'Undine,' 'My Zoe' and More Offbeat Streaming Gems nytimes.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from nytimes.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Julie Delpy seems to always be the life force for any film that she stars in. In Richard Linklater’s romantic Before trilogy, her Céline was the sun; in her own projects as a writer/director/actor, she s embodied the slight screwball that can emerge from real-life situations, whether they involve electric relationships (“2 Days in Paris,” 2 Days in New York ) or romps about a jealous adult son s sabotage (“Lolo”). And because it’s Delpy determining the energy, the movies are grounded in their own unique space, somewhere between only in the movies and just like real life.
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In “My Zoe,” her latest film as a writer/director/actor, Delpy s character Isabelle is the mourning blue of its melancholic story, which presents a mother and ex-wife grieving over her daughter Zoe (Sophia Ally) falling into a coma, while clashing with her ex-husband James (Richard Armitage), and opting for a futuristic way out of her pain. Delpy handles this in such
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Blue Fox Entertainment presents a film written and directed by Julie Delpy. Rated R (for brief language/sexual reference). Running time: 101 minutes. Opens Friday at local theaters. The French-American Delpy has renaissance abilities, as evidenced with the 2007 gem “Two Days in Paris,” for which she wrote, directed, produced, played the lead, edited and composed the soundtrack but this time around, she’s the writer-director-star of a clumsy, off-putting, uninvolving hybrid of domestic tragedy and sci-fi drama with zero payoffs and one of the most infuriating codas of any movie this century. “My Zoe” takes place in an unspecified near future, with Delpy’s Isabelle a recently divorced genetic scientist who lives in Berlin with her 6-year-old daughter Zoe (Sophia Ally) and seems to spend most of her free time bickering and arguing with her British ex-husband James (Richard Armitage), a controlling and emotionally abusive lout who shares custody of Z