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With a title that invokes both the specific (cinema of Godard) and the universal (cinema is Godard), Cyril Leuthy’s Godard Cinema finds itself in conversation with another formulation: Everything is Cinema. Richard Brody’s 2008 study of the filmmaker, is beautifully sentenced, dare-ing criticism; one wonders, sometimes, if his honest contrarianism is the result of a theoretical attempt to widen the possibilities for transmission and reception of image and narrative. Such an attempt finds a natural bedfellow in the mercurial cinema of Jean-Luc Godard. Leuthy’s hagiographic documentary, on the other hand, is an awkward fit for Godard’s polyrhythmic image collisions.

That Brody will be on hand to introduce Leuthy’s film to kick off its New York run at Film Forum speaks, perhaps, to the heart and head-felt intentions of Leuthy, a documentary filmmaker who’s worked as a director and editor of several film histories, including a...

Kino Lorber has bought all North American distribution rights to Jean-Luc Godard’s final short film “Trailer of a Film That Will Never Exist: Phony Wars.” The 20-minute short played at this year’s Cannes Film Festival and will next screen at Toronto and New York film festivals.

Kino Lorber is planning a theatrical roll out for the title this fall, followed by a run at New York’s Film Forum in December, alongside Cyril Leuthy’s documentary “Godard Cinema.”

“Trailer of a Film That Will Never Exist: Phony Wars” was meant to be a feature film project but Godard died a year ago, at the age of 93, before finishing it. Godard had envisioned a complex mixed-media collage of history, politics and cinema through ideas, references and visuals.

Kino Lorber’s library already boasts several iconic films by Godard, including New Wave classics “A Married Woman,” “Alphaville,” and “La Chinoise,...

This Barbie is part film programmer.

Hari Nef makes history at Mubi with the Hand-Picked by Hari Nef curated series, the first of its kind for the streaming and distribution platform.

The “Barbie” and “And Just Like That” actress selected Todd Haynes’ “Safe” and “Velvet Goldmine,” Alex Ross Perry’s “Listen Up Philip,” the fashion documentary “Martin Margiela: In His Own Words,” Jean-Luc Godard’s “La Chinoise,” the coming-of-age day-in-the-life “The African Desperate,” Maurice Pialata’s “Loulou” with Isabelle Huppert, Robert Greene’s “Actress,” Shirley Clarke’s documentary “Portrait of Jason,” and cult classic “Center Stage” from the Mubi vault for the inaugural program.

Check out Nef’s full selection, ready to stream, here.

“I was thinking about what resonates with me in film, and it starts with ideas of spectacle, performance, and queerness,” Nef said in a press statement. “I love films about performers, and the confrontation that happens between a person,...

One of the grand paradoxes of Jean-Luc Godard is that he was a radical, an outlier, a filmmaker who guarded his purity and always looked askance at “the system,” yet because the nature of filmmaking is that it requires a lot of money, and is connected to fame, and produces images that can spread with iconic power, Godard was an outsider who was also an insider; a poet of cinema who made himself a celebrity; an artist who bridged the larger-than-life, old-school ethos of movies with the forbidding imperatives of the avant-garde.

All of that contradiction is on full display, with a luscious kind of resonance, in “Godard par Godard,” an hour-long documentary, written by Frédéric Bonnaud and directed by Florence Platarets, that was presented at the Cannes Film Festival today as a tribute to Godard, eight months after his death on September 13, 2022. The documentary was shown along with Godard’s final film,...

Media coverage of Jean-Luc Godard’s death will fall short of what he merits. He was a game-changing creator on the level of Sergei Eisenstein, Charlie Chaplin, D.W. Griffith, and others who changed the grammar of film forever, but his best-known films are from a half-century ago. And there’s this: Under the standards by which successful directors are judged today — box office and awards — Godard was strictly a minor-league player.

His lifelong regard as a master is a tribute to his films above all, but it also speaks to a cinephile culture that elevated and supported him for decades despite the general public’s disinterest.

In the U.S., Godard’s films initially received erratic distribution with short-run showings at a few big-city theaters; even his best-known titles like “Breathless” and “Week-end” received marginal releases. They appeared erratically, out of order, and sometimes not until two or three years after their public debuts.

Jean-Luc Godard, the revered filmmaker regarded as a giant of the French New Wave movement, has died at the age of 91.

He was known for directing a run of radical, medium-changing films throughout the 1960s, including Breathless and Alphaville.

News of Godard’s death was reported by the French newspaper Liberation.

Along with contemporaries such as Éric Rohmer, Jacques Rivette, and François Truffaut, the Paris-born Godard was a central figure in the Nouvelle Vague, an experimental film movement that emerged in France in the late 1950s.

Several of his films are frequently cited among the best movies ever made.

Godard’s first feature was Breathless, released in 1960, an experimental tribute to American film noir. Starring Jean-Paul Belmondo as a hoodlum named Michel, and Jean Seberg as his American girlfriend, the film caused a stir with its unusual visual style and editing techniques, immediately announcing Godard as one of cinema’s great innovators.

Jean-Luc Godard, a leading figure of the French New Wave, has died. He was 91. The French newspaper Liberation first reported the news which was confirmed to Deadline by a source close to the filmmaker.

Best known for his radical and politically driven work, Godard was among the most acclaimed directors of his generation with classic films such as Breathless (À bout de souffle), which catapulted him onto the world scene in 1960. The film was from a treatment by his contemporary and former friend François Truffaut and followed the story of a young American woman in Paris, played by Hollywood star Jean Seberg, and her doomed affair with a young rebel on the run, played by Jean-Paul Belmondo.

Hollywood & Media Deaths 2022: A Photo Gallery

President Emmanuel Macron of France paid tribute to the director with a statement on Twitter, calling him the “iconoclastic of New Wave filmmakers.”

Born in Paris...

Vladimir and Rosa.“Cinema contains everything. It joins writing, painting, music. It is the most complete art.”—Juliet Berto, Ciné-Bulles, 19861Juliet Berto burst onto the Parisian film scene in the rich late 60s period of experimentation and radicalization, just as the New Wave diverged into competing streams of political and humanist directors. Her biography (what scant details are publicly available) is mythical, and tragically short: Annie Jamet, born and living in southern France, attends a Grenoble film screening where Jean-Luc Godard is present; the director, captivated by 19-year-old Annie, offers her a role in his film 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her. Annie moved to Paris, and by the end 1967, Juliet Berto (as she is credited onscreen) had appeared in three Godard films, a relationship that would deepen over the course of the radical 60s. Berto then worked with Jacques Rivette during the 70s as a key collaborator and...

Ever since Michel Hazanavicius’ Oscar-winning tribute to silent cinema “The Artist,” the French filmmaker has continued to focus his work on the process of filmmaking itself, for better and, mostly, for worse. After “Redoutable,” centered on the relationship between Jean-Luc Godard and Anne Wiazemsky during the filming of “La Chinoise,” he again explored la magie du cinéma in “The Lost Prince,” where Omar Sy saw the rich fantasy film-set world he had created for his daughter begin to crumble as she started to outgrow his fairytales.

Continue reading ‘Final Cut’ Review: Michel Hazanavicius’ Meta Filmmaking Zombie Comedy Remake Is A Depressing Dud [Cannes] at The Playlist.

Kimberly Akimbo, Assassins, Prayer for the French Republic and The Chinese Lady were among the Off Broadway productions receiving multiple nominations for this year’s Lucille Lortel Awards for Outstanding Achievement Off Broadway, announced today.

Among the innovations in this year’s 37th Annual Lortel Awards are the first non-gendered performance categories, and the first-ever Lortel for Outstanding Ensemble. In the new Ensemble category, the inaugural nominees are the casts of English, Oratorio For Living Things, and Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992.

Kimberly Akimbo and Oratorio For Living Things scored the most nominations, with six each, while Black No More and On Sugarland received five. Assassins, Prayer for the French Republic and The Chinese Lady each have four nominations.

The awards will be handed out on Sunday, May 1, at NYU Skirball in Manhattan. The Lucille Lortel Awards are produced by the Off-Broadway League and Lucille Lortel Theatre, with additional support provided by Tdf.

The Chinese Boxer (1970) is Coming to Blu-ray on November 9th from 88 Films

Check out this amazing fight scene from the film:

From the golden age of Kung Fu movies, the legendary Shaw Brothers bring you an action-packed tale of revenge, mayhem and flying fists. When his martial arts school is viciously attacked by a rival gang of Japanese thugs, Lei Ming swears to bring them down with violent justice. Written, starring and directed by Jimmy Wang Yu, The Chinese Boxer (1970) is a fabulously fast-paced feature full of exquisite set-pieces and mind-blowing fight choreography.

A huge influence on the likes of Tarantino’s Kill Bill (2003) and Bruce Lee’s Fist of Fury (1972) this entertainingly savage story of resilience, skill and a battle against the odds, is one of the first true modern classics of the genre, focussing as it does on physical prowess and athletic proficiency over the more mythical elements of the wuxia era.

With it being seven years since his last live-action film, 2014’s The Grand Budapast Hotel, Wes Anderson is hard at work. Following a Cannes premiere, The French Dispatch finally arrives in limited theaters on October 22 followed by a wide release the following week, and he’s already shooting his next film (recently revealed to have the title Asteroid City) outside of Madrid with Tilda Swinton, Bill Murray, Adrien Brody, Tom Hanks, Margot Robbie, Rupert Friend, Jason Schwartzman, Scarlett Johansson, Bryan Cranston, Hope Davis, Jeffrey Wright, Liev Schreiber, Tony Revolori, and Matt Dillon.

As is the case with all of his work, Wes Anderson synthesizes cinema history in his own specific language and for The French Dispatch he has provided a list of influences. As revealed in a promotional book sent to The Flim Stage and styled after the film’s magazine, 32 films are listed that “provided inspiration to the filmmakers,...

The five college-aged kids in Jean-Luc Godard’s La Chinoise speak like revolutionaries. They discuss violent means of change, necessary evils to alter the current course of France’s collective cultural direction. In multiple senses of the word, they were actors. Only one person in Godard’s film was actually a Maoist, a revolutionary fighting for justice across continents: Senegalese activist Omar Blondin Diop, subject of the new documentary Just a Movement.

Directed by Vincent Meessen, it examines Diop’s life through a series of interviews with his brothers, extended family, and friends, using the framework of Godard’s film to tell his story. With archival footage and photographs of Godard and Diop, scenes from La Chinoise, and current activists, musicians, and events within Dakar, Meessen creates a fuller picture of the connection between these two time periods. He gives little explanation for the images being shown, choosing not to employ lower-thirds,...

Are you ready for the weekend? Specifically, are you ready for a Long Weekend? Of course, we’re referring to the rom-com from Sony Pictures Worldwide Acquisitions’ Stage 6 Films.

Long Weekend will make its debut in theaters today and marks the feature directorial debut of Steve Basilone, who also wrote the script.

The rom-com stars Finn Wittrock as Bart who has a serendipitous meeting with Vienna played by Zoë Chao. She’s a little bit of a mystery, but the two end up having a connection and they spend a whirlwind weekend together (hence the title of the movie). As the two fall fast and hard for each other, they dont realize that both carry secrets that could be their undoing… or the chance for a fresh start.

The film also features Casey Wilson, Jim Rash and Damon Wayans, Jr. Long Weekend is produced by Deanna Barillari, Laura Lewis, Theodora Dunlap,...

At the start of “The Inheritance” — an experimental film about the formation of a Black collective, set in the early ’90s — Julian (Eric Lockley) rummages through a wooden crate of books he found in the West Philadelphia row house his grandmother left him. In it is a trove of poetic and political thought circa the late ’60s and beyond: There’s Malcolm X and Alice Walker, James Baldwin and Toni Morrison, as well as Charles Mingus and a stack of Ebony magazines.

In the next scene, Julian’s friend, maybe girlfriend, Gwen (Nozipho Mclean) helps him tug and shove the crate across the floor of the near empty abode. He asks her to move in. She reminds him that the last time they saw each other was at least a month ago. They’d gone to see Andrei Tarkovsky’s “The Sacrifice”;” he cried and grew quiet. No wonder they...

As I wrote last year in my 25 New Face profile of Ephraim Asili, his first feature, The Inheritance, begins when “Julian (Eric Lockley) moves into his late grandmother’s house and initiates an experiment in Black collective living. The influence of Jean-Luc Godard’s La Chinoise, evident in the film’s poster onscreen and the house’s boldly painted walls, is mixed with Asili’s personal memories of Philadelphia’s Move members (the Philadelphia native first met them as a teenager) and living in a Black Marxist collective. Shot, per Asili’s usual practice, on 16mm, The Inheritance marks a shift from overtly experimental to essentially narrative work. […]

The post Shot Reverse Shot: The Inheritance Director Ephraim Asili in Conversation with Residue Director Merawi Gerima (Part One) first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

As I wrote last year in my 25 New Face profile of Ephraim Asili, his first feature, The Inheritance, begins when “Julian (Eric Lockley) moves into his late grandmother’s house and initiates an experiment in Black collective living. The influence of Jean-Luc Godard’s La Chinoise, evident in the film’s poster onscreen and the house’s boldly painted walls, is mixed with Asili’s personal memories of Philadelphia’s Move members (the Philadelphia native first met them as a teenager) and living in a Black Marxist collective. Shot, per Asili’s usual practice, on 16mm, The Inheritance marks a shift from overtly experimental to essentially narrative work. […]

The post Shot Reverse Shot: The Inheritance Director Ephraim Asili in Conversation with Residue Director Merawi Gerima (Part One) first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Artist Ephraim Asili describes his feature debut “The Inheritance” as a “speculative re-enactment” of his time in a West Philadelphia Black Marxist collective. The result is an experimental collage that surely name-checks Jean-Luc Godard, and bends genres and time to create a shape-shifting kaleidoscope of Blackness. Acclaimed during its fall festival run including in Toronto and New York, “The Inheritance” arrives from Grasshopper Film in virtual cinemas on March 12. Watch the exclusive trailer below.

Following almost a decade exploring the African diaspora, Asili sets his ensemble work almost entirely within a brightly colored, West Philadelphia house occupied by a community of Black activists and artist. Woven into a documentary recollection of the Philadelphia liberation group Move — the victim of a notorious police bombing in 1985 — is a scripted drama of characters working toward political consensus, and grappling with their own interpersonal relationships, romantic and otherwise.

From IndieWire’s TIFF review:

Shot...

The Berlin Film Festival has unveiled the titles that will screen in its Forum section this year, which focuses on cutting-edge and experimental cinema.

The 17 films picked for Berlin’s Forum range across style and genre from Ski, a combination of documentary and drama from first-timer director Manque La Banca, to Ephraim Asili’s The Inheritance and Vincent Meessen’s Just A Movement, both of which use Jean-Luc Godard’s 1967 classic La chinoise as a jumping-off point for seperate cinematic revisions. Director Sabrina Zhao adapts a work by German playwright Bertolt Brecht for her feature-length debut, The Good Woman of Sichuan, which will premiere at Berlin’...

The Berlin Film Festival has unveiled the titles that will screen in its Forum section this year, which focuses on cutting-edge and experimental cinema.

The 17 films picked for Berlin’s Forum range across style and genre from Ski, a combination of documentary and drama from first-timer director Manque La Banca, to Ephraim Asili’s The Inheritance and Vincent Meessen’s Just A Movement, both of which use Jean-Luc Godard’s 1967 classic La chinoise as a jumping-off point for seperate cinematic revisions. Director Sabrina Zhao adapts a work by German playwright Bertolt Brecht for her feature-length debut, The Good Woman of Sichuan, which will premiere at Berlin’...

Artist Ephraim Asili describes his feature debut “The Inheritance” as a “speculative re-enactment” of his tenure in a West Philadelphia Black Marxist collective, which is putting it modestly. that’s challenging to behold as a whole, but illuminating in its parts, and often educational without ever feeling too dense.

Shot in buzzing 16mm and balanced off with archival news footage, voiceovers, and interviews, “The Inheritance” establishes a documentary framework, only to break it down entirely. At the center of the movie’s nonfiction leanings is Move, a Black activist group founded in 1972 that was, in 1985, the victim of a police bombing after the organization was deemed a terrorist organization by Philadelphia mayor Wilson Goode and police commissioner Gregore J. Sambor. The parallels to the year 2020 are obvious, but Asili never beats that over your head. And he doesn’t have to. The police brutality witnessed this year and in past...

Bodard worked with iconic directors Jacques Demy, Agnès Varda, Robert Bresson, Jean-Luc Godard, Maurice Pialat, Alain Resnais and Claude Miller.

Legendary French producer Mag Bodard, who worked with iconic directors Jacques Demy, Agnès Varda, Robert Bresson, Jean-Luc Godard, Maurice Pialat, Alain Resnais and Claude Miller, has died at the age of 103-years-old.

Bodard, whose heyday was in the 1960s and 70s, got her first producer credit in 1962 on Norbert Carbonnaux’s comedy The Dance, featuring Françoise Dorléac in her first starring role opposite Jean-Pierre Cassel.

The crew featured production designer Jacques Saulnier, who would go on to work closely with Resnais,...

Jean-Luc Godard's The Image Book (2018) is having its exclusive online premiere in the United Kingdom from December 3 – January 1, 2019.The first thing we see in Jean-Luc Godard’s new film, The Image Book, is the pointing hand of Leonardo da Vinci’s St. John The Baptist, believed by many to be his final work in oils—a masterpiece of sfumato, though Godard’s image is contrasty black-and-white like a Xerox some generations removed from the original. Next, two hands, maybe the director’s, pinning together lengths of film at a Steenbeck editing table, and one of those esoteric quotations for which Godard is famous: “Man’s true condition: to think with hands,” from the Swiss writer Denis de Rougemont, previously featured in Godard’s magnum opus, Histoire(s) du cinéma. Then, a montage from Histoire(s): hands (including Giacometti’s The Hand) and part of a favorite quotation from St.

In the late 1960s, Jean-Luc Godard spun several films — “La Chinoise,” “One Plus One” — out of the perception that politics had begun to fuse with pop culture. His insight was startling, even if how it translated to the real world remained a touch ethereal. It was all about images (the mass-produced iconography of Mao or Che), and it was also about ideology. When Godard famously dubbed “Masculin Féminin” his portrait of “the children of Marx and Coca-Cola,” part of the cheekiness was his acknowledgment that Marxism on the world stage had become a brand.

In that light, a lot of Americans in the 1980s experienced the Sandinistas, the guerrilla freedom fighters of Nicaragua, as figures in a larger-than-life storybook. That was certainly true of the Republican right, led by President Ronald Reagan; to him, they were an evil cartoon Communist enemy that needed to be eradicated, like roaches. But it...

In 1967, 37-year old Jean-Luc Godard fell in love with his 17-year old actress Anne Wiazemsky whilst making his film La Chinoise. He would later go on to marry her. Redoubtable is a comedy drama – note the refusal to quite embrace the ‘dramedy’ tag – based on Wiazemsky’s book ‘Un an Apres’ which chronicled her time shooting the aforementioned feature with her future husband.

In terms of colour palette and general aesthetic, there is more than a touch of the New Wave titan present. Make no mistake, however, this is Michel Hazavanicius’s film. After all, Redoubtable is certainly no hagiography. Neither is it entirely true and quite a biopic. In fact, it is determinedly elusive to pigeonholing, which feels somehow rather apt for a mercurial talent such as Godard.

We sat down separately with the equally delightful co-lead Stacy Martinand Michel himself to talk through this enterprise and their careers.

The Anglo-French actor, who plays Jean-Luc Godard’s 19-year-old wife Anne Wiazensky in a new film, on the romanticisation of artists’ relationships, and defending Lars von Trier

The Anglo-French actor Stacy Martin is an unlikely – and reluctant – participant in the #MeToo wars currently convulsing the film industry: although not exactly for her new film, Redoubtable. It is a frothy biopic about Jean-Luc Godard and his second wife, Anne Wiazemsky, the star of his 1967 film La Chinoise who was just 19 when she met the 37-year-old Godard. Instead, the focus has become Lars von Trier, the director who gave Martin her first professional acting role, as sex addict Joe, in the explicit four-hour epic Nymphomaniac.

Von Trier had a reputation for years for making actors suffer for their art, especially female actors. But when I ask Martin, 27, about him, she describes their working relationship as “amazing”. “He has his flaws, but I...

Declared sacrilege the moment the project was announced, Michel Hazanavicius focuses on a critical, artistic, existential, and perhaps creative calamity period in both the masses and Jean-Luc Godard’s own timeline. Godard Mon Amour (U.S. distributor Cohen Media Group made the title switch from Redoubtable a little bit after its Tiff premiere) sees Louis Garrel in the shoes of Jlg towards the end of La Nouvelle Vague and at the time he moves into La Chinoise with Anne Wiazemsky (played by Stacy Martin). Here is a phoner audio interview conducted by Amir Ganjavie with Hazanavicius.…...

One of his classics is on the official poster for Cannes Film Festival and he has a highly-anticipated new feature premiering at the festival, so it’s a fitting time for a new biopic surrounding Jean-Luc Godard to arrive. After taking on the silent era with his Best Picture-winning The Artist, Michel Hazanavicius will now focus on the French New Wave era with Godard Mon Amour (formerly Redoubtable), which arrives in theaters next week.

Featuring Louis Garrel as Godard and Stacy Martin as Anne Wiazemsky, the film depicts their relationship within the director’s late-60s “revolutionary period,” beginning with the production of his Mao-centered La Chinoise. Today we’re presenting an exclusive clip from the film courtesy of Cohen Media Group, which finds a fan of Godard singing his praises to him on the street without much to say. As one can imagine, Godard’s reaction is anything but pleased.

"I don't feel I have to be everyone." Cohen Media Group has released the full, official Us trailer for Michel Hazanavicius' somewhat controversial film Godard Mon Amour, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival last year with the title Le Redoutable. The film focuses on famous French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard, and his time in the 60s when he made La Chinoise with young Polish actress Anne Wiazemsky. He fell madly in love with her, the two eventually married, but the events of May 1968 shook Godard and things started to get a bit unstable. Louis Garrel plays Godard, and Stacy Martin plays Wiazemsky, with a cast including Bérénice Bejo, Micha Lescot, Grégory Gadebois, and Félix Kysyl. This film is more of an homage to Godard, than a profile of the director, but it's honest and accurate. And it's a surprisingly good film, that examines the challenges of an intellectual filmmaker in an ever-changing society.

You’ve fallen in love with his films, but only a lucky few have fallen in love with Jean-Luc Godard himself. The French New Wave icon is at his most lively in “Godard Mon Amour,” a tragicomedy from “The Artist” director Michel Hazanavicius. Based on actress-turned-author Anne Wiazemsky’s 2015 memoir, “Un An Apres” (“One Year Later”), the film premiered at Cannes last year under the title “Redoubtable.”

“Godard Mon Amour” stars Louis Garrel (“Ismael’s Ghosts”) as a radical young Godard, during his short-lived marriage to Wiazemsky, played by Stacy Martin (“Nymphomaniac”). Set in 1968 during the filming of “La Chinoise,” the movie’s reception and the political climate provokes Godard into a profound self-examination, which propels the newlyweds in different directions.

In Eric Kohn’s 2017 review for IndieWire, he wrote: “The movie toys with Godard’s own early filmmaking style in a wry effort to salute his legacy and demystify its evolution.

The retrospective Godard and the Dziga Vertov Group is showing from February 27 - March 26, 2018 on Mubi in the United Kingdom and United States.British SoundsThe execrable new film Redoubtable by Michel Hazanavicius reduces all aspects of Jean-Luc Godard and his career to the level of a cartoon. And not even a great, cinematically advanced cartoon—the Fleischer brothers, Chuck Jones, or Tex Avery, something that might actually capture some semblance of Jlg’s anarchic humor. No, Redoubtable is strictly Hanna-Barbara, two-dimensional animals lumbering about on an unchanging, depthless landscape. (Oh look! Silly Jean-Luc has broken his glasses again!) As if to drive home the childishness of the film, it is being retitled in the U.S. Now called Godard Mon Amour, it not only makes a mockery of an actually great film by Alain Resnais and Marguerite Duras. It emphasizes Godard as little more than a brand name, a selling point.

To many, the name Claude Berri doesn’t mean all that much. Studied cinephiles may recognize the name as the one attached to the directing credit of the underrated classic Jean de Florette, while others may simply be ignorant to the director’s filmography completely. However, with an Oscar, 21 directed-by films and nearly 60 producing credits to the French filmmaker’s name, there is a treasure trove of motion pictures just waiting to be rediscovered. And thankfully that appears to be happening.

As part of the Quad Cinema’s A Very Berri Christmas retrospective, Cohen Films is premiering a new, 50th Anniversary restoration of one of Berri’s most beloved works, The Two Of Us. An autobiographical work, this marked Berri’s directorial debut, and stars Alain Cohen as Claude, a young boy caught in the middle of World War II. Sent from Nazi-occupied France to live with a Catholic family in the countryside,...

So it’s finally that time of year. Days are sitting between us and the beginning of a new year, and with the conclusion of 2017 imminent, it’s about time we all take stock of the very best that the home video world has offered us all. From mammoth box sets to an unsung classic from a French New Wave legend that is as urgent today as it has ever been, a final film from one of the greatest directors of all time to a retrospective of a documentary filmmaker few people know of, these are the five very best home video releases of the year 2017.

5. La Chinoise

Starting off this list, one of Jean-Luc Godard’s great and underrated masterpieces. La Chinoise comes at an exciting moment in Godard’s career, squarely prior to maybe his best film, Week End, and sees the iconic filmmaker at a moment of experimentation and revolution.

The use of “I” statements when attempting to review a piece of art is often times the sign of a weak or lazy critic. However, in the case of viewing the newly-released Kino Lorber Blu-ray of Jean-Luc Godard’s La Chinoise (which comes hand in hand with a release of the iconic filmmaker’s equally revolutionary Le Gai Savior), it’s all but impossible not to give personal context.

One of Godard’s most esoteric and polarizing works, La Chinoise is a simply constructed story of a group of students, led by Jean-Pierre Leaud’s Guillaume, who form a Maoist revolutionary collective that ultimately sees extreme action as the only thing that can spark any actual change in the modern world. Leaud is opposite the brilliant Anne Wiazemsky who takes on the role of Veronique, effectively the co-leader of the small group, a group that draws inspiration from the students...

“How has La Chinoise aged?” asks Amy Taubin in her liner notes to the new Blu-ray edition of Jean-Luc Godard’s 1967 provocation. Elsewhere in the disc’s accompanying booklet Richard Hell examines how he has shifted positions from seeing La Chinoise as lesser Godard to “a glorious experience” superior to more easily accessible works like Pierrot le fou. Both critics circle around one of the things I find most fascinating about Godard in general, which is the fact that his movies, more than those of any other filmmaker, seem to change the most drastically from one viewing to the next. Of […]...

With a seemingly endless amount of streaming options — not only the titles at our disposal, but services themselves — we’ve taken it upon ourselves to highlight the titles that have recently hit platforms. Every week, one will be able to see the cream of the crop (or perhaps some simply interesting picks) of streaming titles (new and old) across platforms such as Netflix, iTunes, Amazon, and more (note: U.S. only). Check out our rundown for this week’s selections below.

Cinema Through the Eye of Magnum (Sophie Bassaler)

When one conjures iconic memories from cinema history, they might be of your favorite shot or sequence, but my mind often travels to behind-the-scenes photos featuring director, cast, crew, and beyond. These photographs often have a unifying connection: they come from Magnum Photos. Since 1947, the photographic cooperative — founded by such iconic names as Robert Capa amd Henri Cartier-Bresson — has been responsible...

Brady Jandreau plays himself in Chloe Zhao’s The Rider - winner of the Grand Prix Award at the 43rd Festival of American Cinema in Deauville The Rider took the top prize, the Grand Prix Award, at the Deauville Festival of American Cinema. The second feature by Chinese-American director Chloe Zhao, this cowboy drama has received many approving reviews and previously scooped the Art Cinema Award in the Directors’ Fortnight at the Cannes Film Festival earlier in the year.

The Rider deals with a young cowboy Brady whose promising future as a top rodeo rider is suddenly jeopardised by a dreadful head injury. The clan are played by real-life family members Brady, Tim and Lilly Jandreau. Zhao met Brady before his real-life accident and developed the story out of the aftermath.

The jury, headed by The Artist director Michel Hazanavicius whose Redoubtable (the true story of how 17-year-old Anne Wiazemsky...

Decades after he broke form and caught the world’s attention with his New Wave films, the influence of Jean-Luc Godard can still be felt on contemporary cinema. His post-modern filmmaking still remains vitally live, and “La Chinoise” is certainly one that feels fresh. And today we have an exclusive clip from the movie, that’s back in cinemas with a 50th anniversary restoration.

Starring Jean-Pierre Léaud and Anne Wiazemsky, the film follows a group of middle-class students, led by Guillaume and Veronique, who are disillusioned by their suburban lifestyles, and form a small Maoist cell and plan to change the world by any means necessary.

Continue reading Exclusive: Clip From Jean-Luc Godard’s Newly Restored ‘La Chinoise’ Gets Radical at The Playlist.

“It’s the Little Red Book / That makes it all move”

On the tail end of his lauded New Wave period, seminal filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard began to move towards a new realm of cinema, best exemplified by his 1967 political feature, “La Chinioise,” a woozy and modern take on Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s 1872 novel “The Possessed” that married some of the auteur’s signature obsessions — from tracking shots to a star turn from Jean-Pierre Léaud — with a new bent towards political motivations.

Godard continued to traffic in such films for the next decade, spurned by his infamous desire to spend his time “making political films politically,” and “La Chinoise” was followed by offerings like “Le Gai Savoir” and “Tout Va Bien,” which continued to share Godard’s constantly evolving vision of both the world and his films with an enthralled audience.

Read More‘Redoubtable’: Michel Hazanavicius’ Free-Wheeling Jean-Luc Godard Biopic Goes...

Cohen Media Group has acquired the North American rights to Michel Hazanavicius’ free-wheeling Jean-Luc Godard biopic “Redoubtable,” which premiered late last week at the Cannes Film Festival.

Set in Paris 1967, “Redoubtable” follows Godard as he’s forced to re-examine himself after the reception of “La Chinoise,” his political film about young revolutionaries. Seeming to foreshadow France’s civil unrest in May of 1968, the director is shaken by the crisis and irrevocably changed by his own deep-rooted conflicts and misunderstandings. It is set for a North American release in early 2018.

Louis Garrel stars as Godard, with Stacy Martin as Anne Wiazemsky and Bérénice Bejo in a supporting role.

Read More: Cannes 2017: 9 Hot Acquisition Titles That Will Have Buyers Chasing Foreign Films

CEO Charles Cohen has never met a French movie he doesn’t like, so the pairing of his outfit and Hazanavicius’ French film about a French filmmaker is a match made in acquisition heaven.

It’s more Pastiche du Godard than Histoire(s) du Godard in Michel Hazanavicius’ Redoubtable and that’s not a bad thing. The director’s slight but surprisingly playful account of nouvelle vague maestro Jean-Luc Godard’s marriage to actress Anne Wiazemsky and his re-radicalization in the late 1960s has the potential to infuriate the more devout of Godard followers but there is plenty of good-hearted goading and creative homage to savor for the less pedantic fan.

Honing in on a tumultuous time for Godard and his adoptive France, Hazanavicius charts the relationship between him and Wiazemsky from beginning — on the set of his 1967 film La Chinoise — to end, taking in the 1968 protests and subsequent student movement (“I like the movement, not the students,” he later exclaims) as well as Godard’s own abstract departures from his previous filmmaking methods. It marks a welcome return for the director (Michel that...

With his “Redoubtable,” Oscar-winning “The Artist” writer-director Michel Hazanavicius delivers another homage to period cinema, this time channeling Jean-Luc Godard’s moviemaking techniques as he portrays the cinema god during his late ’60s transition from groundbreaking film iconoclast to actual radical revolutionary. (Read Eric Kohn’s review here.)

American buyers are already sniffing around the feature film, one that could play well for older cinephiles who love Godard, an admittedly narrow niche.

French star Louis Garrel, who also appears in Arnaud Desplechin’s festival opener “Ismael’s Ghosts,” is superb as Godard and could land an acting prize. At the beginning, we get a glimpse of the director audiences are clearly expecting to see: confident, playful, and adoring his 19-year-old leading lady Anne Wiazemsky (Stacy Martin), gazing straight at her (and us) as the camera tracks by during the filming of “La Chinoise.”

Read More: The 2017 IndieWire Cannes Bible: Every Review,...

With his “Redoubtable,” Oscar-winning “The Artist” writer-director Michel Hazanavicius delivers another homage to period cinema, this time channeling Jean-Luc Godard’s moviemaking techniques as he portrays the cinema god during his late ’60s transition from groundbreaking film iconoclast to actual radical revolutionary. (Read Eric Kohn’s review here.)

American buyers are already sniffing around the feature film, one that could play well for older cinephiles who love Godard, an admittedly narrow niche.

French star Louis Garrel, who also appears in Arnaud Desplechin’s festival opener “Ismael’s Ghosts,” is superb as Godard and could land an acting prize. At the beginning, we get a glimpse of the director audiences are clearly expecting to see: confident, playful, and adoring his 19-year-old leading lady Anne Wiazemsky (Stacy Martin), gazing straight at her (and us) as the camera tracks by during the filming of “La Chinoise.”

Read More: The 2017 IndieWire Cannes Bible: Every Review,...

As a filmmaker, Jean-Luc Godard is a brilliant enigma whose work offers more questions than answers. “Redoubtable” solves that challenge with an outside source: Adapted from actress-turned-author Anne Wiazemsky’s 2015 memoir, “Un An Apres” (“One Year Later”), this surprisingly endearing tragicomedy recounts her short-lived marriage to Godard and the moment in which the feisty filmmaker soured into the angry, outspoken political radical that became his post-’60s persona.

Written and directed by Michel Hazanavicius (“The Artist”), the movie toys with Godard’s own early filmmaking style in a wry effort to salute his legacy and demystify its evolution. Light and inoffensive, it trades the intellectual rigor of Godard’s work for fluffy sentiments, but never gets crass. Above all else, it succeeds at transforming cinephile trivia into a genuine crowdpleaser.

A welcome rebound after Hazanvicius’ misbegotten remake “The Search,” the new movie is a return to the colorful period details...

The last time Michel Hazanavicius directed an ode to cinema — the 2011 black-and-white silent film The Artist — he won five Oscars including best picture and director. With his latest film, Redoubtable, the French writer-director has upped the ante by tackling cinematic god Jean-Luc Godard.

Based on the book Un an après by Godard’s second wife, Anne Wiazemsky, the film kicks off in 1967, when the New Wave pioneer was shooting La Chinoise in Paris with the German actress, 20 years his junior. That film’s reception sparked an existential crisis for Godard, a somewhat relatable predicament for Hazanavicius. After...

The women, the films, the fights, the flops … the director of The Artist has risked infuriating France with Redoubtable – a hilarious drama about Jean-Luc Godard

It’s May 1968 and Jean-Luc Godard is marching along a Paris boulevard during an anti-establishment demo. On the face of it, things couldn’t be better for the leading light of the nouvelle vague: the great director is spending his spring lobbing stones at the riot police, haranguing students at sit-ins, and making love to his beautiful wife Anne Wiazemsky, nearly 20 years his junior and the star of his new film.

But, just then, a demonstrator sidles up and praises Godard’s early films – A Bout de Souffle with Jean-Paul Belmondo, Le Mepris with Brigitte Bardot. As the fan heaps on more praise, Godard’s face gets longer and longer. Doesn’t this guy realise that the old Godard is dead? That he has disowned those films?...

If you’re a buyer, the Cannes Film Festival isn’t where you go to catch a break. Including festival sidebars like Critics’ Week and Director’s Fortnight, there are more than 75 films at Cannes from all over the world — but when it comes to English-language movies, most are already spoken for.

Read More: The Cannes Film Festival Buyers Guide: Who’s Buying the Movies You’ll Watch

Netflix took the rights to Noah Baumbach’s family drama “The Meyerowitz Stories,” while Amazon has both Todd Haynes’ “Wonderstruck” and Sofia Coppola’s “The Beguiled.” A24 has never bought a completed film at Cannes, but the company is launching four titles at the fest, including Yorgos Lanthimos’ “The Killing of a Sacred Deer” and the Safdie brothers’ “Good Time.”

What’s left are mainly foreign-language films from some of the most respected indie auteurs in world. Most of these filmmakers are...

"Who cares about Cannes?" Oh this is fun. Indiewire recently debuted the first Us teaser trailer for the film Redoubtable, the latest feature from prominent French filmmaker Michel Hazanavicius (of The Artist, The Search). The film tells the story of the 1960s love affair between iconic filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard and 17-year-old actress Anne Wiazemsky. It takes place during the making of and release of Godard's film La Chinoise, from 1967 to 1968. Featuring Louis Garrel as Godard and Stacy Martin (from Lars von Trier's Nymphomaniac) as Wiazemsky. Also featuring Bérénice Bejo and Grégory Gadebois. This is a hilarious trailer mocking Cannes, because Redoubtable is playing at the Cannes Film Festival this year. It gave me a good laugh. We posted another teaser a month ago. Stay tuned for more news after it premieres this month. Here's the official Us teaser trailer for Michel Hazanavicius' Redoubtable, from YouTube (via Lwl): Paris 1967. Jean-Luc Godard,...

Michel Hazanavicius really has a knack for bringing the spirit of French cinema’s past alive. With “The Artist,” he reminded audiences of the best parts of silent film, and with his upcoming “Redoubtable,” he tells the story of beloved French auteur, Jean-Luc Godard.

Read More: 2017 Cannes Film Festival Announces Lineup: Todd Haynes, Sofia Coppola, ‘Twin Peaks’ and More

Set in Paris 1967, “Redoubtable” follows Godard as he’s forced to re-examine himself after the reception of “La Chinoise,” his political film about young revolutionaries. Seeming to foreshadow France’s civil unrest in May of 1968, the director is shaken by the crisis and irrevocably changed by his own deep-rooted conflicts and misunderstandings.

Louis Garrel stars as Godard, with Stacy Martin as Anne Wiazemsky and Bérénice Bejo in a supporting role.

“Redoubtable” will mark Hazanavicius’ return to Cannes, and is already generating buzz as a potential Oscar contender. Check out our exclusive teaser below.

Although the Cannes Film Festival line-up has now been unveiled, for the vast majority of those reading, we’ll have to wait some time before we’re sitting in the theater watching this year’s selections. Thankfully, to get a taste of what to expect, a handful of teasers have arrived for a few of our most-anticipated films — and one we’re curious about.

First up, Kiyoshi Kurosawa is back with the fascinating-sounding Before We Vanish, an alien movie which looks to be conveyed in the striking manner only he can deliver. Then there’s a brief preview for another prolific filmmaker’s latest work as François Ozon‘s L’Amant Double, a psycho-sexual thriller starring Jérémie Renier and Marine Vacth, which turned heads with the debut of its first Nsfw look.

Then there’s a new teaser for Michel Hazanavicius‘ Jean-Luc Godard biopic, Redoubtable. Featuring Louis Garrel as Godard...