No Time to Die: The Sublime Seductions of Lea Seydoux

The last James Bond feature to star Daniel Craig, No Time to Die, picks up where the last, Spectre, left off, with James succumbing to love, and a life with Madeleine, the irresistible Lea Seydoux. Off they go on a Rome adventure, carefree in James’ Aston Martin, with “all the time in the world,”—that line alone should send off waves of foreboding. Rome is Vesper Lynd territory, and sentimental as Bond has become, he must visit his former love’s burying place. Boom! Forget retirement! Bond is off and explosive!

In fact, explosions galore! Fancy cars showing off their equipment! We’re off and running through the many Bond tropes: breathtaking vistas and eye popping laboratories of menacing threats to the world. Among the villains, Rami Malek makes a most chilling appearance as a damaged child gone amok on revenge. “Who’s the blond?” asks Bond eyeing a particularly fawning, smiley sidekick to the CIA’s Felix Leiter (Jeffrey Wright) named Logan Ash (Billy Magnussen). But some heavy lifting belongs to the gun-toting women: Lashanna Lynch as Nomi, a new 007 with 007 chops, Ana de Armas as Paloma, amazingly adept at target practice in crowds, party gown unruffled, and finally Madeleine Swann herself, in for the kill. The girl power is through the proverbial roof!

Meantime, at the New York Film Festival, Lea Seydoux fills every frame of France, Bruno Dumont’s new feature, as a broadcast journalist whose starry red-lipped glamor is challenged when she collides with a motorcycle on a much-trafficked Paris street. France’s career goes off the rails as she questions her role in packaging the world’s catastrophes for television consumption. Featuring a spa in the Alps, winding mountain roads, a mini-museum of a Parisian apartment, France is a smart, scenic movie with a luminous star having her moment.