With 1,200 days of filming per year, the Phocaean city is the most filmed city in France after Paris. On Monday 9 January, the State and local authorities unveiled the outlines of the film section of the “Marseille en grand” plan called for by Emmanuel Macron, with the ambition of making France’s second city “the film capital of the Mediterranean”. “The idea is to make Marseille the Mediterranean capital of cinema and filming”, launched the Minister of Culture, Rima Abdul-Malak, at the signing of a protocol between the State, the Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur (PACA) region, the city and the Aix-M ..read more

Lorrain Sénéchal discusses the week’s film releases with Thierry Fiorile and Matteu Maestracci: “Les Années super-8” by Annie Ernaux and David Ernaux-Briot and “Corsage” by Marie Kreutzer. The film “Les Années super-8” by Annie Ernaux and David Ernaux-Briot is, as its name suggests, family footage shot on a super-8 camera by Philippe Ernaux, the novelist’s ex-husband, between 1972 and 1981. Sequences of everyday life, with the opening of presents on Christmas Eve or holiday films, which look like videos of all the families with the same type of camera at the time. Except that, obviously, these ..read more

Already the world’s richest man, tech entrepreneur and head of one of the most influential social networks, Elon Musk may also have inspired Netflix’s latest crime film, “Glass Onion: A Tale of Two Cities”. The film, which will be released in cinemas on 23 November and available to stream a month later, follows on from Rian Johnson’s previously released Knives and Ladders (2019). In it, actor Daniel Craig returns to the suit of detective Benoit Blanc to investigate a murder on a private Greek island owned by Miles Bron: a billionaire, daring entrepreneur and self-proclaimed genius who has made ..read more

David Pirner reveals why he wrote his ‘metaphor for depression’, while Tony Kaye recalls what inspired the video – which showed the faces of missing children and became a phenomenon Dave Pirner, singer, songwriter We were a garage punk band who recorded for an independent label and travelled in a van. Then I thought I was losing my hearing. I was having a sort of nervous breakdown and needed to get away from the noise. I started playing an acoustic guitar and ended up writing songs on it, one of which was Runaway Train. Initially it went “two souls laughing at the rain, one’s crazy and the oth ..read more

With Halloween looming, these tales by authors from Shirley Jackson to Stephen King are guaranteed to keep you awake as the nights close in In the foreword to his anthology Skeleton Crew, Stephen King launched a memorable defence of the horror short story. No, they weren’t failed novels. Neither were they ideas he couldn’t bring himself to bin. Comparing a novel to a long affair, he saw the short story as a “quick kiss in the dark with a stranger … but those kisses can be sweet”. He is right, of course. Some of literature’s most enduring nightmares are short-form. MR James never wrote a novel ..read more

Two innovative production houses are reinvigorating horror films. Is this the beginning of a Marvel-style expansion of the genre? Horror has been a staple of the movie business since its inception. People love to be scared, and Hollywood studios have wisely capitalised on this. There are many companies that have built their business, and their reputation, on horror films: cool-kid studio A24 are the newest in the game, with Ti West’s trilogy of sweaty slashers X, Pearl and MaXXXine, the upcoming third film. Horror universes may seem like a new phenomenon – but in fact horror films kicked the w ..read more

Ensemble study of film professionals struggling with enforced isolation features some good performances but doesn’t really come together There are some heartfelt performances and vignettes in this debut feature from producer-turned-director Kirsty Bell and writers Elizabeth Morris and Dominic Wells – and certainly some lustrous monochrome images from cinematographer Sergio Delgado. But this lockdown ensemble piece about a movie production stymied by Covid is self-conscious and doesn’t really come together, and the tonal shifts can be a little uncomfortable. Camilla Rutherford plays Rebecca, an ..read more

Benoît Magimel’s French high commissioner confronts the end of his personal Eden in Tahiti, in Albert Serra’s distinctive film Albert Serra’s bizarre epic is a cheese-dream of French imperial tristesse, political paranoia and an apocalyptic despair. It is a nightmare that moves as slowly and confidently as a somnambulist, and its pace, length, and Serra’s beautiful widescreen panoramic framings – in which conventional drama is almost camouflaged or lost – may divide opinion. I can only say I was captivated by the film and its stealthy evocation of pure evil. Admirers of Serra’s previous movies ..read more

Game of Thrones alum Nikolaj Coster-Waldau co-writes and stars in a solid retelling of Danish explorer Ejnar Mikkelsen’s epic Greenland expedition An unusual expedition here for Netflix, unusual less for the nature of the expedition itself and more for the ambition of it, a rare film for the streamer that allows us to travel with characters to a real location, a world away from green screens and sound stages. It shouldn’t be quite this much of a unique selling point but in the age of modestly budgeted fare crafted for the smallest of screens, the sheer on-the-ground expanse of old-fashioned su ..read more

Never underestimate your friendly neighborhood Spider-Man, even with a mutating virus afoot. Despite rising concerns over the omicron variant, “Spider-Man: No Way Home” not only shattered pandemic-era box office records, it now holds the title for the second-biggest opening weekend ever, behind only “Avengers: Endgame.” Weekend ticket sales for the third Tom Holland Spider-Man were even better than estimated, and the movie raked in $260 million in North America, Sony Pictures announced Monday. It’s the best opening weekend ever for Spider-Man films, Sony and the month of December. While the ex ..read more