Paris is star of this gentle comedy
Opening out his own 2002 stage play for his debut as a film director in My Old Lady (12A)
, Broadway veteran Israel Horowitz unfolds a picture book version of Paris where harmonica players and opera singers practise on every street corner, framed by an artful Metro sign or a handy monument.
Into this prettiness wanders worldweary and jet-lagged Mathias Gold, a New Yorker played by Kevin Kline. Mathias has inherited, from his late father, a fabulously large but shabby apartment in the beautiful – and valuable – Marais district.
Arrived to claim his fortune, he is distressed to find the flat is inhabited by the elderly but spirited Mathilde Girard, played by Maggie Smith ringing that familiar delivery through lines such as: ‘Precision is the key to long life. Precision and good wine.’
Desperate to sell the flat, Mathias is stymied by the arcane French law of ‘viager’ which entitles a tenant to remain their death, something from which the redoubtable Mrs G seems very far, despite her 92 years. The red wine, you see.
Mathilde is later joined by her daughter Chloé (Kristin Scott Thomas). A threehander develops and secrets are uncorked which entwine them all.
Much of this is charming fun, and indeed more enjoyable when concentrating on the lightly comic aspect of ‘ la situation’ rather than when each character emotes in over-written speeches.
Given how much property dominates conversation these days, films about our emotional and financial attachment to it are rare. This is almost a good one.
Glowering and hulking throughout, Idris Elba lends rather too much muscular presence to No Good Deed (15A) , an unpleasant home-invasion film set in Atlanta. Elba plays a killer called Colin (yes, Colin) who escapes from prison, throttles his ex-girlfriend then charms his way (not very charmingly) into a chic home where Terry (Taraji P Henson) is minding her children while her lawyer husband is away on a golf trip.
In his post-Mandela career, Elba would do well to bury this film. New Zealand vampire mockumentary
What We Do In The Shadows (15A) features Viago, Petyr, Vlad and Deacon as eternal mates who flat-share and bicker about housework: ‘Vampires don’t do dishes,’ they moan in vaguely Teutonic accents.
The poster claims it’s hilarious, a sort of Spinal Tap meets The Young Ones, with teeth. And I can’t remember when I laughed… no… I really can’t remember.
The dourest winner of the top prize at Cannes for some years, Winter Sleep (15A)
is a meditation on miserableness by Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan, whose work I find unattractive, conceited and generally over-praised.
A surly man runs a hotel in wintry Anatolia and witters on about how he’d rather be elsewhere to anyone who’ll listen, or won’t.