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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An Ordinary Case review – Daniel Auteuil directs and stars in tense Ruth Rendell-ish crime procedural

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A careworn husband is accused of murdering his wife in a story inspired by a real life case that dispenses with the genre’s familiar brutality

Here is a fictionalised true crime drama, but one that is more stately and sedate than the garish procedural brutality of regular true crime. There is one gruesome crime-scene photo, but otherwise this could really have been based on something by Ruth Rendell. It is co-written and directed by its star Daniel Auteuil and the original French title is Le Fil (The Thread), after an incriminating thread of material found on the corpse – or perhaps it means the thread of logic behind a legal argument, the loose thread which, if pulled sufficiently, might cause the whole thing to collapse.

The action is based on a case recounted by Jean-Yves Moyart, a criminal defence lawyer, who blogged under the name “Maître Mô” and who died in 2021. Grégory Gadebois plays Nicolas Milik (“Ahmed” in Moyart’s blog), a devoted, careworn husband to his alcoholic wife Cécile and caring dad to five children. When Milik is accused of murdering his wife, with a local bar owner apparently an accomplice, principled lawyer Maître Monier (Auteuil) takes the case; passionately convinced of his client’s innocence but finding himself in an increasingly tense situation.

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