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

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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...
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Allo la France review – romance of French phone booths exposes funding cuts to rural services

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In an endearingly whimsical road trip documentary, Floriane Devigne takes calls from her interview subjects in the last remaining phone boxes dotted across rural France

The humble telephone box, a souvenir from the days of analogue, can also be an intriguing cinematic locus. Floriane Devigne’s road trip documentary begins with such a relic: the last public phone booth in Paris, which also appears in Jacques Rivette’s mesmerising 1981 film Le Pont du Nord. Unlike their Instagrammable British counterparts, French phone boxes are usually painted in a demure grey and blend seamlessly with their surroundings.

As it moves from the capital city to more remote areas, Devigne’s film observes the vanishing of a formerly essential utility as her cross-country odyssey sparkles with an endearing whimsicality. Instead of using talking heads, Devigne ducks into various phone boxes scattered across France, as she takes calls from her interview subjects. Stories of love and longing fill these unassuming booths, themselves once the location of secret rendezvous and romantic trysts. The interiors of these facilities are now caked with dirt and graffiti; the lovers of yore are long gone.

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