Juliette Binoche

An intriguing Chinese box of a movie, this slightly too-clever drama unpicks the layers of identity that are concealed behind the image of a celebrity. It's so knowing that it can't help but find revelatory meaning here and there, and the performances are raw and fascinating. There's also spectacular scenery and some darkly swelling emotions. But the themes are pushed a bit too hard, and the plot is enigmatic and oddly unresolved.

At the centre is Maria (Juliette Binoche), a famous actress who is aware that as she ages she's entering a new phase in her career. She's headed with her personal assistant Val (Kristen Steward) to a special event in Sils-Maria, Switzerland, to honour Wilhelm, the director who made Maria a star. But Wilhelm dies just before they arrive, so the event turns into a memorial instead. At the funeral, theatre director Klaus (Lars Eidinger) approaches Maria about starring in a new version of Wilhelm's iconic play Maloja Snake, which refers to an unusual cloud formation in this Alpine region. But this time Maria would play the older woman, while rising-star Jo-Ann (Chloe Grace Moretz) takes the ingenue role that sparked Maria's career. While Jo-Ann catches headlines for her bad-girl antics, Maria asks Val to help her get a grip on the alien older character she will be playing.

The story spirals out from here with swirling angles of meaning, as the play within the film becomes entangled with the contrasting public and private lives of the celebrities. Thankfully, even though everything is very pointed, the actors deliver remarkably off-handed performances that are very easy to identify with, revealing their characters' private thoughts and insecurities. There is of course also a further meta-level to all of this, as Jo-Ann's paparazzi-baiting lifestyle echoes experiences Stewart herself has had.

Continue reading: Clouds Of Sils Maria Review

With a stripped-down, bare-faced performance, Juliette Binoche is utterly wonderful in this tense French drama. Based on the real story of artist Camille Claudel, who was locked in an asylum by her family, the film is an unofficial sequel to the 1988 biopic. And it also continues to provocatively explore the impact of religion in society that has infused writer-director Bruno Dumont's work from La Vie de Jesus (1997) to Outside Satan (2011).

The film picks up Camille's story after she has split up with the sculptor Rodin and established herself as an artist in Paris. But her family is worried that she is living the wrong kind of life, so in 1913 they had her committed to an isolated psychiatric hospital. Over the next two years, her doctor (Robery Leroy) and the attending nuns know that she shouldn't be here, especially since the constant noise from the inmates interferes with any attempt to carry on with her work. When her younger brother Paul (Jean-Luc Vincent) comes for a visit, Camille hopes that he'll finally agree to let her out, but his intense religious believes convince him that the arts are evil and that the best way to care for his sister is to cruelly lock her away.

Yes, Dumont is drawing all kinds of parallels here with modern society and the fears people have of art they don't understand, which would probably include many of Dumont's films. But aside from a brief section that centres on Paul, the film is tightly focussed on Camille, and Binoche lets us see right through her. It's a wrenchingly raw performance that reveals all of Camille's conflicting inner emotions, with glimmers of hope and even bliss as well as the deep yearning to have her old life back so she can once again express herself artistically. By locking in so closely on Camille, Dumont and Binoche force us to experience her incarceration with her, including the daily irritations and small mercies.

Continue reading: Camille Claudel 1915 Review

For a blockbuster about gigantic radioactive monsters, this is a remarkably humane movie. But then that's no surprise for a film from Gareth Edwards, whose micro-budget Monsters (2010) showed that effects-based movies don't need to sacrifice characterisation and real emotion. So while this film is still a big action romp, it's also cleverly grounded by believable people.

It centres on Ford (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), whose life was upended in 1999 by a nuclear accident in Japan that killed his scientist mother (Juliette Binoche) and turned his father into a conspiracy-theory nutcase. Now just as Ford returns from military service to his wife (Elizabeth Olsen) and young son, he's called back to Japan as his dad spots tremors similar to those 15 years earlier. And as three terrifying creatures rise out of the earth, Ford is drafted in to help protect humanity. Following the beasts via Hawaii and Las Vegas to an epic confrontation in his hometown San Francisco, Ford works with scientists (Ken Watanabe and Sally Hawkins) and military commanders (David Strathairn and Richard T. Jones), eventually realising that the big-daddy monster Godzilla might actually be trying to help.

One of the more interesting aspects of Max Borenstein's script is that it reveals fairly early on that humanity is responsible for all of this and also helpless to avert the coming cataclysm. And yet the military machine does what it can, firing pathetic bullets and mobilising nuclear warheads because that's all it knows how to do. This approach adds a moral complexity that plays out in the decisions the characters have to make along the way. Taylor-Johnson is fine as the bland but muscled everyman at the centre, but Cranston steals the film with a far more textured role. Watanabe proves to be a master at the distant stare, while everyone else just runs and/or yells like real people would.

Continue reading: Godzilla Review