Alain Chabat

It's been 20 years since French filmmaker Luc Besson shook up the sci-fi genre with his inventive adventure The Fifth Element, and now he's back at at again with this adaptation of the popular comics by Pierre Cristin and Jean-Claude Mezieres. The film is a blast of visual animation, with a wildly over-complicated story involving time and space. It's all rather messy, but there's plenty of comedy and adventure to hold the interest, plus some offbeat romance and a hint of present-day politics.

It's set in the 28th century, when the human-created mega-city Alpha has travelled across the universe and is now home to beings from a thousand worlds. Valerian (Dane DeHaan) is a security officer working with his bickering partner Laureline (Cara Delevingne) to retrieve illegal contraband. After a mission on a desert planet with parallel dimension issues, they return to Alpha with haunting information about a lost civilisation, which seems to be at the centre of a secret war Alpha's Commander (Clive Owen) is waging. Amid a complex power struggle, Valerian and Laureline head into a no-go sector of Alpha to find out what's going on, getting help from a chatty pimp (Ethan Hawke), a submarine pirate (Alain Chabat) and a shape-shifting pole-dancer (Rihanna).

Besson fills the nearly two and a half hour running time with outlandishly colourful effects, lively action and lots of verbal banter, but not so much character development. Only Valerian and Laureline emerge as fully formed people, even as they conform rather oddly to gender expectations that are old fashioned today, let alone 700 years in the future. So their tetchy romance is enjoyable but rather aimless. Meanwhile, Rihanna has some strong moments once she stops dancing and changing costumes like she's in a music video. And Sam Spruell and Kris Wu make a solid double act as Alpha officials trying to work out what's going on.

Continue reading: Valerian And The City Of A Thousand Planets Review

Castella (Jean-Pierre Bacri) and his wife have to attend a local stage production of Bérénice, in which their daughter plays a small part. They don't care for the theatre and can't understand the verse, but, to Castella's own surprise, he finds himself unusually moved by a leading actress Clara. The charming point here is that Clara isn't a young aspiring theatrical diva but an aging, harried, and often unemployed actress from a small provincial theatre. Castella, however, doesn't see her that way: For him, she brings into his dispassionate routine the whiff of a free-spirited life including cozy, drunken late-night talks and vibrant gallery gatherings. Through happenstance, Castella's new business arrangement requires him to learn English, and Clara (Anne Alvaro) becomes his teacher.

Continue reading: The Taste Of Others Review