Next Time I'll Aim for the Heart (2014)

To me, this movie is perfection.

A lot of perfectly good film show their cards early, establish a unique premise and let the audience explore a topic at a leisurely pace, without much in terms of surprise. this film is not one of those films.

I enjoyed watching this film and would recommend other to give it a try , (as I am) but this movie, although enjoyable to watch due to the better than average acting fails to add anything new to its storyline that is all too familiar to these types of movies.

It's simply great fun, a winsome film and an occasionally over-the-top luxury fantasy that never flags.

This French serial killer movie is based on fact but an intertitle at the start tells us that it is also a work of 'imagination'. It's the kind of film the Americans do better but it has a clammy quality nevertheless and revealing the killer in the opening minutes actually adds to the tension and it's well acted and it's well directed by Cedric Anger. For reasons that will become clear very early on it concentrates very much on the police investigation while at the same time giving us a good, detailed psychological portrait of the killer. Unfortunately the film doesn't appear to have had much of a distribution so it's very possible it passed you by.

Quite a sober, depressing and eerie account of a true tale (different names and some details, though) about a serial killer (he got caught pretty early on, but until then it seems he was only warming up), in which the viewer mostly just follows the main character's actions; a frustrated young man who works as a policeman whose history is mostly unclear, but there are little hints about his utter frustrations and how "his sensitive side was destroyed by a careless society" (or words to that effect), as he himself states at some point in the film.It will be difficult, if not impossible, to prove that the aforementioned details were exactly as in the Alain Lamare case, but the film easily succeeds in presenting a haunting portrait of a man gone completely crazy, but at the same time shows a lot of restraint, has the perfect cover, is quite intelligent and physically apt. Though I will readily admit he made a silly mistake by leaving his fingerprints on those car plates - which is how he got caught.Guillaume Canet plays Franck Neuhart with much conviction, but really, none of the cast members fail; Ana Girardot, as the burdened woman who unwittingly strikes up a relationship with Franck, deserves a special mention as well. The atmosphere and cinematography are appropriately depressing (almost to point of being dreamlike, which reflects the strange state in which Franck is in), in which the beautiful countryside of France - mostly filmed at night, or when it rains or it is misty - helps a lot.9 out of 10.

Original French title for this film is "La prochaine fois je viserai le coeur". It is based upon the real events that took place in 1978 - 79 in Oise County in France. A serial killer just starts killing young women and dumping their bodies. He then sends taunting letters to both the Police and their Gendarme cousins (separate departments). That is when the hunt is on. We know from pretty early on who the culprit is and so this is more of an examination of who this man was and what were his motives as well as a recreation of what took place.The film plays out in a linear fashion with no back story and the makers have said they have had to use a lot of imagination and even supposition to fill those blanks in. So it is a work of fiction. Guillaume Canet ('Tell No-one') as the exemplar Gendarme with sociological issues is both chilling and convincing. The period detail is rather good but the eagle eyed amongst you will spot the same cars being used in different scenes (keep an eye out for a Triumph Herald) and as plot goes this does not hang about. As all thrillers need to be it is fast paced, there is an air of tension and the violence is both effective and at the same time done in an understated way.All in all a very good French film - the subs could have been better - but that is generally the case these days. That said even at 111 minutes this felt like a much shorter film and as such it is one I would recommend.

This is something of a hybrid inasmuch as it is based on real events that happened thirty years ago and the perpetrator is still very much alive and incarcerated in a secure psychiatric unit. What is never made really clear is why a gendarme would suddenly begin killing young girls at random, initially running them down and later picking them up as hitch-hikers, shooting them and dumping them by the roadside. There is no attempt at sexual molestation, the killing itself seems to provide sufficient satisfaction. It is not surprising that Guillaume Canet elected to play the lead. This fine actor/director can take his pick of leading roles but, not unlike Isabelle Huppert, he has a penchant for the offbeat and unusual and once again he delivers a compelling performance. As an added twist the murderer is a gendarme, a French title not unlike special Constable in England. As the murders take place in the area in which he works he is, in effect, investigating his own crimes - Yves Montand of course did much the same thing in Police Python 357 but that was a fictional situation whilst this is very real. Not perhaps everyone's cup if The but the central performance is well worth seeing.