‘Nobody would forgive me if I told the truth’: new film about pacifist turned Nazi collaborator divides France

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In Les Rayons et les Ombres, Jean Dujardin plays a real-life press baron partying during the horrors of the second world war. Director Xavier Giannoli discusses bringing this still sensitive topic to light Xavier Giannoli’s new film Les Rayons et les Ombres (Rays and Shadows) is told from the postwar perspective of Corinne Luchaire, a French actor who was once hailed as “the new Garbo” but grew too close to the Nazis during the German occupation years. As Luchaire records her thoughts on a borrowed tape recorder, she struggles to reconcile her unfaltering devotion to her father, the once-powerful press baron Jean, with his 1946 execution for treason. Her wilful blindness collapses as the Jewish director who helped launch her career visits her cramped flat. When Corinne, played by newcomer Nastya Golubeva Carax, enquires after his sister, he reveals that she died in a concentration camp. “I didn’t know,” murmurs Corinne, only to be met with the devastating reply: “Did you even try to ...
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The History of Concrete review – John Wilson’s first movie is an absurd triumph

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Sundance film festival: the documentarian’s feature debut, essentially an extended episode of his HBO series, turns an exploration of concrete into a meditation on change

For those in the know, the release of the Sundance film festival lineup last December contained one perfect, tantalizing log line, for a documentary plainly called The History of Concrete: “After attending a workshop on how to write and sell a Hallmark movie, filmmaker John Wilson tries to use the same formula to sell a documentary about concrete.”

Wilson, a film-maker from the Nathan Fielder school of meandering, bone-dry observational comedy, is a master of the modern documentary-essay-memoir, with an uncanny eye for the idiosyncratic, unintentionally hilarious and disturbing vignettes hiding in plain sight. Over three near-perfect seasons, his peerless HBO series How To With John Wilson, executive-produced by Fielder, spun spoofs of practical guides (“How to Cook the Perfect Risotto”) into profound meditations on the loudness, loneliness and ridiculousness of modern urban life, each half-hour episode a magic trick of elaborate, bizarre tangents reined in at the last second. For fans of the show – in my opinion, the single best TV series about New York this decade – Wilson’s feature documentary debut, supposedly about the most iconic element of urban life, was a must-see.

The History of Concrete is screening at the Sundance film festival and is seeking distribution

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