Marie-Célia Cannenpasse-Riffard

A white picket fence, money and a life filled with glitter; Swallow is a tale that could have easily been found on Desperate Housewives‘ Wisteria Lane. Blonde and seemingly angelic Hunter (Haley Bennett) could have joined the notorious weekly poker club. But behind the classic trope of an unhappy life whilst bathing in privileges, director Carlo Mirabella-Davis portrays true despair in the most unconventional way.

Hunter is a desperate housewife unaware that she’s stuck in an unhealthy relati...

One wouldn’t imagine a rock and roll concert without the pit buzzing to the beat, a compact and euphoric crowd singing along and yet, Leto, from director Kirill Serebrennikov, opens with a contradiction. In a hot and cold atmosphere, a group plays energetic music in front of a frozen audience, confined in a room by guards. This first sequence alone sums up the dilemma within Leto, that roughly translates as ‘Summer’ in Russian, a film about a generation’s burning soul trapped in an icy era.
M...

His style usually unleashing an extremely divisive response, Xavier Dolan’s latest opus The Death and Life of John F. Donovan is unlikely to drastically change audiences’ minds. In this, the Québécois director’s first English-language feature, Dolan studies the toxic aspects of stardom, while once again losing his characters within the vagaries of maternal tragedy.
Kit Harington plays Donovan, a spiralling young actor who finds in Rupert Turner (Jacob Tremblay), an 11-year-old fan, the most u...

Going for sweet, tender and sensual when telling the twists and turns of a friendship transforming into something more, is a scenario bound to cause a few cavities. Xavier Dolan’s Matthias & Maxime’s candid take on blurred lines surprises by the sincerity of the sparks it provokes, contrary to expectations.
All it takes is one staged kiss on a student film set, for childhood best friends Matt and Max (Gabriel D’Almeida Freitas and Xavier Dolan) to question the nature of their bond. Matt is st...

An incisive eye and an original outlook: French filmmaker Claire Denis needs no introduction. Once again, she surprises and challenges audiences with her English-language debut High Life, a mediation on what it means to be human in a visceral search for pleasure whilst blurring the lines between good and evil.
We’re first introduced to Monte (Robert Pattinson) as he takes care of a crying baby within the confinement of what looks like a place reminiscent of Earth, but not quite. The room is b...

Nichée entre AVENGERS: INFINITY WAR et le très attendu AVENGERS: ENDGAME, une nouvelle Captain s’invite à l’assemblée des super-héros Marvel et pourrait bien changer la donne. Fun, efficace, surprenant, CAPTAIN MARVEL tape vigoureusement du poing sur la table.
Après WONDER WOMAN, la plus célèbre des Amazones présentée au public par DC Comics, il était temps que Marvel se mette au diapason de l’ère du temps. Le Studio nous dévoile donc CAPTAIN MARVEL, son premier film entièrement consacré à un...

Every week, IndieWire asks a select handful of film critics two questions and publishes the results on Monday. (The answer to the second, “What is the best film in theaters right now?”, can be found at the end of this post.)
This week’s question: With rumors about “Bond 25” starting to trickle out, and Daniel Craig set to hang up his tuxedo for good after production wraps, who should be the next person to play 007?
Idris Elba
I am firmly in the camp that believes Idris Elba would make an exce...

The White House may have known ferocious villains in the past, but nothing compared to the one Adam McKay introduces us to in his newest biopic Vice, in which we come face-to-face with Vile slash VP Dick Cheney.
McKay’s Dick Cheney, Master among the masters, is a Yale drop-out and a disappointing husband turned politician, almost by accident. It is only after his wife Lynne (Amy Adams) threatens to leave that Dick finally blooms into the best snake charmer the reptile house has ever known. An...

Every week, IndieWire asks a select handful of film critics two questions and publishes the results on Monday. (The answer to the second, “What is the best film in theaters right now?”, can be found at the end of this post.)
This week’s question: What is Samuel L. Jackson’s best performance?
Decades of spirited portrayals in canonic films and big-budget extravaganzas turned Samuel L. Jackson into an American cinema staple. His high points are many, with Spike Lee, Quentin Tarantino, and withi...

At the very end of Split, released in 2016, M. Night Shyamalan – to whom we also owe the incredibly striking Unbreakable – reveals a twist that made fans’ heart jump with excitement. It turns out that multi-personality serial killer Kevin Wendell Crumb (James McAvoy), nicknamed ‘The Hoard’, belongs within the same cinematic universe as superhero David Dunn (Bruce Willis), ‘The Green Guard’ with a rain poncho. Naturally, masses couldn’t wait for both to literally bump shoulders, overseen from ...

Si le très académique COLETTE tombe dans les codes du biopic lisse et classique sans révolutionner le genre, il lui reste un charme indélébile qui laisse une sensation de légèreté.
La tâche était ardue que de s’attaquer à Colette, un monument de la littérature française qui fascine toujours par son avant-gardisme et dont l’histoire ne cesse de se décliner au cinéma. Le réalisateur Wash Westmoreland relève ce défi de taille pour donner ainsi vie au portrait de la fameuse romancière touche-à-to...

London timidly reveals its skyline behind a foggy veil, but the cold breeze seems to bite a little less thanks to Jack, an endearing lamplighter played by Hamilton’s creator Lin-Manuel Miranda, who tours the streets of the awakening city with a smile and a song on his lips. It is on Cherry Tree Lane that his bicycle finally slows down, where the glow of the last lamp fades away. We are back on the familiar doorsteps, but so many years have passed and all traces of childhood miracles have clea...

On August 16, 1819, protesters quickly gather in Manchester. Families, wearing their best clothes, their dog running between their legs, and smiles on their faces, arrive in large numbers at St Peter’s Field, to participate in what they think is going to be a peaceful rally. But soon, the cavalry called by local authorities crashes into them with sabres lifted into the air. This is how dozens of innocent people get killed and others injured. Drawing a parallel with the very recent Waterloo, t...

Country music, cowboy boots and a big heart: these are the ingredients of Wild Rose, a story telling the adventures of the tender and thorny Rose-Lynn, a Glaswegian ball of fire trying her best to rocket through life and chase what she thinks is her destiny.
The film opens on the lively Rose-Lynn enthusiastically getting out of jail. She feels it, the world awaits: from the cell to the stage, Rose-Lynn well intends to go and sail away from her native Scotland to Nashville, the only coveted pr...

Coming back to solid ground after the acclaimed Gravity and looking back on his roots, Alfonso Cuarón takes a path through childhood and his own memories to craft and deliver the elegant and incisive Roma, an incredibly lyrical piece of life. It finds beauty in the little things about a 70s existence in Mexico City – a floor being swept several times, a plane shooting through the sky, a rooftop to hang up clothes – and pushes them in the foreground.
The director of Y Tu Mamá También multi-tas...