‘Bigbug’ Review: Jean-Pierre Jeunet Demonstrates the Perils of Total Creative Freedom

Manuel Betancourt To say “My Best Part,” the directorial debut of “Call My Agent” assistant Nicolas Maury, revels in cringe-worthy moments is, perhaps, an understatement. The opening moments alone find a bowl-cut-sporting Jérémie (Maury) flummoxed by the very straightforward GPS directions spouted at him by his phone.

Bad Wolf Co-Founder Jane Tranter And Sony’s Wayne Garvie To Keynote Mip TV

the 2019 off-Broadway musical it’s based on. Back then I called the show, which also starred Dinklage, “black eyeliner set to music.” That’s still true, only now it’s black eyeliner set to music with lavish sets and costumes.So, it’s absolutely terrific if you press “mute.” “Cyrano” is a love story you’ve already seen even if you don’t realize you have.

Cate Blanchett and Adam Driver step out on the red carpet while attending the 2022 Cesar Awards on Friday (February 25) at L’Olympia in Paris, France.

Leigh Francis’s deliberately repulsive alter ego Keith Lemon is one of the silliest, most tedious people on television. So he is an entirely appropriate host on E4’s very silly, and rather tedious, new show, The Real Dirty Dancing.

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Manori Ravindran International EditorEntertainment One has hired Left Bank executive producer Sharon Hughff to serve as creative director of scripted television out of the U.K.In her new role, she will oversee the scripted team and pipeline from the U.K., while spearheading efforts to expand the slate into buyers in the U.K. as well as Europe and Asia.

It sounds like the set-up to a French New Wave film: a French au pair falls in love with an Irish pickpocket leading to a whirlwind romance that changes both their lives. It might be twee, but Joan Verra (Isabelle Huppert) lived it, and on a long, rainy, nighttime drive reflects on the intense, yet fleeting relationship of her youth.

Guy Lodge Film CriticAll great actresses of a certain age should get to anchor as many starring vehicles as the indefatigable Isabelle Huppert. Her prolific output and enduring marquee-name status are testament to French cinema’s continued interest in women past the age where Hollywood mostly confines them to secondary mom roles.

Fêted and eternally fabulous, Isabelle Huppert is this year’s Berlin Film Festival honorary Golden Bear laureate for her life’s work so far, with an accompanying program of some of her most celebrated films. About Joan is her newest, screened out of competition as a Berlinale Special gala (though Huppert was unable to make the trip to Berlin after testing positive for Covid). That is quite a lot of weight to carry for Laurent Larivière’s slender story about the malleability of memory. That subject in itself, broad and deep as it is, may be too much for this rickety film to bear, even with Huppert’s flickering brilliance in the title role.

David Benedict The gap between what you see and what you get has long proved fertile territory for playwrights. At his considerable best, not least his Oscar-winning adapted screenplay of his play “The Father,” French dramatist Florian Zeller (and translator Christopher Hampton) has shown that by cunningly changing what audiences are seeing, he can not only define but also dramatize emotional content.

Michael Nordine authorIt’s May 10, 1981, and Paris is celebrating. French political junkies might know the cause for this revelry, but for the rest of us, the reason seems to matter less than the electric atmosphere enveloping the streets as people dance to the sound of honking car horns.

Chris Willman Music WriterUnofficially, at least, the United States has three national anthems now, not just one … which allowed three musical all-star artists — Mickey Guyton, Jhené Aiko and Mary Mary — to shine in the immediate run-up to Super Bowl LVI in Los Angeles Sunday.Much-lauded country singer Guyton was in pole position just before the game to sing “The Star Spangled Banner,” as she has on many occasions before. Although a pianist was seen, Guyton’s version was for all intents and purposes a cappella, joined by a choir shortly before she gave Frances Scott Key’s tune a galvanizing key change.In a way, Guyton’s appearance was an act of symbolic consolidation, on top of just picking the rare current name act who’s capable of the vocal job.

Death on the Nile (★★☆☆☆) miscalculates from the start, marching into a mystery Christie herself showed no interest in exploring: the origins of Hercule Poirot’s trademark mustache.Director and star Kenneth Branagh, helming his second Christie adaptation following the 2017 hit Murder on the Orient Express, digs into a black-and-white, WWI-set prologue that firmly establishes Belgian sleuth Poirot as the film’s romantic hero.Christie’s sturdy plots and colorful characters certainly invite inventive reinterpretation, but it feels misguided making this or any Poirot story more about the man solving the mystery, than about the mystery that Poirot must solve.The sprightlier 1978 version of Death on the Nile, directed by John Guillermin and scripted by Sleuth playwright Anthony Shaffer, struck a more satisfying balance between the famous detective and the cast of suspects all harboring motives for murder.That whodunnit boasted a lineup of eccentric legends — Bette Davis, Angela Lansbury, Maggie Smith, David Niven, and, of course, Peter Ustinov as Poirot — inhabiting Dame Agatha’s larger-than-life characters while swooning about in Anthony Powell’s Oscar-winning ’30s-era costumes.The result was gloriously camp, as much as it was wickedly intriguing.

Most of Cambodian director Rithy Panh’s family were killed in Khmer Rouge labor camps. He was lucky enough to get out and, after months in a Thai refugee camp, move to Paris where he eventually went to film school. His adult years have been spent making innovative, impressionistic documentaries about Cambodia’s terrible years of struggle, mingled with personal memories.

Peter Debruge Chief Film CriticAs the first film from the director of “Amélie” in nearly a decade, “Big Bug” is kind of a big deal. Sadly, it’s also a big disappointment — easily the most obnoxious Netflix original in some time, owing to the company’s trust in a director whose overactive imagination demands some kind of boundaries.At precisely the moment pandemic-confined audiences want to get out and breathe fresh air, Jean-Pierre Jeunet gives them a suffocating scenario in which a squabbling French family is trapped in their retro-modern home with several android assistants.

Elsa Keslassy International CorrespondentFrançois Ozon, the prolific and provocative French director who won the Berlinale’s 2018 Golden Bear Award with “By the Grace of God,” is returning to the festival with “Peter von Kant” which will world premiere on opening night. A twist on Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s cult film “The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant,” Ozon’s movie has Denis Menochet playing the tormented filmmaker, opposite Isabelle Adjani, who stars as his muse. Like the original film, “Peter von Kant” is about a film about love, jealousy and domination.

K.J. Yossman Komplizen Film, the German studio behind Princess Diana biopic “Spencer,” have joined The Creatives, an alliance of independent production companies.The alliance was formed to increase the companies’ “collective power in the face of the changing landscape.”Film and TV production outfit Komplizen, which was founded in 1999 by Janine Jackowski and Maren Ade, joins eleven other companies from across the world including Razor and Haut Et Court, the latter of which initiated the collective.The companies work closely together in a number of ways, from sharing information, combining talent and networks and negotiating with common rules to co-production and partnerships.

Komplizen Film, the German indie run by Janine Jackowski, Maren Ade and Jonas Dornbach, has joined The Creatives, an alliance of independent production companies that has a three-year partnership for developing and funding series with Fremantle.