side of social media, as well as over dinner table debates from Patras to Palmers Green. (Theo James, Jennifer Aniston, Hank Azaria, and Dave Bautista are among the other no...
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The Animal Kingdom review – Romain Duris leads post-Covid fantasy of virus-triggered mutants

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Duris stars as a father protecting his son, who may or may not be mutating, in Thomas Cailley’s well-crafted thriller

Thomas Cailley’s sci-fi fantasy has too much sensitivity and good taste to be the proper horror-thriller or creature feature that it almost resembles. It’s a drama of emotions and ideas about post-Covid society – which is welcome enough – but with a dash of prosthetics and CGI and some scares. I felt something very similar about Bong Joon-ho’s monster film The Host back in 2006: the worthiness operates against the excitement and I found myself wanting something more gleefully crass and shocking, something more ironic or thrillingly callous. The Animal Kingdom seems squeamish about going for the jugular in the way a proper genre movie would – or a Marvel movie.

The scene is a France of the near future in which there has been an outbreak of some disease which has caused humans to mutate into animals. The government is just about on top of the situation, having established high-security clinical holding units to confine the “bestioles” (“critters”) as local people heartlessly call them. François (Romain Duris) is a stressed guy keeping his emotions in check since his wife became a “bestiole” and now has to be a single-dad to his tricky teen son Émile, in which role Paul Kircher indicates that he might be succumbing to the disease with unnervingly subtle bovine and simian mannerisms, camouflaged within classic adolescent sulkiness. Adèle Exarchopoulos rather phones in the role of a uniformed female cop who appears to have a tendresse for François.

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