MOVIE REVIEW
Chicken With Plums (2011)
Le Pacte
Marjane Satrapi has carved herself a very particular niche, firstly as a cartoonist with an extremely distinctive black-and-white drawing style shown off her in her graphic novels, which are based on her life growing up in Iran. Now living in France, Ms. Satrapi has further branched out into making films based on her graphic novels; the first was 2007’s “Persepolis,” an animated, autobiographical film drawn in her style co-written and co-directed with Vincent Paronnaud. And now they have reteamed for the live-action — though stylized — “Chicken With Plums.”
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MOVIE REVIEW
360 (2011)
55th BFI London Film Festival
Opening the BFI London Film Festival is Fernando Meirelles’s “360” — in reality an international production, but for London’s purposes the director’s second British film after “The Constant Gardener.” It’s a modernization of Arthur Schnitzler’s sexual-morality play “Reigen” (a k a “La Ronde”) adapted by acclaimed screenwriter Peter Morgan, who’s had most of his success with semi-fictionalized biographies such as “Frost/Nixon” and “The Damned United.”
Although the material is venerable, the film comes across as something of a Johnny-come-lately to the fad of interconnected stories, popularized in the last decade by Mr. Meirelles’s Latin American peer Alejandro González Iñárritu (who was surely first choice for this project).
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