La vie en rose posterEdith Piaf’s life was full of drama, drama that poured out of her when she sang. Born into poverty in WWI-era Par­is, raised in a brothel when both par­ents aban­doned her, dis­covered singing on street corners, she became one of the biggest stars of the 20th Cen­tury and died of liv­er can­cer at the age of only 47. Her life is giv­en the big screen treat­ment in La Vie En Rose, a big budget French pro­duc­tion that opened the Ber­lin Film Fest­iv­al this year. La Vie En Rose is play­ing almost every­where from today: Read­ing Cour­tenay Cent­ral, Rialto, Light­house Petone, Pent­house and Embassy.

Also open­ing today is a Michael (Heat) Mann pro­duced thrill­er called The King­dom, star­ring Jam­ie Foxx. A bomb explodes in Saudi Ara­bia, tar­get­ing Amer­ic­ans work­ing there. The US Gov­ern­ment offers the loc­als an elite team of FBI invest­ig­at­ors to sup­port the invest­ig­a­tion and they rap­idly find them­selves cul­tur­ally out of their depth even though they have the skills and tech­no­logy to loc­ate the ter­ror­ists before they strike again. Also star­ring Jen­nifer Garner, Chris Cooper (Breach) and Jason Bate­man. The King­dom plays at Read­ings, Regent-on-Man­ners and Sky City Queens­gate.

Finally this week, Scar­lett Johans­son stars in The Nanny Diar­ies, adap­ted from the smash hit nov­el by the people who brought you the won­der­ful Amer­ic­an Splendor (Robert Pul­cini and Shari Spring­er Ber­man). Star of Amer­ic­an Splendor, Paul Gia­matti, also fea­tures as one of the pois­on­ous par­ents entrust­ing their off­spring to decent hard­work­ing Scar­lett (the oth­er is Laura Lin­ney). Read­ings Cour­tenay Cent­ral and Sky City Queens­gate.

La Vie En Rose has been reviewed at Funer­als & Snakes and the oth­er two will show up in due course.