BMA (Bands Music Action)

4.5/5 Review by John P. Harvey. Set during the widespread “yellow vests” protests from late 2018 to mid 2020 over tax inequities in France, and based on actual events, Case 137 introduces us to police investigator Stéphanie Bertrand (Léa Drucker). Stéphanie heads up a unit in the French National Police General Inspectorate (IGPN), the body responsible for investigating police malfeasance, including brutality. The unit’s case no.

4.5/5 Review by John P. Harvey. In 1982, President François Mitterand (played by Michel Fau) initiated a competition for the design of a monument celebrating the 1989 bicentenary of the French Revolution. The monument was to complete a line of great monuments sited in La Défense, Paris’s enormous business district.

4/5 Review by John P. Harvey. Mélanie (Julia Piaton), a defence lawyer, knows that chronic health problems could lead her to die at any moment. Having determined to have something special in her life before that happens, she urges her best friend, Benjamin (Quentin Dolmaire), to come with her to Spain to experience something special too. To drive them both, she enlists a client she hardly knows, Lucas (Grégory Gadebois), who upon their return to France will stand trial on drug-trafficking charges.

3.5/5 Review by John P. Harvey. Jérôme Commandeur, who directed and co-wrote this movie, co-stars as Jordy, one of three men who at school 30 years earlier had been awful to most of their classmates and are shocked to receive news of the death of their classmate Daniel (Michaël Abiteboul).

⭐⭐⭐⭐ Rating: 4 out of 5. Review by John P. Harvey. With a lifetime of unfulfilled fantasies of travel and no income to speak of, Yann (Hakim Jemili) is astonished to learn that the travel guide Globetrotter’s publisher, Globetrotter, actually pays people to travel. He therefore seizes an opportunity to impress Globetrotter’s boss, Karol (Christian Klavier), by lying through his teeth about the range of his travel experience.

3/5 Review by John P. Harvey. France’s answer to Back to the Future takes an unusual approach to time travel in shifting an entire culture forward in time but leaving intact its protagonists’ memories of their period of origin and ignorance of their new timescape, highlighting changes in attitude as much as changes in physical environment. Living a typical Parisian suburban life in 1968, husband and wife Michel and Hélène Dupuis (Didier Bourdon and Elsa Zylberstein) live the dream.

5/5 Review by John P. Harvey. Amélie is aware from the time of her birth in Japan of her unique qualities, which include the capacity to see everything but understand nothing, as if her consciousness were locked in a clear glass tube. She feels, in some ways, overlooked by everyone except her father’s mother, Claude, who lives in Belgium, and live-in nanny, Nishio-san.

5/5 Review by John P. Harvey. Dog 51 is set in Paris in a not-too-distant future in which police operations — along with most other societal functions — are effectively directed by an artificial intelligence named ALMA.

3.5/5 Review by John P. Harvey. Sister Lucie (Marilou Berry) has been a nun for 20 years. Under the stern supervision of her Mother Superior, Mother Henriette (Isabelle Nanty), she and her religious sisters find little opportunity to enjoy themselves in even the most trivial ways, and they know little of the modern world.

4.5/5 Review by John P. Harvey. Based on the life of counterfeiter Ceslaw Jan Bojarski, The Money Maker begins during WW II, when Jan Bojarski (Reda Kateb) is keeping body and soul together by forging identity papers for others. The film takes up the story after the war when, in 1951, Bojarski and a fellow Pole, Serge (Pierre Lottin), are living in France and existing on casual menial work, in spite of Bojarski’s being an engineer and skilled inventor.