Rory O'Connor

3 weeks ago | thefilmstage.com | Rory O'Connor

The new film from Jean Pierre and Luc Dardenne is much like the others. The actors are mostly non-professional; the locations are real; the themes are sociological; the mood is often tense. The subject of their latest is unplanned pregnancies and the options made available for young French women who feel that their situation, whether exterior or interior, might not be suited for raising a child.

3 weeks ago | thefilmstage.com | Rory O'Connor

It’s a brisk March morning in Luxembourg and my conversation with Paul Laverty has turned to Cantona. “Remember that goal he scored, with Brian McClair?” A classic, I agree. “He did that lovely 1-2, looked up, dented the ball,” Laverty explains, whistling the arc, “and then just stood there and stuck out his chest. He was everything you could be.” I was curious how Laverty, who wrote Ken Loach’s Looking for Eric, in which Cantona played himself, had approached the player with the script.

3 weeks ago | thefilmstage.com | Rory O'Connor

Among the best things in The President’s Cake are the colors. There’s the deep red of a rooster’s comb as it peeks out from a young girl’s carrying pouch; there’s the white decorations that adorn her uncle’s blue car; and then there is the opening vista, in which a deep evening sky is disturbed by the roar of two American fighter jets. We’re somewhere in the ’90s, the country is Iraq, and the decorations are for its president, Saddam Hussein.

1 month ago | thefilmstage.com | Rory O'Connor

For the second time in three years, Cannes’ competition ends with a film in which Josh O’Connor plays a scruffy, late-20th-century man with some knack for pinching masterpieces. Following (spiritually or otherwise) Alice Rohrwacher’s La Chimera is Kelly Reichardt’s The Mastermind, an experiment in form so thorough and self-assured that even Robert Bresson might have appreciated it.

1 month ago | thefilmstage.com | Rory O'Connor

I could name few living filmmakers better equipped for the Western than Alessio Rigo de Righi and Matteo Zoppis. The duo behind The Tale of King Crab––a film I revere like a sacred relic––have created their own niche in contemporary Italian magical realism, somewhere adjacent to Alice Rohrwacher and Pietro Marcello while very much its own thing. Their latest is called Heads or Tails and it’s another of the filmmakers’ ethereal campfire stories.