Director Dominik Moll ‘expertly maps how justice can stall’ in the ‘near-broken system’ of the French police

For his new crime drama, director Dominik Moll found inspiration in the real-life cases of protesters who were badly injured by French police during the 2018 “gilets jaunes” demonstrations, said Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian. Léa Drucker stars as Stéphanie, a conscientious police internal-affairs investigator, whose routine life is upended when she is handed the case of the title – that of a young man who was left with brain damage as after being struck in the face by a rubber bullet during anti-tax protests in Paris.

Sifting through the evidence, she discovers he is from her home town in the “left behind” northeast, and her mother knows his. She comes up against other complications too, including the resentment of her police officer ex-husband, who thinks she is a traitor to the force. The film is “nowhere near as complex” as Moll’s dark psychological thriller “Harry, He’s Here to Help” (2000), but it is serious and often compelling.

Moll “expertly maps how justice can stall in a near-broken system”, said Danny Leigh in the Financial Times. Stéphanie initially pursues the case with vigour but soon finds herself caught in an impossible position: loathed by her colleagues but, to a “sceptical world”, just another cop.

I was gripped by Stéphanie’s painstaking efforts to uncover the truth, said Hadley Freeman in The Times, but what stuck with me were the long conversations she has, with her family and other officers, about the “morality of it all” – the police’s actions, and those of the protesters. Moving and intelligent, “Case 137” makes a “strong argument for less gloss and more reality” in films.

by Ben Eastham

As a well-respected critic and editor, Ben Eastham “has spent many years at the vanguard of contemporary art”, said Ian Maleney in The Guardian. And in his “neatly done” debut novel, he puts his experience to good use. 

The narrator, a “somewhat hapless” art-critic-turned-teacher, finds himself in a moral quandary when he’s offered a job working for a “techno-utopian settlement inside a giant dome” on a Greek island. The job is well paid, but the project is funded by the Morel Foundation, an “artwashing spin-off of an arms-manufacturing multinational”. A friend calls it “literally a doomsday bunker for billionaires”. The narrator accepts the role anyway. 

What follows “isn’t a plotty novel”, said John Self in The Times. It is largely constructed from “diversions”, as the narrator travels to the island and records his encounters and experiences. What it amounts to isn’t quite clear, but Eastham “is deeply quotable, and good at being funny and serious at the same time”. “The Floating World” “hovers somewhere between now-read-on and stop-and-look”, and is always “interesting”.

Actress who won an Oscar for her first movie performance

A “luminous beauty with dramatic depth”, Eva Marie Saint, who has died aged 102, took Hollywood by storm with her first film, said The New York Times. She won an Oscar for her role as the sister of a murdered longshoreman (and Marlon Brando’s love interest) in Elia Kazan’s gritty drama On the Waterfront (1954). That alone would have assured her a place in movie history; five years later, however, she proved “equally convincing as a stylish siren” in another film that is often listed among the best ever made – Alfred Hitchcock’s thriller North by Northwest. After that, she was offered a three-picture deal that her agent said would make her “a superstar”, but she turned it down. She had two children and decided she’d rather be “a working actress with a home life that worked” than spend her life on film sets.

Eva Marie Saint was born into a Quaker family in 1924 and grew up in upstate New York. Her original plan was to become a teacher, like her mother, said The Daily Telegraph. But at Bowling Green State University in Ohio, she auditioned for a play for a dare, got the part and caught the bug. She trained at the Actors Studio in New York, and had been working on live TV and on stage for eight years when Kazan decided she had what it took to play the ex-convent girl whose delicacy and moral seriousness contrasted with the rough, corrupt world of the New Jersey docks. She would recall Brando as “the finest actor I ever worked with”, said The Times; as well as being a “genius”, he was also a “prince” who had insisted on giving her his coat during chilly location shoots.

She nearly passed up the chance to star as Eve Kendall, the “ice blonde” who seduces Cary Grant on a train in North by Northwest. “I don’t know, honey, I don’t come in until about page 70,” she told her husband after looking at the script. To play the enigmatic femme fatale, Hitchcock gave her just three instructions: lower her voice, be totally still (no gesturing) and maintain eye contact with Grant. He also had her hair styled into a sleek bob and kitted her out in elegant outfits from Bergdorf Goodman. He turned her, she said, into a “sexy spy lady”.

Her later films included Otto Preminger’s Exodus (1960), and All Fall Down (1962), in which she starred with the young Warren Beatty. In the 1970s, as big-screen roles dried up, Saint moved back into TV, including a recurring role as Cybill Shepherd’s mother in the hit show Moonlighting from 1986. Her husband of 65 years, TV director Jeffrey Hayden, died in 2016. In 2018, aged 93, she presented an award at the Oscars and was greeted with a prolonged standing ovation. In 2023, she became the oldest living Oscar winner.