Dead Souls review – Alex Cox rides into sunset with anti-Trump spaghetti western

Rotterdam film festival The Repo Man director relocates Gogol’s surreal novella to the old west in what he says will be his final film English film-maker Alex Cox comes riding into town with this jauntily odd and surreal western which he has indicated will be his swansong, shot on the rugged plains of Almeria in Spain and also Arizona. Cox himself is the star – an elegant, dapper presence – and his co-writer is veteran spaghetti western actor Gianni Garko. The story has obvious relevance to contemporary America, and a flash-forward makes some of this clear. But it is also inspired by the classic novella of the same name by Nikolai Gogol, a mysterious parable of greed and vanity about a man who travels around offering to buy the souls of dead serfs on various estates in pre-revolutionary Russia so landowners can lower their tax bills, but plans to claim that they are still alive and therefore pass himself off as a wealthy man. Continue reading... from Film | The Guardian https://i...

On my radar: Jacques Audiard’s cultural highlights

The film director on the music he works to, educating himself via podcasts, and why the Paris Olympics was a pleasant surprise

Jacques Audiard was born in Paris in 1952, the son of the prolific screenwriter and director Michel Audiard. He began writing films in the mid-1970s and made his directorial debut in 1994 with See How They Fall. He won Baftas for The Beat That My Heart Skipped (2005) and A Prophet (2010) and the Cannes Palme d’Or with Dheepan in 2015. Audiard’s latest film, Emilia Pérez, a trans-empowerment musical set among Mexican drug cartels, won the Jury prize at Cannes and was described by Variety as “dazzling and instantly divisive”. It’s in cinemas now and will stream globally on Netflix from 13 November. Audiard lives in Paris.

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