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TV REVIEWS

LEO MATTEÏ, season 7-8 et 10

The Secret of Jade

This double episode is of good quality thanks to the direction of Hervé Renoh ("Coursier"), an investigation with multiple false leads.
Télé Loisirs
A double episode with perfect mechanics, which offers Philippe Bas a strong role for his coming back on TF1. His intriguing character brings a thrilling dimension to the fiction. We ask for more.
Télé 7 Jours

Blood ties

A particularly successful episode, which skillfully mixes the police plot with the personal story of Leo Matteï and his daughter, Eloise. The script keeps the viewer on the edge of his seat until the end and reserves some emotionally charged scenes. Note the presence in the cast of Solène Hebert and Sagamore Stévenin, who form a very surprising couple.
Télé Loisirs

CHRONICLES OF THE SUN, season 5-6

 
Audience Award for the best French series at the La Rochelle TV Fiction Festival, Best French series at the Luchon Festival
Chronicles of the Sun is a French television series that has won over the public thanks to a complex plot and endearing characters. The series deals with current social issues with accuracy and offers a contemporary look at the city of Montpellier. The international success of the series testifies to its importance in the French audiovisual landscape.
Every evening, some 4 million viewers are loyal to Un si grand soleil, the daily soap opera on France 2. But, in reality, they are much more. First, there are the French-speaking viewers, who watch the series via TV5 Monde in over 150 territories around the world. But the program, shot in Montpellier (Hérault) since 2018, has also attracted many foreign broadcasters around the world.France Televisions has notably sold the program in North America, and South America. More than 35 countries of this continent follow the adventures of Claire Estrela, in Spanish, under the name Amor de amores. The public broadcasting group is delighted to announce that this is the first French soap opera to be sold in this territory in the language of Cervantes. Chronicles of the Sun was also acquired by Silknet, the largest telecom group in Georgia, which broadcasts it via its channels.
20 Minutes

LEO MATTEÏ, season 6

On the edge

Official Selection, 2019 Luchon Film Festival
An episode rich with emotions, with an exciting and nicely nuanced scenario. In addition to the procedural plot, which has an effective suspense and a lot of tension, the peaceful relationship between Léo Mattei and his daughter offers nice moments of complicity. Bruno Wolkowitch's guest starring is to be noted.
Télé Loisirs
Addressing a delicate subject, this episode skillfully mixes action and emotion. Mention to Bruno Wolkowitch in an unexpected role.
Télé Z
Léo Mattéï rebounds with his daughter and carries out investigations at the Marseille Minor Brigade. Emotion comes first.
Télé 7 Jours

The back of the medal

The scenes of David’s trial hold great moments of tension and emotion.
Télé 2 Semaines
A very successful end for this season, with a plot focused around David and his crimes. Captivating and otherwise carefully realized. The series has experienced a real qualitative leap in the last few episodes, which promises for the next season.
Télé-Loisirs

CASSANDRE

Unconditionally

This opus in which Cassandra must face her ex-husband, a customs officer and a liar, is rich in twists and emotions. In her role, Anny Duperey is wonderfully diabolical.
Télé-Loisirs
Tense, the investigation takes a very personal turn for Florence Cassandre who, moreover, plays opposite to a convincing and subtle Anny Duperey in her role as a castrating mother.
Télé Star
This double investigation in which Cassandra confronts her ex-husband is rich in twists and strong emotions.
Télé 2 Semaines

Backfire

Grand Prix of the Cognac Film Festival 2017
Without a doubt, the best episode of the series. In addition to the talent of Gwedoline Hamon, we are also moved by the unfailing interpretation of the guests.
Télé 7 Jours
A very pleasant police jigsaw puzzle that Gwendoline Hamon and her partners recreate with talent and enthusiasm. By digging into the dungeons of the past, Cassandre sparks.
Télé Star
This episode is full of surprises. Dominique Pinon is astounding.
TV Grandes Chaînes
A beautiful setting for a sordid story. We go from surprise to surprise in this episode where Gwendoline Hamon, alias Cassandre, shows a lot of insight.
Télé Z
A beautiful interpretation, especially Gwendoline Hamon.
Télé-Câble-Satellite

SECTION DE RECHERCHES

Night of Drunkenness

Audience leader with 7.03 million viewers in France
This plot is a captivating entry with, on one hand, a race against the clock well built and on the other hand, an investigation on a particularly manipulative character. Consequently, the tracks are multiple and put the nerves of Bernier and his team to harsh test.
Télé-Loisirs
A thrilling story that gets off to a flying start and never stops on the way, carried by talented young guests.
Télé Star
A particularly successful episode of the star series of TF1 (1st National TV Channel in France).
Télé 7 jours

ROUGE DIAMANT

Jack of Diamonds, Pilot

Nominated for the Gemini Awards, Canada
A quality international production, which reserves an excellent role to Jean-Yves Berteloot.
Programme.tv
From this unlikely encounter between two beings that everything opposes is born an irresistible duet. We are won over by the story, both funny and sensitive, by the acting, remarkable, by the characters carrying beautiful promises. Not to miss !
Télé 7 Jours
Arsène Lupin makes emulators ... International co-production with visibly important means, this police comedy aims to blow up the bank with a charming bandit inspired by Cary Grant in ``To Catch a Thief`` or Georges Clooney in ``Ocean's Eleven``. In this role, Jean-Yves Berteloot does the job without showing off.
Télérama
An inspired creation, very attractive.
Télé Câble-Satellite
This pilot of an international series is very pleasant and the duo Berteloot / Bregar works perfectly.
Télé-Loisirs

R.I.S. POLICE SCIENTIFIQUE

On Edge

Audience leader with 6.9 million viewers in France
The tension is constant in this episode with a very successful scenario and staging.
Télérama
Launched in a race against time to save one of their own, RIS's heroes use all the scientific resources of their team in this breathtaking episode.
Télé 7 Jours

COMMISSAIRE MOULIN

The worst of the nightmares

Audience leader with 8.6 Million viewers in France
Rhythm, suspense, direction, hellish music and tightly slamming dialogues. Excellent duo of actors (Yves Rénier and Christian Brenel) for controlled power relationship between very typical characters (curator and psychiatrist). That's it, well-done, from first to last role. No dead time, maximum efficiency. Going like this, it could almost annoy. But it's not. With pleasure, we let ourselves embark into it.
Télé 7 Jours
Many twists in this episode particularly intense served by very good actors.
Télé Loisirs

FILM REVIEWS

PARIS-EXPRESS

Feature film

Official Selection at Singapore Festival
This hectic popular comedy uses all the mechanisms of the genre (...) Well-paced, the film rushes on the fast lane. We do not get bored on the way. The good surprise? Michael Youn. The director, Hervé Renoh, did not hesitate to reframe the actor. He finally wins his stripes of actor. A clever comedy, fast and unpretentious. After all it's not so common ...
Le Figaro
COURSIER drives us skilfully from spectacular pursuits to comic situations (...) Michaël Youn finds one of its most convincing roles with this comedy of action led foot to the floor in the streets of Paris.
Le Parisien
More Tati than Taxi, Sam/Youn is seen here hustled, threatened, shot and fooled on all sides (...) The imbroglio sustained, extraordinary vaudeville crime fiction involving art traffic and Mob diamonds, is well tie up. Everything makes you want to see Youn in a role free from his past wacky obligations.
Libération
An explosive action comedy! Even the exuberant Michaël Youn does not get over it. In this comedy, the troublemaker of the media landscape becomes actor ``with a big A``. Hervé Renoh was able to communicate his vision: the result is surprising. Throughout the film, actions, waterfalls, adventure follow one another, for a good dose of humor and lots of twists ...
Le Progrès
With a fine casting and situations playing honestly about everyday life in front of an immoderate mafia, COURSIER holds its sympathetic comical ambitions.
Excessif
An hectic and crazy comedy tasting the pure cinema entertainment dear to the public, in the style of Philippe De Broca or Gérard Oury.
L'Officiel
The comedy of the month! Mixing humor and action, this film does not leave you a moment of respite. Michael Youn, far from his pre-pubescent comedies, shows that he also knows how to take himself seriously (...) Hervé Renoh gives us a good surprise, full of comic and vibrating situations, to see absolutely.
Geek
Youn displays a very welcome surprising sobriety in this spirited comedy that also owes a lot to his merrily wacky supporting cast.
Guidetele.com

REQUIEM

Feature film

Official Selection Sitges International Festival
Official Selection Fantastica Film Festival Brussels
A feverish dive into an aesthetic universe where violence and fantastic poetry are intimately linked ... No doubt, with REQUIEM, Hervé Renoh enters through the front door in the 7th art: he masters his subject and plays perfectly with the nerves of the audience thanks to technical elements used wisely. A dantesque performance brilliantly performed, camera on the shoulder (...) Hervé Renoh is interested in the disturbed interiority of beings: the states of mind of the characters are translated by piercing, sharp eyes, whose acuteness expresses more than any long speech. In the midst of horror, the director even managed, with a master hand, to place replicas of humor. The casting is perfect and the actors excel in their respective roles. As for photography, it heckles the audience from end to end. Nothing is left to chance in this diabolical thriller that will leave no one indifferent.
Le Quotidien du Cinéma
For his first feature film, Hervé Renoh offers us a nerve-wracking behind closed doors pleasing to the eye by finding a perfect balance between a gothic aesthetic and a narrative structure rooted in reality. Mankind is at the center of this spellbinding work, this baroque tragedy where fate, revenge and remorse intertwine. Admirably filmed and staged, REQUIEM also knows how to rely on sumptuous sets and mystical music.
L’Écran Fantastique
REQUIEM, with a dark and elaborate form, is an action movie that can seduce as much the film-lover who does not look for anything else as the one who asks the cinema to have a meaning (...) No doubt it is the reason for which it is interpreted by actors with strong personality. Nothing syrupy, indeed, or superficial in the game of Patrick Dell'Isola and Moussa Maaskri ... A violence that screams to a call of redemption. That one of French cinema?
La Provence
Hervé Renoh aligns settling of scores and gunfights with a startling malice where bloody hostage taking, calls to reason and redemption of the soul mix in a purifying violence as rarely seen in French crime fiction. Supported by effusive actors with hallucinated craggy faces, REQUIEM is the real punch of this summer.
Rock & Folk
The prototype of the good B movie. Directed harsh, edited hard, REQUIEM is the very example of the unpretentious film that gives its fair share of tension and sore violence. Proof that French are not more clumsy than others shooting on the good old silver film. It was time!
Score
For a first feature film, Hervé Renoh pushes back the limits of the French-style crime fiction. Baroque and Gothic at the same time, the film sets out to show the violence without complacency, an exacerbated violence tempered by an omnipresent humor. Impeccable casting, sense of rhythm and emotion ... Requiem has everything to entertain an informed public.
Zone Fantastique
Mystical and violent, REQUIEM undeniably conveys a universe specific to its director. The penultimate film in the French Bee Movies series devoted to genre films (...) REQUIEM is a thrilling work, with no downtime and no concessions.
Mad Movies
REQUIEM sparks a suspense worthy of Usual Suspect, interspersed by sequences filled with dark humor (...) The story cleverly shines the revelations and keeps the public in suspense until the last moment. And that without a scrambling scenario, without rickety justification. The great strength of the plot lies in a psychological analysis fine enough to avoid the pitfall of a too manichean vision. The ravages of evil as well as the precepts of faith have penetrated souls to varying degrees. Thanks to these nuances, the crescendo of horror becomes more effective.
À voir - À lire
What strikes first is certainly the technical quality of REQUIEM, both in terms of direction (varied and dynamic), lighting (always very neat) or editing (nervous and flowing) (...) The young director believes in his film and in the story he tells, and we feel it. We never have the impression that we are dealing with a cheap cinema. This is further reinforced by a diversified and highly skilled cast.
Devildead/DVD
It is to a mystical and ballsy crime film where Hervé Renoh invites us for his first direction. With an assumed visual ambition (perfectly mastered) and a narrative register directly drawn from comic books and western spaghetti, REQUIEM is the anti-``Dobermann``: a work that is just as muddled (...) but inhabited by a true love of characters and using graphic iconization intelligently.
DVDrama
In REQUIEM, no metaphysical thinking, but fun, humor (sometimes at a push!), And action often free. A hybrid of Tarantino, Sergio Leone and many others, with many stated references, including Reservoir Dogs. If we did not blame Tarantino for digesting films, why not do it for Renoh?
Abus de Ciné
Finally a bit of renewal and originality in the cinematographic landscape ... You will appreciate REQUIEM for its original scenario as well as its light and its very interesting direction. A hat trick for this film directed by Hervé Renoh in just 30 days and with a budget of only 8 million francs ...
Cinekritik
Orchestrated in the form of a diabolical crescendo on a Baroque opera background, Hervé Renoh's REQUIEM is a descent into hell without any escape, tainted by gasps of raw violence, which begins with a bloodbath to end in the middle of flames (...) The visual climate, resolutely expressionist, is particularly successful; no slippage either on the side of staging, yet perilous. As for the interpretation, it is irreproachable, the actors being smashing with primary brutality or interiorized psychology.
Comme au Cinéma
First film of Hervé Renoh (as well director, screenwriter and even co-author of part of the original soundtrack) Requiem is a little film of genre typically from here produced by Fidélité Films, via its production Bee Movies. Despite a starvation budget, this talented young director has given everything to give us quite a nervous film that seriously plagues at times. Thanks in particular to a generic, a soundtrack, and a particularly neat editing, he managed to create an artistic universe of his own, largely tinged with mysticism. Indeed, the light of the film is particularly neat (we sometimes have the impression of being in a film of Ridley Scott) and Requiem detonates from a visual perspective, far from the usual frenchy humdrum productions, by reaching sophisticated technical effects (such as ``ramping`` or images acceleration). The shootings, themselves, have nothing to envy to the lively clashes in the final of ``Way of The Gun``. Casting side, Patrick Dell'Isola and Moussa Maaskri are impeccable (...) we can only salute the initiative of Hervé Renoh to kick in the anthill of the French cinematographic landscape.
Ciné Mag

THE ENEMY

Short film

Youth Jury Prize at the Clermont-Ferrand Festival Best Director Award at the Villeurbanne Festival Grand Prix of Stockholm Short Film Festival Photography Award at the Edinburgh Film Festival Short Film Grand Prix, New York Film Festival
How to say the war today, without falling into the spectacular Hollywood version, or the documentary saturating our eyes a little more with images of trivialized horror? By the ellipse or the timelessness of the situation. This is the second attitude that Hervé Renoh chose, whose film is one of those emerging from every programs visible these days in Clermont-Ferrand. A team of ``soldiers`` emerges in a clearing flooded with morning fog. Their rags bear the clash of modern conflicts, those who enlist civilians in wars that exceed them. It could be Lebanon, a few years ago, the former Yugoslavia or Chechnya or ... These exhausted ``warriors`` will fall under the bullets of a mysterious sniper, whose childish character reveals the perversion to which ends any ``civil`` war. Civilization, precisely, here is gone and, with it, one of the main attributes of the human species, language. One expresses oneself only by gestures and borborygms. From his stint on the set of Leos Carax's ``The Lovers on the Bridge``, Hervé Renoh kept in touch with Denis Lavant, whose ``mug`` serves well this loss of essence. This sensitivity to language is probably to be found in the life of the young director, who told us that he spent most of his life abroad, from one country to another ... THE ENEMY allows him to be understood across borders. It revives, by the way, with the best lessons of silent movies.
L'Humanité