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Close-Up is a feature that spotlights films now playing on Mubi. Claire Denis's Bastards (2013) is showing April 14 – May 13, 2019 in the United States.Claire Denis' Bastards has often been referred to as an exploration of power, money, and depravity, or as an allegory for late capitalism. The figure of Edouard Laporte (Michel Subor)—an ironclad businessman whom neither the police nor the law courts seem to have any interest in investigating—stands here as the personification of a corrupt economic system, the ultimate devil onto whom it is easy to project our high-profile tycoons and shady politicians. This may indeed be the soil—the given—in which Bastards is rooted, but it can also cloud our vision as to what the film ultimately unfolds.Blindness is a major theme in Claire Denis's Bastards. Marco (Vincent Lindon), a naval captain, returns to Paris after the suicide of his brother-in-law and the...

With twenty-five years of filmmaking under her belt, French auteur Claire Denis is still at it. Her latest movie is Bastards, a stark look under the bonnet of the upper class, revealing dark possibilities and even bleaker realities. It continues her run of films which look inwardly at cultures and the various factors that make them tick – or break – such as Chocolat or 35 Shots of Rum.

The director was kind enough to share some time with HeyUGuys about Bastards, and the methods and motivations behind making it.

Bastards stars Vincent Lindon, Chiara Mastroianni, Julie Bataille, Michel Subor, Lola Créton, Alex Descas and is in cinemas now.

Kathir a Madurai lad goes to Coimbatore with a purpose and very soon flips for the charms of a beautiful Pavithra who is their neighbor. But Pavithra is already in love with her friend Gautham who is ‘not a nice guy’. Kathir who was...

In Britain, the term ‘bastard’ is often affectionately implemented into speech amongst friends, as a commonly used term that has lost its sting somewhat, said endearingly, albeit mockingly, at times. However it would seem that in France, the word remains indicative of unpleasantness, and as poisonous as it’s intended, as within Claire Denis’ aptly named Bastards, there are some rather nasty characters to say the least. If this film was a physical object and you ran your finger across it, you’d be left with half an inch of dirt to wipe off, as this is a seedy, grotty and ultimately bleak affair.

Vincent Lindon plays Marco, who returns home to Paris following the suicide of his brother-in-law, to not only provide some comfort to his grieving sister (Julie Bataille), and physiologically damaged niece, Justine (Lola Créton), but to seek revenge also, as he targets the man who they...

Claire Denis' Bastards (Les Salaudes) may actually have a decent story, but she has muddled up the narrative to the point it's confusing as all hell. Even once the pieces start to come together, the film comes to a head-scratching conclusion of sex with corncobs and a close-up of a guy stroking his penis. Let's begin with the plot details I gathered after the opening moments and see where we get... It's raining very hard. A man has killed himself. A girl is walking naked in the streets. A man named Marco (Vincent Lindon) works aboard a container ship and receives a phone call with a family emergency and heads home immediately. Upon arrival he moves into an apartment without any furnishings. Here he makes eyes at the woman living downstairs and helps fix the chain on her son's bicycle. Following the film's opening minutes, those were the things I knew.

Claire Denis' films are typically intimate dramas weighted with emotion, which makes it particularly dispiriting that "Bastards," her eleventh feature, contains all of those ingredients without sufficiently making them gel. A muddled revenge drama about family ties and traumatic experiences, the movie wallows in its characters' anger and frustrations, but despite a strong cast and shadowy mysteries that deepen the plot, "Bastards" creates the sour impression of a half-formed work.  That's partly due to a consciously fragmented structure devoid of purpose. The movie contains a confusing trajectory in spite of its relatively simple premise. In a dreary opening sequence, Denis reveals the aftermath of a man's suicide while his nude daughter Justine (Lola Créton) wanders the darkened Paris streets wearing only high heels, apparently abused by an unidentified assailant. Needless to say, that sudden double blow leaves Lola's mother, Sandra (Julie Bataille) in a state of intense...

It’s a bit hard getting a matching synopsis for the apparently confusing Bastards, directed by Claire Denis, but the common consensus is this: a sea captain (Vincent Lindon) gets a call from his estranged sister (Julie Bataille) that everything has gone to hell at home. Her husband has committed suicide and her daughter has been the victim of a vicious rape that lands her in the hospital. When he identifies the man who might be connected to both crimes, he starts up an intense affair with his mistress (Chiara Mastroianni) as a means of getting to him faster. The English-subtitled trailer for Bastards (Les salauds) is tense, dark and brief – a contemporary film noir with a great new wave soundtrack. As with many a psychological thriller, we get to see small hints of both sex and violence; while this is going to be heavy on the sexual content, they don’t let you forget what it...

I saw Claire Denis' Bastards (Les Salaudes) in Cannes earlier this year and it has one of my favorite opening paragraphs to a review I've ever written: Claire Denis' The Bastards (Les Salaudes) may actually have a decent story, but she has muddled up the narrative to the point it's confusing as all hell. Even once the pieces start to come together, the film comes to a head-scratching conclusion of sex with corncobs and a close-up of a guy stroking his penis. Today IFC released the first domestic trailer for the film, which they plan on releasing in theaters on October 23 (iTunes on Oct. 25) and in their description they call it a "gripping thriller about money, sex and power" telling the story of "a ship captain returns to Paris to seek vengeance on the man suspected of causing his brother-in-law's suicide." The story seems simple enough, but the...

Claire Denis douses Bastards in her usual oblique dreaminess, equal parts romantic and malevolent, yet that style can’t fully compensate for a tale that, underneath its gorgeous aesthetic affectations, proves frustratingly undercooked. After the suicide of his brother-in-law, tanker captain Marco (a grave, intense Vincent Lindon) abandons ship and returns home to help sister Sandra (Julie Bataille), who blames her husband’s death on his renowned business partner Laporte (Michel Subor), and whose daughter Justine (Lola Créton) has attempted suicide after what a doctor (Alex Descas) claims has been severe sexual abuse. Working from a screenplay co-written by Jean-Pol Fargeau, Denis establishes her scenario – which also involves Marco striking up a ...

The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (Dir. Ben Stiller)

The trailer for Ben Stiller’s newest directorial effort is life-affirming, anthemic, and seems like a heartstring-puller in the best possible way. Trailers are often misleading. The Secret Life of Walter Mitty is occasionally satisfying white-guy wish fulfillment, as if Network’s Howard Beale were in a 2-hour, beautifully choreographed fantasy sequence. Depending who you are, this might sound like the best possible scenario for a trip to the multiplex, and that’s exactly what Twentieth Century Fox is banking on with its Christmas Day release.

Stiller is a capable multi-hyphenate, proven by his successful Hollywood farce Tropic Thunder. He does double duty again here as the title character, a backroom photo editor at Life magazine who suffers flights of fancy when he often zones out mid-conversation. The dreams inside his head are much more fantastical than the ones he stifles in real life.

The 51st New York Film Festival, running September 30th – October 13th, is coming up quickly and the full lineup is well under wraps. As Sound on Sight gets pumped up for the New York hospitality, here are our picks for the most anticipated films of the 51st Nyff, along with their official synopsis and trailer.

Captain Phillips

Paul Greengrass, 2013

USA | 134 minutes

“In April 2009, four Somali teenage pirates in a stolen Taiwanese fishing vessel seized the Maersk Alabama, a cargo ship bound for Mombasa. When the crew resisted, the pirates left with the Captain, Richard Phillips, and tried to make it ashore in the ship’s high speed lifeboat. What followed was a tense stand-off that was closely watched by the entire planet. Paul Greengrass, one of the incontestable masters of reality-based fictional filmmaking, and writer Billy Ray have crafted a film (based on Phillips’ account of the incident) that is...

Bastards

Written by Claire Denis and Jean-Pol Fargeau

Directed by Claire Denis

France/Germany, 2013

Every detail matters in the films of Claire Denis. Her latest, and unquestionably her darkest film yet, Bastards, contains a wealth of information in its first few shots: a man on the verge of what we learn to be a suicide, pacing about his office with the rain crashing down outside; a naked girl, wearing only heels, slowly inching her way down a darkly lit street. We re-visit the latter of these shots later in the film, but under a completely different and disturbing context. Denis is back working in full L’Intrus mode, and while Bastards isn’t nearly as impenetrable as the aforementioned 2004 film, it’s an elliptically charged work that challenges and seduces with its wide gamut of unsettling images and sounds.

Intensely fragmented, the “thriller/revenge” narrative is put in slow-motion by the suicide of Jacques.

A true whodunit type but of a different vibe, the one film from this years’ Cannes that should have gotten picked up around the same time they inquired about Blue Is the Warmest Color is the one film that had no business being regulated to the Un Certain Regard section. Sundance Selects will proudly feature their label at the front of the reels for the Tiff & Nyff festival screenings for Claire Denis’ Bastards. We imagine a deal was long in the works as the distributor has already affixed an October 25th release date.

Gist: Written by Denis and Jean-Pol Fargeau, supertanker captain Marco Silvestri (Vincent Lindon) is called back urgently to Paris. His sister Sandra (Julie Bataille) is desperate – her husband has committed suicide, the family business has gone under, her daughter is spiraling downwards. Sandra holds powerful businessman Edouard Laporte responsible. Marco moves into the building where Laporte has...

Sundance Selects has acquired U.S. rights to Claire Denis’ Bastards, which had its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in the Certain Regard sidebar and is scheduled to play both the Toronto International Film Festival and the New York Film Festival. The distributor plans to release it Oct. 25. The film, with a screenplay by Denis and Jean-Pol Fargeau, stars Vincent Lindon, Chiara Mastroianni and Michel Subor, and was produced by Alcatraz Films and Wild Bunch. Linden plays a ship’s captain who is called back to Paris when the husband of his sister, played by Julie Bataille,

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Revered director Claire Denis brings to the Croisette easily one of her least-accessible jaunts yet with the impenetrable Bastards, an ill-organized revenge tale that unfolds in needlessly incoherent fashion, and despite a rather salacious, sexy premise, fails to get the pulse racing in all other departments. Marco (Vincent Lindon) is one half of the film’s beguiling sibling equation, a man who learns that his brother in law, Jacques (Laurent Grevill) has taken his own life, while niece Justine (Lola Creton) has been taken to hospital after suffering from severe mental trauma. In an attempt to make amends with his estranged sister Sandra (Julie Bataille), Marco moves into the same apartment block as the shady businessman she believes caused Jacques’ suicide, and embarks on an affair with his mistress, Raphalle (Chiara Mastroianni). The full transfixing extent of Denis’ film was made most abundantly clear at the conclusion of the Cannes premiere screening this afternoon, when...

Claire Denis' The Bastards (Les Salaudes) may actually have a decent story, but she has muddled up the narrative to the point it's confusing as all hell. Even once the pieces start to come together, the film comes to a head-scratching conclusion of sex with corncobs and a close-up of a guy stroking his penis. Let's begin with the plot details I gathered after the opening moments and see where we get... It's raining very hard. A man has killed himself. A girl is walking naked in the streets. A man named Marco (Vincent Lindon) works aboard a container ship and receives a phone call with a family emergency and heads home immediately. Upon arrival he moves into an apartment without any furnishings. Here he makes eyes at the woman living downstairs and helps fix the chain on her son's bicycle. Following the film's opening minutes, those were the things I knew.

In the first of his columns from the London Film Festival, Michael reports back with five movies worthy of your attention...

Blogging from a festival is a daunting task. The London Film Festival is a massive deal, at least from a raw numbers point of view. With the late additions to the bill, it comes to over 200 films, in just over two weeks of screenings.

Making sense of it all is made easier by spotting threads, be it thematic, national or topical, and these columns are spinning out of that thinking. I was surprised by how immediately the connections presented themselves. It's silly, really, as this is a pretty well curated amalgam of cinema.

Within the first week of previews, I was blindsided by a selection of films that, you could say, strayed a little close to home. They featured young adults, that key demographic that sits in between maturity and middle age,...

Once in a while, one has to try something new when it comes to films. Unlike Toronto Stories, which is another anthology movie I'd recommend, Paris, je t'aime uses a rather different approach while showing as much audacity as its Canadian counterpart. All in all, the film is a rather enjoyable gem.

First of all, to put it shortly, Paris, je t'aime uses 18 short segments directed by internationally acclaimed directors. Of course, each segment takes place in a different district of Paris. In each segment, the directors, through their own vision, offer their own interpretation of the meaning of love in none other than the most romantic city in the world.

Obviously, the first praise that you'd like to offer for this film is certainly its photography. Without looking like a postal card, Paris, je t'aime has no difficulty to capture the city's beauty in order to fit it into...