Review: The Topp Twins: Untouchable Girls

Reviews

Review: The Women On the Sixth Floor

A comforting charmer

By PETER KEOUGH | June 28, 2011

2.0 Stars

The MFA's Boston French Film Festival, like all such events, tends to ease gently into the more challenging material on the program — so it's understandable that it kicks off with this comforting charmer instead of, say, Jean-Luc Godard's Film Socialisme. Philippe Le Guay's '60s-set Gallic Upstairs/Downstairs has all the requisite elements: easygoing political correctness, staid platitudes, saucy comedy, and a romance between a middle-aged bourgeois and a life-affirming babe 30 years his junior. The former is Jean-Louis (Fabrice Luchini), a buttoned-down stockbroker with a gawky wife who suddenly notices the stinking drains on the sixth floor of his town house. That's where the immigrant Spanish maids live, and his new awareness might have something to do with his new housekeeper, the stunning Maria (Natalia Verbeke). Next thing you know he's hiring a plumber, dissing Franco, and ogling Maria's ass. Vive la Revolution!

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ARTICLES BY PETER KEOUGH

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Whatever your opinion of the policies of Benjamin Netanyahu, Prime Minister of Israel, you can't deny that his brother Yoni was a hero, a courageous man whose conflicts and triumphs mirror those of his homeland.

REVIEW: WHERE DO WE GO NOW? | May 22, 2012
Lebanese director Nadine Labaki's whimsical film about internecine slaughter has a tone problem from the very start: a group of widows engage in a goofy line dance while the voiceover narrator bewails the death toll of religious warfare.

REVIEW: MEN IN BLACK 3 | May 24, 2012
Griffin (Michael Stuhlbarg), a fifth dimensional alien, can see the infinite possibilities each moment possesses and the infinite contingencies that caused it to happen.

INTERVIEW: RICHARD LINKLATER MESSES WITH TEXAS IN BERNIE | May 16, 2012
No matter how far he strays, Richard Linklater's heart remains in Texas.

REVIEW: THE DICTATOR | May 16, 2012
Though his PR campaign might suggest otherwise, Sacha Baron Cohen has actually made (with director Larry Charles) a sweet movie, not unlike Charlie Chaplin's The Great Dictator , if less sentimental.