sorana_necula_reset

Firelight  is a 1997 period  romance film  written and directed by  William Nicholson  and starring  Sophie Marceau  and  Stephen Dillane . Written by William Nicholson, the film is about a woman who agrees to bear the child of an anonymous English landowner in return for payment to resolve her father's debts. When the child is born, the woman gives up the child as agreed. Seven years later, the woman is hired as a governess to a girl on a remote Sussex estate, whose father is the anonymous landowner. Filmed on location in  Firle , England and  Calvados , France, [1]  the film premiered at the  Deauville American Film Festival  on 14 September 1997.  Firelight  was Nicholson's first and only film as a director. In 1837, Swiss  governess  Elisabeth Laurier ( Sophie Marceau ) agrees to bear a child for an anonymous English landowner in return for money needed to pay her father's debts. They meet over t...

Finland’s official Oscar contender offers a fictionalized take on a real-life fencing teacher who took a stand against Stalinist oppression in Soviet-era Estonia. A local story with universal resonance, Finland’s submission for the Best Foreign Language Oscar race is a solid period drama set in the small Baltic state of Estonia during the dark days of Soviet occupation. Given that three out of director  Klaus Haro ’s previous four features were nominated as Finnish Oscar contenders,  The Fencer  is hardly a surprising choice. But much like its three predecessors, it will likely prove a little too staid and conventional to make the final shortlist.   Borrowing some familiar tropes from inspirational teacher-hero dramas like  Dead Poets Society ,  Anna Heinamaa ’s screenplay ticks all the right middlebrow boxes, but ultimately fails to deliver on character depth or moral complexity. Already released domestically to critical acclaim,  The Fencer...

Paolo Sorrentino's second English-language feature stars Michael Caine and Harvey Keitel as two aging artist friends with different ideas about how to wrap up their creative careers. Youth  is a voluptuary’s feast, a full-body immersion in the sensory pleasures of the cinema. A film about old artists by a much younger man,  Paolo Sorrentino’s  second English-language feature is an immeasurable improvement on his first,  This Must Be the Place , standing much closer to the level of his 2013 triumph,  The Great Beauty , as it takes on potentially heavy material in a disarmingly whimsical, intelligent and keen-witted manner.    Michael Caine  and  Harvey Keitel , both at the top of their games, wonderfully carry this spirited look at two aging artist friends with distinctly different ideas about how to wrap up their creative careers. Luring younger audiences to a film about mostly older folk at a Swiss spa will be a challenge, but a decen...

Ten luminous and newly translated stories by Némirovsky ( Suite Française  ), who died at Auschwitz, expose the miseries that undermine happy families. Set mostly in France, where the author immigrated after the Russian revolution, these accomplished tales create worlds full of secrets and treacheries, such as in the title story, set on one typical Sunday at a bourgeois Parisian home where the middle-aged wife and mother, Agnes—once embittered by her husband's taking of a mistress, but now apathetic to his wanderings—remembers her own lost love. “Flesh and Blood” is a masterpiece of familial subterfuge revolving around an aged matriarch who falls ill and tries to keep peace among her three self-absorbed sons and their grasping wives. In “The Spell,” a young visitor to a messy Russian household gleans dark mysteries around a lovelorn aunt's romantic sorcery; several of the tales, such as “The Spectator” and “Monsieur Rose,” capture aloof, prosperous gentlemen fleeing Paris in ad...