Chicago – Couples making plans to start a family may get a kick out of “Babies,” the lyrical new documentary from French filmmaker Thomas Balmès. Everyone else may find themselves bored stiff. The film is an intriguing experiment with varying degrees of success. It’s as tedious as it is compelling and as annoying as it is insightful.
Universal marketed the picture as the next “March of the Penguins,” with the key exception that it features humans. The film also doesn’t include narration by Morgan Freeman, which may be a plus, considering how hackneyed it would be to hear The Actor Frequently Known as God pontificating on the profundity of infant behavior. In fact, “Babies” contains no narration whatsoever. It simply observes four babies in different parts of the world during their first year of life. Balmès and his team of collaborators have constructed a portrait that plays like cinematic poetry at best,...
Universal marketed the picture as the next “March of the Penguins,” with the key exception that it features humans. The film also doesn’t include narration by Morgan Freeman, which may be a plus, considering how hackneyed it would be to hear The Actor Frequently Known as God pontificating on the profundity of infant behavior. In fact, “Babies” contains no narration whatsoever. It simply observes four babies in different parts of the world during their first year of life. Balmès and his team of collaborators have constructed a portrait that plays like cinematic poetry at best,...
- 10/5/2010
- by adam@hollywoodchicago.com (Adam Fendelman)
- HollywoodChicago.com
Lucy Gordon, a young British actress perhaps best known for a small role in Spider-Man 3, was found dead in her Paris apartment yesterday, May 20. Gordon’s death was an apparent suicide. She is supposed to have hanged herself while her boyfriend, cinematographer Jérôme Alméras, slept. Gordon would have turned 29 tomorrow, May 22. The Oxford-born Gordon worked as a model before making her feature-film debut in the little-seen Perfume in 2001. Among her other screen credits are the romantic comedy Serendipity, with John Cusack; The Four Feathers, opposite Heath Ledger; Steve Clark’s dramatic comedy Frost, starring Jason Behr; Russian Dolls, with Romain Duris; and John Krasinski’s Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, which was screened at this year’s Sundance Film Festival. Additionally, Gordon had recently completed Joann Sfar’s biopic Serge Gainsbourg, vie héroïque / Serge Gainsbourg (a Heroic Life) (top photo), in which she played the role of Serge Gainsbourg...
- 5/21/2009
- by Andre Soares
- Alt Film Guide
Release Date: Oct. 24
Director/Writer: Philippe Claudel
Cinematographer: Jérôme Alméras
Starring: Kristin Scott Thomas, Elsa Zylberstein
Studio/Run Time: Sony Pictures Classics, 117 mins.
Novelist’s film debut allusive, ambitious
After a successful literary career in his native France and a stint as a professor of literature, Philippe Claudel has ventured into film with his first directorial effort. I’ve Loved You So Long—the story of two sisters who hazard a reconnection after the older sibling has been incarcerated for 15 years—is rife with allusions to literature and overloaded with water motifs and the notion of family. Kristin Scott Thomas’ haunted, Oscar-worthy turn (as the convict struggling to assimilate back into the world) conveys unspeakable pain and guilt through her gaunt visage and thousand-yard stare. Relying on Alméras’ static camera, Claudel sometimes shoehorns in too much peripheral suffering. Ultimately, he defuses the horror of the unspeakable crime, the sisterly tension...
Director/Writer: Philippe Claudel
Cinematographer: Jérôme Alméras
Starring: Kristin Scott Thomas, Elsa Zylberstein
Studio/Run Time: Sony Pictures Classics, 117 mins.
Novelist’s film debut allusive, ambitious
After a successful literary career in his native France and a stint as a professor of literature, Philippe Claudel has ventured into film with his first directorial effort. I’ve Loved You So Long—the story of two sisters who hazard a reconnection after the older sibling has been incarcerated for 15 years—is rife with allusions to literature and overloaded with water motifs and the notion of family. Kristin Scott Thomas’ haunted, Oscar-worthy turn (as the convict struggling to assimilate back into the world) conveys unspeakable pain and guilt through her gaunt visage and thousand-yard stare. Relying on Alméras’ static camera, Claudel sometimes shoehorns in too much peripheral suffering. Ultimately, he defuses the horror of the unspeakable crime, the sisterly tension...
- 10/24/2008
- Pastemagazine.com
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