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4 items from 2013

17 May 2013 4:43 AM, PDT | WeAreMovieGeeks.com | See recent WeAreMovieGeeks.com news »

Review by Barbara Snitzer

In the House (Dans La Maison) is a crafty, suspenseful yarn that successfully maintains the audience’s engagement throughout its entire 102 minute running time.

Director François Ozon has improved his craft by being prolific; he has made just about a film a year since his debut feature Sitcom in 1998. Fabrice Luchini plays Germain Germain, a failed author turned jaded literature teacher at the Lycée Gustave Flaubert.  The film begins with a new school year. Germain’s first assignment is for the students to write about their summer’s activities. Germain is astounded by the mediocrity of his students’ work; he reads aloud the shoddy essays to his wife,Jeanne (Kristin Scott-Thomas) who sympathizes with his frustration.  He picks the papers at random, expecting each to be worse than the next, when suddenly, one essay captivates both of them. Student Claude Garcia (excellent performance by Ersnst Umhauer »

- Movie Geeks

19 April 2013 8:05 AM, PDT | FilmExperience | See recent FilmExperience news »

Glenn here. Given my penchant for poster goodness I figured I'd pick up Nathaniel's regular "posterized" feature. A fun series that can time to time shine a curious light on the way films are marketed and how certain actors or directors can find themselves in a so-called "marketing rut" where it's the same thing over and over. Think of a Will Smith movie and don't you just picture his smug mug staring out at you in mid-range closeup? Even that one about selling his organs to Rosario Dawson (or whatever Seven Pounds was about - I've sure as hell forgotten!)

This week I've chosen François Ozon - and he's having a helluva week. Not only is his latest (un/lucky number thirteen) film, In the House [Dans le maison], getting a release in America, but his next picture, Jeune et Jolie, was just chosen to compete for the Palme d'Or in Cannes. Well done, »

- Glenn Dunks

18 April 2013 2:00 PM, PDT | FilmSchoolRejects.com | See recent FilmSchoolRejects news »

To say that François Ozon has worked in many genres would be a misstatement, but only because his films tend to ignore the boundaries of genre in the first place. 8 Women is a musical, melodrama and murder mystery. Swimming Pool is a thriller inflected by romance novels. Sitcom is a fusion of sitcom tropes and rambunctious sexuality. And now, Ozon has made a film that functions almost as a retrospective blend of his own prior work. In the House builds from the insightful narrative trickery of Swimming Pool, blends in the promiscuous anarchy and wry humor of Sitcom, and drops the whole thing into the otherwise boring “inspirational schoolteacher” movie. The result is Ozon’s best work in a decade. The student in question is Claude Garcia (Ernst Umhauer), a sly young man with a lot of ambition and little humility. He’s the star of his literature class, taught by once-aspiring novelist Germain (Fabrice Luchini). It »

- Daniel Walber

28 March 2013 5:05 PM, PDT | The Guardian - Film News | See recent The Guardian - Film News news »

François Ozon's new film, In the House, looks set to be his international breakthrough. But has the erstwhile enfant terrible fallen for the bourgeois values he once satirised?

François Ozon has been knocking out roughly a film a year since the late 1990s: some camp and frivolous (Sitcom, Potiche), others intense (5x2, Time to Leave), each one zesty and provocative. Occasionally he will make something truly exceptional: Under the Sand, starring Charlotte Rampling as a woman falling apart after the disappearance of her husband, was rightly considered a masterpiece by the late Ingmar Bergman.

But though Ozon has had commercial success in France, he is still chasing the sort of career-changing international breakthrough on a par with, say, Pedro Almodóvar's Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown or Michael Haneke's Hidden. If there is any justice, his new film In the House will change that. It's a witty, »

- Ryan Gilbey

4 items from 2013