Jacques Audiard
28 connections found
View:
Connections, in both directions
“Dheepan” pulls its poverty-stricken characters together only to atomize the community in a bloody climax that’s cinematic as hell yet dramatically unconvincing, as though a finely observed fable had decided to go out with a “Taxi Driver” bang.
Audiard rejects a more reasonable ending in favor of a slate-clearing, Taxi Driver -inspired climax, which pointlessly fringes into fantasy territory.
…by Bill Chambers "Well, not exactly," a critic acquaintance gently scoffed after I shrugged that Dheepan was "y'know, Taxi Driver."
The drift towards a violent, cathartic showdown, with echoes of Death Wish and Taxi Driver, sits uneasily with what has gone before but provides a suitably dramatic finale to a solid and engrossing Audiard drama.
For director Jacques Audiard to snag his industry's greatest prize for "Dheepan" instead of his greater earlier efforts, "The Beat that My Heart Skipped" and "A Prophet," is roughly tantamount to Martin Scorsese landing the Best Director Oscar for "The Departed" instead of "Taxi Driver" or "Goodfellas."
Early word of mouth even compared it to Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976) in both atmosphere and in its explosive third-act climax of visceral violence.
If James Toback's petty-criminal tale "Fingers" inspired Jacques Audiard's previous "The Beat That My Heart Skipped," it's Martin Scorsese's "Goodfellas" that looms over his latest "A Prophet."
That one was very loosely inspired by James Toback's "Fingers," with Harvey Keitel as the vulnerable son of a gangster.
Audiard may have had the stones to tweak Jim Toback 's Fingers in '05 (with the racy The Beat That My Heart Skipped), but here, his approach to cinematic '70s-isms is slavish—and downright corny.
Maybe it's not fair to hold all organized-crime movies up to "The Godfather," but "A Prophet" -- nominated for an Oscar in the foreign-language category and bolstered by Tahar Rahim's sensitive, nuanced central performance -- comes out OK in the comparison.
Malik's character arc recalls Michael Corleone's in "The Godfather," and the inexperienced actor who plays him has an intensity that rivals Pacino's.
Directed and co-written by Jacques Audiard ("The Beat That My Heart Skipped"), "A Prophet" is a gritty, passionate, magnificently crafted film that deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as "The Godfather," "GoodFellas" and "Gomorrah."
Some have compared this French crime drama to The Godfather, and though that may be a common critical touchstone, writer-director Jacques Audiard (Read My Lips, The Beat That My Heart Skipped) manages to replicate its most elusive elementââ¬ânot the dark comedy or the operatic bloodletting but the incremental corruption of a decent man into a willful, coldhearted killer.
If James Toback's petty-criminal tale "Fingers" inspired Jacques Audiard's previous "The Beat That My Heart Skipped," it's Martin Scorsese's "Goodfellas" that looms over his latest "A Prophet."
Think "GoodFellas," but with Gauloises and accent aigu instead of plates of spaghetti and accent Pesci.
Directed and co-written by Jacques Audiard ("The Beat That My Heart Skipped"), "A Prophet" is a gritty, passionate, magnificently crafted film that deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as "The Godfather," "GoodFellas" and "Gomorrah."
A Prophet has been compared to American TV series like Oz for its episodic plot and large cast, but it’s more like a Gallic Goodfellas: thoroughly absorbing, exciting, even poetic.
The film has been compared to The Godfather; its depiction of a youth of decidedly non-royal lineage working his way up the underworld ladder is, in fact, much closer to Goodfellas, and in one rock-accompanied, hyperbolically edited passage, Audiard pays homage to Scorsese’s mastery of the moment when things spin out of control.
The film that follows is as ambitious a crime saga as Goodfellas or perhaps even The Godfather, but condensed into the few years of Malik's sentence.
His story is a modern “Straw Dogs” about a man pushed to his breaking point in a world where he can’t escape the horrors of violence.
Audiard has said "Dheepan" was inspired by Sam Peckinpah 's "Straw Dogs" (1971) and his focus on Sri Lankan immigrants was chosen largely for narrative purposes.
The filmmaker has said that he and his co-writer Thomas Bidegain wanted to craft a Straw Dogs-style flick and then worked their ways backwards to the diaspora scenario, and you wished the process had been reversed.
The opposite of an amoral opportunist like Scarface’s Tony Montana, Malik is a quiet kid who only wants to serve his six years with his head down and his hands kept clean.
Filmmaker Jacques Audiard (The Beat That My Heart Skipped) has rightly called A Prophet his ''anti-Scarface.''
He remade James Toback’s fatalistic fever dream Fingers as the romantic, relatively upbeat The Beat That My Heart Skipped, and in A Prophet, he seems to be turning De Palma’s Scarface inside out and finding the core of self-actualizing inspiration that no climactic hail of bullets could puncture.
The Gospel According to St. Matthew (1965)
Directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini
influenced A Prophet (2009)
Characters
A Prophet gets a much-needed hint of ambiguity in the lead turn by Rahim, an earthy-looking non-pro who sometimes seems to be channeling Enrique Irazoqui 's lumpen prole Christ from The Gospel According to St. Matthew.
But, true to the tradition of crime movies going back to James Cagney in "White Heat," "A Prophet" - which was nominated for an Oscar for best foreign-language film this year and won the grand jury prize at last year's Cannes Film Festival - is taut and brutal, and its scenes of bloodletting often stand out.
Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (2010)
Directed by Edgar Wright
influenced Paris, 13th District (2021)
Visuals
In his wildly experimental, postmodern “Scott Pilgrim vs. the World,” Edgar Wright sought to shake up the grammar of filmic storytelling, borrowing techniques from the hand-drawn source material.
Its ending—which I’ve seen read in two completely opposed ways—has in my view a whiff of Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971) about it, but lacks the drive and sense of being a single piece that marks the Kubrick film.
The West is captured by veteran cinematographer Benoît Debie, who often works with Argentinian filmmaker Gaspar Noé (see “Irreversible” and others).
In his quietly stunning performance as a French teenager of Arab descent spending six years in prison, Tahar Rahim looks not unlike a thinner, more intense Danny McBride, and his nervous, awkward mannerisms reminded me of McBride’s small, but crucial role in David Gordon Green’s lyrical All the Real Girls (2003), in which he played a soft-spoken, not particularly bright young man on the margins of society.
If Hallam Foe possessed itself of tighter narrative and psychological parameters, and its climaxes felt more equal in scope and in emotional heft to the film that has conveyed us toward them, the movie might amass the charge of Jacques Audiard's Read My Lips or The Beat that My Heart Skipped , whose sensory richness and offbeat character studies and enervating suspense Hallam Foe otherwise shares.
The Next Three Days (2010)
Directed by Paul Haggis
influenced by A Prophet (2009), The Beat That My Heart Skipped (2005)
Plot
Watching John’s dogged determination as he slowly amasses knowledge of dark criminal arts — including a fast seminar on prison breaks from a cameoing Liam Neeson — is reminiscent of another recent French movie, Jacques Audiard’s A Prophet.
Haggis has added nearly 40 minutes to the duration, and a different French cinematographer has been engaged (Stéphane Fontaine, who shot A Prophet and The Beat That My Heart Skipped).
Haggis has added nearly 40 minutes to the duration, and a different French cinematographer has been engaged (Stéphane Fontaine, who shot A Prophet and The Beat That My Heart Skipped).
Stephane Fontaine (“A Prophet,” “Rust & Bone”) — makes for an experience that feels as luminous and enriching as practically every widescreen frame.
Ross imbues Ben’s self-contained universe with a magical atmosphere expertly captured by cinematographer Stéphane Fontaine (“A Prophet”).
Cinematographer Stéphane Fontaine (Jacques Audiard's "A Prophet") has many angles to cover, given that Mortensen and all six children are often all active players in a scene.
Wise and funny, it’s got glorious photography by Stephane Fontaine (A Prophet) and a tone shot-through with melancholy, loss and regret.
The film's authenticity extends to the natural-light cinematography of the gifted Stéphane Fontaine (A Prophet) and the crisp editing of Joseph Krings (Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead).
The film spends its first forty-five minutes showing that unnamed agent’s efforts on a defiant al Quaida prisoner (Reda Kateb of “A Prophet”) while newcomer Maya (Jessica Chastain) sits in, observes, learns and strategizes.
When new CIA operative Maya (Jessica Chastain, "The Help") goes to her first job in the field, it's to a Black Site outside of Islamabad, where Ammar (Reda Kateb, "A Prophet") is being held prisoner, his arms chained over his head in the center of a bunker.
Much of the movie unfolds like "A History of Violence" with an immigrant twist, as Sivadhasan and his surrogate family begin to sink deeper into their roles.
Like Viggo Mortensen’s Tom Stall in “A History of Violence,” Dheepan is The Family Man With a Dark Past.
Unlike other revisionist Westerns, dedicated to showcasing the brutality of existence in the old West (think The Hateful Eight or Bone Tomahawk ) The Sisters Brothers is, surprisingly, far more compassionate - embroiling us in the feelings of the brothers as they reconcile with a trauma from their childhood.
A kind of post-western in the vein of Slow West , Deadwood or Bone Tomahawk , Jacques Audiard’s The Sisters Brothers returns to the iconic open plains and hardy saloons of John Ford and Sergio Leone, but with the rose-tinted lens torn from the camera and flung into the mud.
Truth be told, these elements don't entirely mesh well with the rest of the movie's narrative, but at least A Prophet avoids getting bogged down in the same kind of mystical mumbo-jumbo that sank The Green Mile .
The real art of “The Place Beyond the Pines” is the innovative plot construct, which can only be compared to films such as “The Godfather” and “A Prophet.”