The Big Picture (L'Homme qui voulait vivre sa vie) (2010)

This talented Mr Ripley played by an always rivetting Romain Duris isn't a sociopath - he's quite sympathetic - but there are signs, like his getting into a bath in a business suit, that suggest there is something wacky about him and that might help explain his ability to upheave his life and leave his kids behind after he kills his wife's lover, disposes of the body in distinctly The Talented Mr Ripley style, adopts his victim's identity and moves to Kotor to live and work as a photographer - all enthralling stuff but after this great start, nothing much else happens before an abrupt, meaningless ending that abandons matters, including a plot thread involving poor wasted Catherine Deneuve that a better film would have tied up.

★★★☆☆

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Arsène Lupin (2004)

As a kid, I was riveted by Maurice LeBlanc's stories of Arsène Lupin, the gentleman thief who always wins, part The Scarlet Pimpernel, part Sherlock Holmes, and this movie adaptation - not of one book but a mash-up of many - gets everything right: the look of the debonair hero played by Romain Duris, the glamour of La Belle Époque, the enormously fun exploits, the derring-do, the twists and turns of inexplicable mystery, and although I don't remember his family life being quite so complex, that worked for me as well.

★★★★☆

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Heartbreaker (L'Arnacœur) (2010)

In this French romcom, most amusing when it is being sensible but most of the time trying to be an unbridled screwball comedy, Romain Duris' heartbreaker-for-hire, who worms his way into his quarries' hearts by crying on demand and spouting the sort of sappy lines typically reserved for daytime soaps, ends up falling for a client's daughter days out from her marriage to Mr Wrong.

★★★☆☆

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Just A Breath Away (Dans La Brume) (2018)

France's contribution to the glut of situational scifi thrillers, in which family members must work together to survive an inexplicable phenomenon (think A Quiet Place, It Comes At Night, Bird Box, The Silence, and perhaps, back in the beginning, The Happening) is the incredibly contrived but entertaining Dans La Brume, (or Just A Breath Away), about a poisonous fog that envelops Paris, leaving only those living sufficiently high up in their apartment buildings alive - when they get the chance, one family does not evacuate the city because their daughter has an autoimmune disease and lives in a hermetically sealed chamber, so instead they dash in and out of the fog trying to make optimal use of a limited supply of oxygen tanks, gas masks and batteries.

★★★☆☆

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All The Money In The World (2017)

ATMITW starts thrillingly with director Ridley Scott sweeping us back and forwards through time and around the world from Morocco to Saudi Arabia and New York and back to set up the details of the famous Getty kidnapping of 1973, but after an hour, when the movie goes back to square one and Michelle Williams' and Christopher Plummer's impressive performances become strained and repetitive through their having nothing new to do, it becomes clear that what we are watching is akin to the chess game that Plummer's Getty is momentarily seen playing by himself - no amount of lavish period Italian detail can hide the fact Scott is treading water and using exposition, nebulous developments and inconsistent characterisation to protract to epic length a stalemate.

★★★☆☆

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