It is a paradox worthy of Zeno himself that significant dumbing-down is necessary in order to make tales of extraordinary genius comprehensible to us lay audiences. But in her own attempt at grandly unifying these opposing poles, French director Anna Novion splits the difference so often she delivers in “Marguerite’s Theorem,” a movie riddled with cliché that plunges right past comprehensible into painfully, pedantically predictable — even to those of us who stumble when subtracting one two-digit number from another. Its heroine loves math because through it she can “put order on infinity,” but “Marguerite’s Theorem” is proof as incontrovertible as Andrew Wiles’ 1994 Fermat solution, that one can have too much order.
Marguerite Hoffman is a tacitly spectrum-coded PhD student at France’s École Normale Supérieure, which is legendary in science circles for churning out geniuses at a rate it might take one of its graduates to compute. As one of...
Marguerite Hoffman is a tacitly spectrum-coded PhD student at France’s École Normale Supérieure, which is legendary in science circles for churning out geniuses at a rate it might take one of its graduates to compute. As one of...
- 6/15/2023
- by Jessica Kiang
- Variety Film + TV
The burnout associated with gifted kid syndrome — the crushing realization that, after constant praise and validation as a child, you’re not as special as everybody told you that you were — has become a self-diagnosed internet ailment of the most annoying people you know, determined to blame their obnoxious high standards on their parents and teachers. It’s a well-worn screen trope, whether through countless “yep, that’s me, you probably are wondering how I ended up here”–style biopics of real-life geniuses to the Rachel Berry brand of insufferable know-it-alls.
Perhaps that explains how initially unlikeable Marguerite is, then: a dazzlingly smart student of mathematics at the prestige École Normale Supérieure, whose three year quest to make a field-shattering breakthrough ends in humiliation, disbelief, and the childish instinct to retreat into a hole. French-Swedish director Anna Novion crafts a film that plots its coordinates in a familiar territory — that...
Perhaps that explains how initially unlikeable Marguerite is, then: a dazzlingly smart student of mathematics at the prestige École Normale Supérieure, whose three year quest to make a field-shattering breakthrough ends in humiliation, disbelief, and the childish instinct to retreat into a hole. French-Swedish director Anna Novion crafts a film that plots its coordinates in a familiar territory — that...
- 5/22/2023
- by Steph Green
- Indiewire
As IndieWire has published its great camera survey regarding Cannes Film Festival 2023, we analyzed the data to reveal that the Arri Alexa Mini is still the king of kings. This is the 4th year in a row that this camera dominates the Cannes list. Also, there’s a respectful presence of good and old film cameras. Explore the list below.
Cannes Film Festival 2023 – Camera Manufacturers Chart The cinematography of the leading film festivals
Just saying — and without noticing, we wrote a title very similar to last year’s Cannes 2022 (“The Cameras Behind Cannes 2022: Alexa Mini (Still) Dominates”). This shows that filmmakers love the Arri Mini so much…but we’ll elaborate on this later. We have been waiting for IndieWire to complete its survey regarding the cameras that shot Cannes 2023’s feature films. Each year, IndieWire sends a questionnaire to main festivals’ filmmakers (directors and cinematographers) in order to...
Cannes Film Festival 2023 – Camera Manufacturers Chart The cinematography of the leading film festivals
Just saying — and without noticing, we wrote a title very similar to last year’s Cannes 2022 (“The Cameras Behind Cannes 2022: Alexa Mini (Still) Dominates”). This shows that filmmakers love the Arri Mini so much…but we’ll elaborate on this later. We have been waiting for IndieWire to complete its survey regarding the cameras that shot Cannes 2023’s feature films. Each year, IndieWire sends a questionnaire to main festivals’ filmmakers (directors and cinematographers) in order to...
- 5/22/2023
- by Yossy Mendelovich
- YMCinema
It’s been over a century since anyone’s adapted Wilkie Collins’ underrated “The New Magdalen” for the screen, and while Aurélia Georges’ cleverly modified version doesn’t resolve the novel’s inability to account for the protagonist’s mastery at disguising her working-class origins, its handsome imagery and Sabine Azéma’s adroit interpretation as the duped wealthy widow make “Secret Name” an attractive prospect for costume drama fans. The novel played on Victorian-era anxieties of class corruption with its story of a former prostitute assuming a dead high-bred woman’s identity only to discover that she wasn’t dead after all, but since subverting the social order no longer carries the same level of apprehension it did back then, the film foregrounds the ethical ramifications of impersonation and identity.
Georges (“The Girl and the River”) and her co-writer Maud Ameline seamlessly shift Collins’ action from the Franco-Prussian War to the First World War,...
Georges (“The Girl and the River”) and her co-writer Maud Ameline seamlessly shift Collins’ action from the Franco-Prussian War to the First World War,...
- 8/16/2021
- by Jay Weissberg
- Variety Film + TV
Petite Nature
Samuel Theis, who co-directed 2014’s Party Girl alongside Marie Amachoukeli and Claire Burger, branches out on his own for his next directorial effort, Petite Nature. Produced by Caroline Bonmarchand and lensed by Jacques Girault, Theis employs Antoine Reinartz and Izia Higelin alongside newcomer Aliocha Reinert. Party Girl opened Un Certain Regard at the 2014 Cannes Film Festival, nabbing the Golden Camera award as well as Best Ensemble out of the sidebar. The title also received a Cesar nod for Best First Film.…...
Samuel Theis, who co-directed 2014’s Party Girl alongside Marie Amachoukeli and Claire Burger, branches out on his own for his next directorial effort, Petite Nature. Produced by Caroline Bonmarchand and lensed by Jacques Girault, Theis employs Antoine Reinartz and Izia Higelin alongside newcomer Aliocha Reinert. Party Girl opened Un Certain Regard at the 2014 Cannes Film Festival, nabbing the Golden Camera award as well as Best Ensemble out of the sidebar. The title also received a Cesar nod for Best First Film.…...
- 12/31/2019
- by Nicholas Bell
- IONCINEMA.com
You’re looking for real intimacy and you couldn’t pick a worse place to find it. Not if you’re the gay male hustler driving the plot of Sauvage/Wild, the raw and riveting debut feature from French writer-director Camille Vidal-Naquet.
“My name is whatever you want it to be,” this unnamed, unwashed wild child tells the tricks who use him as a piece of meat. He gets paid for it, after all. In interviews, Vidal-Naquet refers to this achingly vulnerable soul as Leo. And yet the homeless Leo,...
“My name is whatever you want it to be,” this unnamed, unwashed wild child tells the tricks who use him as a piece of meat. He gets paid for it, after all. In interviews, Vidal-Naquet refers to this achingly vulnerable soul as Leo. And yet the homeless Leo,...
- 4/11/2019
- by Peter Travers
- Rollingstone.com
There have been quite a few high-quality American films about male prostitution, from John Schlesinger’s Oscar-winning “Midnight Cowboy” to Gus Van Sant’s “My Own Private Idaho” and Gregg Araki’s “Mysterious Skin,” and from France there has been Patrice Chéreau’s “L’Homme blessé,” and several films from André Téchiné, most notably “J’embrasse pas,” which translates as “I Don’t Kiss.”
Camille Vidal-Naquet’s first feature “Sauvage/Wild” is very much in the Téchiné tradition of “J’embrasse pas,” and the subject of kissing or not kissing is actually central to the narrative. What’s most impressive about this film is the intricacy of Naquet’s screenplay, which plays out in a series of subtly mirroring episodes that follow the life of Leo, a 22-year-old street kid played by Félix Maritaud, who made an impression on screen in “Bpm (Beats Per Minute)” and carries this movie almost singlehandedly.
Camille Vidal-Naquet’s first feature “Sauvage/Wild” is very much in the Téchiné tradition of “J’embrasse pas,” and the subject of kissing or not kissing is actually central to the narrative. What’s most impressive about this film is the intricacy of Naquet’s screenplay, which plays out in a series of subtly mirroring episodes that follow the life of Leo, a 22-year-old street kid played by Félix Maritaud, who made an impression on screen in “Bpm (Beats Per Minute)” and carries this movie almost singlehandedly.
- 4/10/2019
- by Dan Callahan
- The Wrap
New Wave godmother Agnès Varda has been laden with any number of honors and tributes in recent years, but she hasn’t received a better one, albeit indirectly so, than “Sauvage.” Even the title of Camille Vidal-Naquet’s tough but invigorating debut feature recalls the unmoored, asphalt-pounding energy of Varda’s seminal 1985 character study “Vagabond,” though the feral human subject here is a gay male prostitute, as hardened by the elements and the travails of his profession as he is vulnerable to them. Played with potent, unpredictable abandon by Félix Maritaud, he’s a protagonist you fear and fear for by turns, as he recklessly roams the streets, nightclubs and backwoods of Strasbourg in search of more than just the physical contact he’s freely selling. Though hardly revolutionary in form, the frank, sometimes violent queerness of its perspective makes his Cannes Critics’ Week entry genuinely bracing: Distributors inclined towards...
- 5/14/2018
- by Guy Lodge
- Variety Film + TV
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