‘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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At the Sea review – Amy Adams plays it overly straight in insufferable upper-middle-class drama

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Shame, healing and personal growth are the order of the day in this humourless, self-adoring and vapid exploration of an artistic and narcissistic Cape Cod family

Here is a quite unbearable curation of first-world problems starring Amy Adams from screenwriter Kata Wéber and her husband, director Kornél Mundruczó. They are film-makers who have given us challenging and interesting material in the past; now they pivot to a solemn, narcissistic tale, couched in self-forgiving, self-adoring rhetoric, all about upper-middle-class artistic folk in the US, yearning for wellness and recovery in their lovely Cape Cod home. It’s a movie which invites its audience to believe in the alleged talent and importance of its artistic characters, and also extend submissive empathy to their inter-generational psychic wounds.

Adams plays Laura, the grownup daughter of a supposedly brilliant dance company director, now dead and remembered in epiphanic childhood memory-glimpses, a genius who had close-cropped grey hair, a black polo neck and functioning alcoholism. Laura inherited his dance passion and his boozing, and now runs his world-renowned company with an uncertain hand; she has just returned from rehab after drunk-driving and crashing while her young son Felix (Redding Munsell) was in the car. Thank heavens they weren’t hurt! You can spend the entire film expecting a flashback to this dramatic event which might show Laura in a bad light – or an interesting one. But no.

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