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"What is it with this family? Do balls skip a generation?” complains Jacques Mesrine to his father before knocking over a whiskey bottle and storming out of his parents’ apartment. The impetuous Mesrine is no 15-year-old punk testing his father’s authority, but a 30-something former soldier with a nonspecific axe to grind and a talent for armed robbery. "Mesrine: Killer Instinct”, written and directed by Jean-François Richet, is the first half of a two-part film based on the life of Jacques Mesrine, a French career criminal who died in 1979. Vincent Cassel stars as Mesrine, a figure who combines a smart self-regard with an addiction to notoriety and a seemingly unmotivated blood lust. I do not think it is spoiling much to say that Mesrine desecrates corpses, bludgeons foes with a truncheon, sticks the barrel of a gun into his wife’s mouth, and stabs and buries a pimp alive. If “Bonnie and Clyde” wasn’t your thing, cross this one off the list.  read more »

"High-concept war film" is not a phrase that inspires confidence. If "Restrepo" and "The Hurt Locker" are any indication, critics like war films to come with a minimum of artsy futzing. Both of those efforts, arguably the best war films of the decade, embraced the conventions of their genres as a way to introduce rather thornier subject matter. They were war films, sure, but they were also a straightforward documentary ("Restrepo") and an action thriller ("The Hurt Locker"). Samuel Maoz's debut feature, "Lebanon", is a radical departure from that strategy. It is, to be blunt, an experimental war film.  read more »

If summer's typical bouquet consists of green grass, barbecue and a touch of sea breeze, the indoor equivalent must be a cinema house's whiff of fresh popcorn and stale air-conditioning. Box-office wisdom dictates that audiences gravitate toward extremes during the warmer months, preferring to end lazy days at the beach with jacked-up, stunt-heavy action thrillers like "Salt" and "Inception", films which opened this season in America at #2 and #1 respectively.

Another hallmark of summer flicks? Hollywood stars. Although Angelina Jolie and Leonardo DiCaprio technically play characters in each film, what their roles actually offer is the opportunity to play out enhanced versions of their public selves. In Jolie's case, we get a resilient and enigmatic international megababe; in DiCaprio's case, a stoically wounded Everyman with the soul of an artist. Both are dreamy.  read more »

This picture was taken in a northern Californian suburban mall by a kind reader who hoped it might prompt others to suggest alternative lit-promoting drinks—Catcher in the Rye bourbon, say. (Tequila Mockingbird, alas, has already been done.)

The photo is amusing, perhaps less for the way it captures the commercial savvy of a winery cashing in on the "Eat, Pray, Love" phenomenon (now a motion picture!), than for how it delicately nods at our more conventional approach to marital misery and workaday ennui: ie, eat, pray and drown sorrows in a cheap pinot grigio because you can't afford to go on an international spiritual journey to discover the beautiful you that no one else sees except for the strapping Latin lover you pick up along the way.

Lest this sound like yet more Elizabeth Gilbert bashing, I'll say that she is indeed a gifted writer, not least because she is charming enough to subject millions of people to the kind of neurotic navel-gazing most of us have to pay therapists to divulge. (Personally, I enjoyed the "eat" part, muddled through "pray" and lost interest by "love", by which point I felt the memoir delivered diminished returns. But Ms Gilbert's prose style is clean and well-judged, with the kind of casual, self-conscious insight that is all too easy to underestimate.) Those who still prefer to heap scorn on authors of blazingly successful memoirs about finding meaning amidst privilege might consider listening to this really quite great TED talk Ms Gilbert delivered on creativity last year, between sips of pinot grigio.  read more »

My colleague over at Johnson raises an amusing point on the nature of film titles in foreign languages—one that lends itself quite readily to some lazy, armchair anthropology (ie, dinner-party trivia):

Puns, to be fair, are usually impossible to translate faithfully. But even simple titles sometimes undergo big changes—especially, it seems, in China, where "Free Willy" is known as “A very powerful whale runs to heaven”. ("Boogie Nights", wonderfully, is “His great device makes him famous”.)...

Often, though, one has no idea that the title one knows and loves has been dreamed up by a translator. When I arrived in Mexico I wanted something easy to practice my Spanish, so I went looking for “La chica con el tatuaje del dragón”, as I assumed Stieg Larsson’s thriller might be known. It isn’t: the title here is “Los hombres que no amaban a las mujeres” (“The men who didn’t love women”).

What a rubbish name, I thought: why couldn’t Mexicans be given a direct translation? In fact, it’s English-speakers who have been duped: the original, in Swedish, is simply “Men who hate women”. (“It was considered too scary for foreign audiences, while just hitting the politically-correct spot in Sweden,” reckons my neighbourhood Swede.)

One can't help but speculate how poorly a book called "Men who hate women" would've done at American airports. Such a title is a clear liability when trying to get lucky while looking literary at an airport bar.  read more »

As something of an antidote to Hollywood’s summer blockbusters, the 33rd Asian American International Film Festival (AAIFF) in New York delivered some refreshing cinematic treats. The AAIFF—which wrapped up in late July, is the first and longest-running festival of its kind, spotlighting work by and about Asians. Like its West Coast counterpart, the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival (which takes place in March), the AAIFF grants rare access to films that are otherwise inaccessible to western audiences.

Jacklyn Amor and Minnie Li, the festival's co-directors, crafted a programme of 23 feature-length films and 71 shorts. The week-long festival opened with "Manila Skies" (pictured) by Raymond Red, a Cannes Palme d’Or-winning director from the Philippines. The film is about an poor worker named Raul (Raul Arellano) who ends up hijacking a plane. Through haunting vignettes, Red captures the harsh realities that plague lower-class workers in the Philippines. He grants a a glimpse of the deplorable living quarters of migrant workers and the deadened eyes of a young prostitute as she is led off by a Western tourist. These scenes are subtle and powerful.  read more »

If the idea of a trilogy offers authors an organising principle and a formal constraint, it offers readers the reassuring promise of more where the first book came from. Vendela Vida’s trilogy began in 2003 with “And Now You Can Go”, a starkly witty exploration of a young woman’s travels after a trauma, and continued with “Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name” (2007), whose young heroine unravels the question of her parentage over the course of a journey in far north Lapland. Vida’s newest offering, “The Lovers”, concludes the series by entering the consciousness of an older and decidedly wiser (though no less adrift) presence. The novel concerns a widow, Yvonne, who returns to the scene of her honeymoon and discovers, in the gently decomposing old town, several new ways of thinking about her marriage and herself, not all of them a comfort.

Vida, who is also a founding co-editor at the Believer, spoke with More Intelligent Life about “The Lovers”.  read more »

Because the world needs more voices, or, rather, more thoughtful, rarified ones that can be imagined with a British lilt, The Economist has just launched "Prospero", a new blog named for the hero of Shakespeare's "The Tempest", an expert in the power of books and the arts (ie, he was more or less undone by them). The blog will be full of literary insight, cultural commentary and coverage of the art market.

Already readers can find the paper's take on the Man Booker prize longlist (announced today, and full of impressive young writers, as predicted), and on Andrew Wylie’s new deal with Amazon to publish electronic versions of books by some of his authors (seen by some traditional publishers as a declaration of war). There are also quite a few posts that should look familiar to readers of More Intelligent Life because, frankly, we're one big happy family over here at The Economist's culture desk.

Picture credit: Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com (via Flickr)

If I were a man, I'd be nervous about taking a date to see "The Kids Are All Right", a new film from Lisa Cholodenko, now in American cinemas. It wouldn't be because the film, about a married lesbian couple with two teenage children, presents a threat to family values (it doesn't), or because Annette Bening and Julianne Moore are so appealing as lesbians that female audience members may be enticed to switch sides (it doesn't work that way). I'd be nervous, rather, because Mark Ruffalo, as the couple's sperm donor, is sexy to a degree that can only be described as squirm-inducing. Few male audience members will come off well next to the actor's motorcycle-riding, wine-drinking, scruffy-faced character onscreen. He's so comfortable with himself it makes you itch.  read more »