Il y a longtemps que je t’aime, French novelist and scenarist Philippe Claudel’s first feature, from his own excellent script, has won best film prizes at the César Awards and from the British academy. Its protagonist, Juliette Fontaine, has just been released from prison, after fifteen years, for murdering her six-year-old son. Léa, Juliette’s younger […]

“Why should Europe’s fate be decided in Vienna, of all places?” a citizen bemoans. Set in Vienna during the 1815 Congress, dazzlingly directed (as well as choreographed) by Erik Charell, Der Kongreß tanzt is a light, tuneful German operetta mixing ordinary characters with the powerful, for instance, Austria’s Prince Metternich and Russia’s Tsar Aleksandr I. […]