Le Week-End
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Love Lost: Director Roger Michell on Le Week-End
For aging, married academics Nick (Jim Broadbent) and Meg (Lindsay Duncan), romance doesn’t come so easy anymore in Roger Michell’s wise and often very funny anti-rom-com Le Week-end. They jet off to Paris to recapture some of the spirit of their initial honeymoon 30 years before. But the trip is miserable from the start. She refuses to stay in the hotel from the honeymoon, sickened by its beige paint job. They check into a place far too expensive for their budget and enjoy the view of the Eiffel Tower, but little magic is rekindled with Meg, who is especially uninterested […]
by Brandon Harris on Mar 14, 2014 -
These Are a Few of My Favorite Things: New York Film Festival I
I have both good and bad news about the New York Film Festival (September 27-October 13). First, the good news: For the most part, the films in this impressive, carefully balanced program are very good. And the bad: The fest has become so expansive that quantity just may overshadow quality. A bright, high-energy, and well-regarded expert in all things cinema, Kent Jones debuts as head of the NYFF. For the first time in its 51 years, the composition of the selection committee has been, wisely, revised. Traditionally it was guided by the fest director, always a professional programmer, but rounded […]
by Howard Feinstein on Sep 26, 2013 -
San Sebastian Critics Notebook: The Perils of Human Relationships
At almost the midway point of the 61st edition of the San Sebastian Film Festival, relationships have been high on the agenda in the competitive Official Selection, from the pushmi-pullyu problems of a middle-aged marriage in Le Week-End to an unhinged battle between the sexes in Álex de la Iglesia’s Witching and Bitching (Las Brujas de Zugarramundi) and the neat and sweet triumvirate of friendship that crops up in David Trueba’s Living is Easy with Eyes Closed (Vivir es fácil con los ojos cerrados). Relationships are also crucial to the festival itself and many others as they fight for films […]
by Amber Wilkinson on Sep 24, 2013
