News

Hulu has officially ordered a new crime drama series based on the 1987 film, Black Widow, with Shameless actress Emmy Rossum in talks to star in the show.

Per Deadline, Rossum is set to executive produce the untitled project alongside New Girl creator Liz Meriwether and is in talks to star in the series as well. The official logline for the untitled series reads: "An FBI agent uses the secrets from a female serial killer’s past to try and find her.” Rossum will reportedly portray the FBI agent if an agreement is reached to star in the series. In addition to serving as executive producer, Meriweather will also serve as writer on the series.

The untitled series is based on 1987's Black Widow, a crime drama directed by Bob Fafelson and written by Ronald Bass. The film stars Debra Winger, Theresa Russell, Sami Frey, Dennis Hopper, Nicol Williamson, Terry O'Quinn,...

Streaming in Europe on Netflix, “Bardot" is a 6-episode, France-produced drama TV series, created, directed by Danièle Thompson and Christopher Thompson, starring Julia de Nunez as the iconic film actress:

"...the series follows the career of French cinema actress Brigitte Bardot, from her first casting as a teenager...

"...to the filming of Henri-Georges Clouzot's feature "La Vérité"..."

Cast also includes Victor Belmondo as 'Roger Vadim', Jules Benchetrit as 'Sami Frey'...

...Géraldine Pailhas as 'Anne-Marie Mucel'...

...Hippolyte Girardot as 'Louis Bardot', Yvan Attal as 'Raoul Lévy'......

...... Anne Le Ny as 'Olga Horstig', Louis-Do de Lencquesaing as 'Henri-Georges Clouzot'...

...Laurent Stocker as 'Pierre Lazareff'...

...Oscar Lesage as 'Jacques Charrier', Noham Edje as 'Jean-Louis Trintignant'...

...Fabian Wolfrom as 'Sacha Distel' and Mikaël Mittelstadt as 'Gilbert Bécaud'.

Click the images to enlarge...

"Bardot" is the new 6-episode, live-action, France-produced drama TV series, created, directed by Danièle Thompson and Christopher Thompson, starring Julia de Nunez, airing in 2023 on France 2:

"...the series follows the career of French cinema actress Brigitte Bardot, from her first casting as a teenager...

"...to the filming of Henri-Georges Clouzot's feature "La Vérité"..."

Cast also includes Victor Belmondo as 'Roger Vadim', Jules Benchetrit as 'Sami Frey'...

...Géraldine Pailhas as 'Anne-Marie Mucel'...

...Hippolyte Girardot as 'Louis Bardot', Yvan Attal as 'Raoul Lévy'...... 

...... Anne Le Ny as 'Olga Horstig', Louis-Do de Lencquesaing as 'Henri-Georges Clouzot'...

...Laurent Stocker as 'Pierre Lazareff'...

...Oscar Lesage as 'Jacques Charrier', Noham Edje as 'Jean-Louis Trintignant'...

...Fabian Wolfrom as 'Sacha Distel' and Mikaël Mittelstadt as 'Gilbert Bécaud'.

Click the images to enlarge...

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"Bardot" is the new 6-episode, live-action, France-produced drama TV series, created, directed by Danièle Thompson and Christopher Thompson, starring Julia de Nunez, airing in 2023 on France 2:

"...the series follows the career of French cinema actress Brigitte Bardot, from her first casting as a teenager...

"...to the filming of Henri-Georges Clouzot's feature "La Vérité"..."

Cast also includes Victor Belmondo as 'Roger Vadim', Jules Benchetrit as 'Sami Frey'...

...Géraldine Pailhas as 'Anne-Marie Mucel'...

...Hippolyte Girardot as 'Louis Bardot', Yvan Attal as 'Raoul Lévy'...... 

...... Anne Le Ny as 'Olga Horstig', Louis-Do de Lencquesaing as 'Henri-Georges Clouzot'...

...Laurent Stocker as 'Pierre Lazareff'...

...Oscar Lesage as 'Jacques Charrier', Noham Edje as 'Jean-Louis Trintignant'...

...Fabian Wolfrom as 'Sacha Distel' and Mikaël Mittelstadt as 'Gilbert Bécaud'.

Click the images to enlarge...

The push and pull of a Sight and Sound crown: if a film’s greatness becomes received wisdom in ways previously never possible—where even an Alfred Hitchcock movie starring Jimmy Stewart receives new forms of attention—the film itself invariably becomes embalmed, a single object of study before it’s the work of artists who thought heavily, intently, obsessively about how to make it exist.

Most writing, discussion, and scholarship on Jeanne Dielman considers what’s before us: its rigor, subversions, thrills, boredom. About which there’s endless consideration, needless to say. And none of which begins explaining how a 24-year-old Belgian woman, directing her third feature, rewrote entire swaths of cinema history in her image, nearly five decades hence dethroning Citizen Kane and Vertigo from the closest known claim to greatest film ever made.

An answer, or at least some open door, has been there longer than most...

Sofia Bohdanowicz and Deragh Campbell's Ms Slavic 7, which is receiving an exclusive global online premiere on Mubi, is showing from June 4 - July 4, 2020 in Mubi's The New Auteurs series.Above: The above image and those throughout this article are a selection of pages from the notebook Deragh Campbell kept as the character Audrey Benac, toward the creation of the monologues in Ms Slavic 7.Considering Sharon Lockhart’s collaboration with Noa Eshkol, in which she retranslates the deceased artist’s elaborate system of choreographic notation into movement, Daniela Zyman negates the perception of a filmed subject as a singular identity and defines it instead as a figure of two, an encounter between the artist and the protagonist. She applies this to Lockhart’s greater body of work, describing Lockhart’s particular ability to allow the coexistence of the subject’s inherent right to self-representation and the artist’s formal impositions,...

One Shot is a series that seeks to find an essence of cinema history in one single image of a movie. Jim Jarmusch's Stranger Than Paradise (1984) is showing May 15 - June 14, 2020 in many countries in the series "Outlaws and Misfits: Jim Jarmusch's Cinema of Outsiders."“We can bet that this film will be a flop,” blurbed Jean Eustache about his fellow post-New-Wave underachiever and pal Luc Moullet’s Anatomy of a Relationship (1975), an early exercise in self-scrutiny coauthored by Moullet’s partner Antoinetta Pizzorno. “That’s the best for me: I’ll plunder it more easily.” In comparable fashion, a 1964 commercial flop made by one of the masters of both Eustache and Moullet, Jean-Luc Godard—who incidentally had helped to launch the careers of both of these disciples—was successfully plundered by Jim Jarmusch twenty years later in Stranger Than Paradise. More specifically, Jarmusch appropriated a black-on-white principle exploited...

Stars: Brigitte Bardot, Sami Frey, Paul Meaurisse, Charles Vanel, Marie-José Nat | Written by Henri-Georges Clouzot, Véra Clouzot, Simone Drieu, Jérôme Géronimi, Michèle Perrein, Christiane Rochefort | Directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot

A mighty success at the time, Henri-Georges Clouzot’s 1960 thriller La Vérité was the film to make a serious actor of Brigitte Bardot. A big part of the hype may have been Bardot’s fling with co-star Sami Frey, which led to her attempted suicide just before the film’s release. Clouzot’s heart attack during filming, and the death of his wife not long after, only adds to the film’s grisly impact.

It’s 1959, and a court in Paris convenes to decide the fate of Dominique Marceau (Bardot). She admits to shooting her lover, Gilbert (Frey); but her defence, led by the wearied Guérin (Charles Vanel), are arguing that she was driven to madness by her victim. They’re up against a fearsome prosecutor,...

Brigitte Bardot proved her mettle as a dramatic actress in H.G. Clouzot’s strikingly pro-feminist courtroom epic, that puts the modern age of ‘immoral’ permissiveness on trial. Is Bardot’s selfish, sensation-seeking young lover an oppressed victim? Clouzot makes her the author of her own problems yet doesn’t let her patriarchal inquisitors off the hook.

La vérité

Blu-ray

The Criterion Collection 960

1960 / B&W / 1:66 widescreen / 128 min. / available through The Criterion Collection / Street Date February 12, 2019 / 39.95

Starring: Brigitte Bardot, Paul Meurisse, Charles Vanel, Sami Frey, Marie-JoséNat, Jean-Loup Reynold, André Oumansky, Claude Berri, Jacques Perrin, Jacques Marin. Fernand Ledoux.

Cinematography: Armand Thirard

Film Editor: Albert Jurgenson

Written by Henri-Georges Clouzot, Simone Drieu, Michèle Perrein, Jérôme Géronimi, Christiane Rochefort, Véra Clouzot

Produced by Raoul Lévy

Directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot

H.G. Clouzot mesmerized audiences with the political outrage of The Wages of Fear and the riveting horror-suspense of Diabolique, but his intellectual,...

Every so often, usually while walking around Toronto on a busy day, I'll be struck by the vividness and accuracy of Agnès Varda's singular portrayal of a day in the life (barely two hours, really, making it even more remarkable) spent in the various layers and spaces of the urban environment. I speak, of course, of Cléo from 5 to 7, Varda's 1962 classic and the first film of hers I fell in love with. In those instances, I'll find myself returning to the moments I've cherry-picked as my favorites over the years, skipping across the linear sequence of events that follow the titular singer (Corinne Marchand) across Paris as she waits for the results from a medical examination within the film's designated timeframe (minus half an hour, as the film famously ends at the ninety minute mark). More than for any other film, engaging in these mental replays feels very much like replaying the events of a day I had once experienced myself long ago—albeit one that I’ve been able to revisit and come to know nearly by heart, complete with all of my favorite moments and details waiting in their proper places, so often have I gone back to that June 21st in Paris, 1961.Varda has even made it relatively easy for anyone who wishes to explore and investigate to their heart's content the events of that fateful first day of summer from so long ago now, not only by making such a crisp cinematic itinerary of the various locations visited in the film itself, but also by helpfully providing a map in her book Varda par Agnès complete with a color-coded legend indicating the locations of key scenes from the film, practically inviting the reader to recreate Cléo’s journey for themselves on the streets of present-day Paris. At once attentive and relaxed in its tour of the city (mainly focused in the Left Bank), Cléo is ably conducted in a number of different registers: as an uncommonly lovely essay-poem on the ebb and flow of urban life, an at-times somber meditation on the precarious balance between life and death, and a revealing and honest study of female identity and the ways it is scrutinized and distorted in the public’s relentless gaze. In a feat of remarkable economy and resourcefulness, the film was shot in chronological order across a five-week period, beginning on the date of the story’s events, synchronized as closely as possible to the times in the day Cléo experiences them, in keeping with narrative fidelity and proper quality of light for each scene. Neatly arranged into thirteen chapters, each with its duration clearly stated so we can easily keep track in real time, Cléo’s lucid odyssey through the various public and private spaces that make up her day is observational cinema at its most fertile, free, and magically attuned to its subjects, partly the result of Varda and her team’s carefully planned and executed shoot, partly that of simply being in the right places at the right times.Together, the films of the French New Wave make up one of the most valuable and immersive audiovisual documents of a specific time and place in history—namely France in the late 1950s and early 1960s—that we have. This is especially true of the Paris-situated films, which create the alluring image of an interconnected network of overlapping stories concentrated in a single city. The sharing of certain actors, cinematographers, writers, composers, and other key artists and technicians across different films by different directors especially helped make the impression of one Paris holding an eclectic anthology of New Wave tales. This perception was further reinforced by the cheeky self-referential winks and nods that so many of the New Wave directors—Jean-Luc Godard in particular—lovingly included in their films as gestures of solidarity and support with their nouvelle vague comrades. This is why the eponymous hero of Jean-Pierre Melville’s Bob le flambeur, noted by many as a crucial New Wave precursor, gets name-checked by Jean-Paul Belmondo in Godard’s Breathless, why Truffaut muses Marie Dubois and Jeanne Moreau both pop up in A Woman Is a Woman, with Moreau getting asked by Belmondo how Jules and Jim is coming along, and why Anna Karina’s Nana glimpses a giant poster for the same Truffaut film as she is being driven to her fate in the final moments of Vivre sa vie.Varda got in on the fun herself in Cléo from 5 to 7 not only by casting Michel Legrand, who provided the film with its robust score, as Cléo’s musical partner Bob (a part that gives the legendary composer a substantial amount of screen time and amply shows off his incandescent charm), but also by extending the invitation to Godard, Karina, Sami Frey, Eddie Constantine, Jean-Claude Brialy, producer Georges de Beauregard, and Alan Scott, who had appeared in Jacques Demy’s Lola. They all show up in Les fiancés du pont Macdonald, the silent comedy short-within-the-film that serves triple duty as a welcome diversion for our stressed heroine, a loving cinephilic tribute to the legacy of Chaplin, Keaton, and Lloyd, and an irresistible, bite-sized New Wave party. And yet I find Cléo to be perhaps the most enchanting of all the New Wave films not for the aesthetic commonalities and cleverly devised linkages that bind it to The 400 Blows, Breathless, Paris Belongs to Us, and its other cinematic brethren, but rather for the tapestry of curious details that root it in its specific time and place and entice on the power of their inherent uniqueness and beauty. “Here,” Varda seems to say as she follows Cléo across the city, “let’s have a look at these interesting people and places on this first day of summer here in Paris, and see what we can see after watching them for a while.” The film’s opening scene continues to extend this invitation as it draws us in closer. It shows us, through the sepia-hued Eastmancolor that deviates from the rest of the film’s silvery monochrome and the “God’s eye” overhead shots (long before Martin Scorsese and Wes Anderson adopted the technique as their own), the cryptic spectacle of Tarot cards being shuffled, placed down, and turned over to reveal the story of Cléo’s potential fate before we’ve even gotten a chance to properly meet Cléo herself. The slightly macabre illustrations to which Varda and cinematographer Jean Rabier dedicate their tight close-ups and the elderly card reader’s accompanying explanations of their meanings lend an air of prophecy to the events to come while also fueling Cléo’s anxiety surrounding her fate (when pressed for a clearer forecast of the future through a palm reading, the reader’s evasive response is less than inspiring). This introduction effectively locks us into Cléo’s perspective, preparing us for the next hour and a half that we will spend quietly observing as, following her distraught exit from the reader’s apartment, she grapples with her fears and insecurities, contemplates and revises her appearance and the identity behind it (tellingly, we discover late in the film that Cléo's real name is Florence), and comes to terms with the ultimately fragile nature of her own mortality. In our allotted chunk of time with her, we see the pouty girl-child subtly shift and adjust her attitude, inching a little closer towards a place of earned maturity, grace, and acceptance regarding her fate, wherever it may take her.Along the way, the film seems to expand to take in as much of the people and places around Cléo as it can. Scene by scene, her Paris makes itself felt and known through key peripheral details: a pair of lovers having an argument in a café near where Cléo sits, listening in; the procession of uniformed officers on horseback heard clip-clopping through the street on the soundtrack and seen reflected in the array of mirrors placed throughout a hat shop; a spider web of shattered mirror and a cloth pressed against a bloody wound, indicating some incident that occurred just before Cléo happened along the scene of the confused aftermath. Other stimuli fill a dazzling program of serendipitous entertainments for us to take in one by one: whirlwind rides in two taxis and a bus, an intimate musical rehearsal in Cléo’s chic, kitten-filled apartment (with Legrand, no less, clearly having a great time, his nimble fingers releasing ecstatic bursts of notes and melodies from Cléo’s piano as if they were exotic birds), the aforementioned silent short, a sculpting studio (the space alive with the indescribably pleasant sound of chisels being tapped at different tempos through soft stone), a frog swallower, a burly street performer who wiggles an iron spike through his arm, and the soothing sights and sounds of the Parc de Montsouris, among a hundred other subtle and overt pleasures scattered throughout this gently orchestrated city symphony, a heap of specificities found and sorted into a chorus of universal experience.Very much in her own way, across a body of work informed by a boundless spirit of generosity, Agnès Varda has gone about carefully collecting and preserving a marvelously varied assortment of subjects throughout her busy life, shedding fresh light on some of the most unlikely (and overlooked) people and places in the world. She refers to her self-made approach to filmmaking as ciné-criture (her own version of Alexandre Astruc's caméra-stylo), which, as we’ve come to know it through Varda’s intensely personal works, is a little like cinema, a little like writing, and uses aspects of both media to make a compassionate, genuine, and wholly original film language. Just as Antoine (Antoine Bourseiller), the dreamy young man whom Cléo encounters in the Parc de Montsouris, translates the world around them into a stream of fanciful observations and flowery speech, so too does Varda, in allegiance with poetry, ditch any semblance of objectivity, going instead for presenting the world simply as she sees it, investing it with her own unmistakable blend of charm, warmth, eloquence, and empathy, all somehow executed with nary a shred of ego or preachiness.“All these stories we simply can’t understand!” randomly exclaims a café patron to her young companion at one point late in Cléo’s journey, perhaps suddenly becoming aware, as we gradually have, of the unfathomable multitude of trajectories that trace themselves across every city every day in a dense tangle of narrative strands. In picking up Cléo’s and diligently following it with her camera for an hour and a half, Varda draws our attention to all those other strands that make up the lives of other people, leading off into their own directions, fated to become entangled with others still. Wisely, deftly, one discovered strand at a time, she helps us better appreciate, again and again, the humble miracle of so many lives coursing and thriving alongside each other, each one special and strange, each rooted in its own distinct flavor of being-ness. Cléo from 5 to 7 in turn roots us in another person’s life for its short time span and ends up giving us a whole universe, casually overflowing with meaning, life, lives, and the myriad details that shape and define them. No, we can’t understand all the stories we come across in a day. But then again, sometimes we don’t really need to understand so much as simply see. See, and accept, and appreciate what is...and then move along to whatever’s next.

Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles is a thriller. It’s as claustrophobic, psychologically penetrating, and exactingly-directed an apartment film as anything Roman Polanski has made. That it takes 200 minutes to watch is almost besides the point. The more you give yourself over to it – shutting out distractions, not breaking it into sections – the tighter its hold. I’ve seen the film three times now, twice at home with all the intrusions that comes with that, and once in a theater with all the peace it suggests. Except, peace for this film means an acute focus on its inner torment.

Jeanne (Delphine Seyrig) is a widow raising her teenage son in a single-bedroom apartment (he sleeps in the pull-out couch in the living room). Over the course of three non-consecutive days, we see Jeanne cook, clean, run errands, knit, read letters, and cook some more (there’s a lot of...

The twenty first entry in an on-going series of audiovisual essays by Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin. Mubi will be showing Chantal Akerman's Tomorrow We Move (2004) from March 8 - April 7, 2017 in most countries around the world. Tomorrow We Move (2004) is Chantal Akerman’s most underrated film. A recent, ambiguous “tribute” to the director in Cineaste magazine dismissed most of her work in fiction filmmaking beyond the 1970s, and was especially down on those fictions involving music, comedy, love, passion, and obsession. So, into the bin go Night and Day (unmentioned in the article), Golden Eighties (“dated and silly”), La Captive (“elephantine, imitative, and strangely fake”), and Almayer’s Folly (sunk by that “terrible French actor Stanislas Merhar”). And Tomorrow we Move? It and A Couch in New York (1996) are merely “exercises that Akerman had to get out of her system.”There is frequently an element of self-portraiture in Akerman’s work,...

David’s Quick Take for the tl;dr Media Consumer:

Mr. Freedom begins with a wail of sirens as Chicago cops swarm in to crack the skulls of rioters and looters. It ends with a catastrophic explosion that levels a city block in Paris and mutilates the body of the movie’s titular hero. In between all that, against a backdrop of Cold War intrigue and superpower paranoia run amok, we see scenes involving overt racist mockery, rape as a spectator sport, sacrilege, poisoning, prostitution, assassination, the sexist degradation of women and a pervasive attitude of unmitigated cynicism and ridicule toward the aspirations of the USA as a bulwark of liberty, democracy and decency against the forces of tyranny and oppression around the world. All the necessary ingredients for a robust satirical take-down of good old fashioned patriotism, American-style! The politics are radical, the humor is often guttural, and the...

The ongoing vitality of the French New Wave doesn't need to be reiterated, nor the importance of Jean-Luc Godard. However, getting to see his films from that era on the big screen is a rare treat, which is why you'll want to make time this spring for "Band Of Outsiders." Read More: 10 Great European Neo-Noir Films Yep, it's the movie inspired the name of Quentin Tarantino's company, A Band Apart. Featuring Sami Frey, Claude Brasseur, and Anna Karina, and released four years after the groundbreaking "Breathess," it's a melancholy romance and crime flick rolled into one. Here's the synopsis: Franz (Sami Frey) and Arthur (Claude Brasseur) don’t have money, jobs, or prospects, but they do have a black convertible and a shared romantic interest in Odile (Anna Karina). When Odile lets slip that a stash of cash is ineptly hidden in the isolated villa where she lives, the...

Jean-Luc Godard’s early films were distinct from each other in tone and form – romantic comedies, outlaw-chic, dystopian visions – connected only by the ‘shifting centre’ of his cinematic world, his wife and muse, Anna Karina

Jean-Luc Godard had a problem with endings. His early films often finish with a throwaway closure, a death, not quite real, distantly presented. His films are all middle, yet a sense of ending imbues them. For Godard, even love itself is something that is always winding down and his lover, his wife, the muse of the best of his early movies, Anna Karina, embodies this problem. Watching Bande à Part (1964) and Pierrot le Fou (1965), I really didn’t want these films ever to finish; the deep pleasure of being in the company of Karina, and Claude Brasseur and Sami Frey and Jean-Paul Belmondo, is so beguiling that you want the fun to last a little longer.

Forget film art for a minute. Bob Rafelson and Ronald Bass's smart and sexy murder thriller throws Debra Winger and Theresa Russell into a slick neo-noir tale with fancy glamour trimmings, and comes up a bright, intelligent entertainment. A government agent tracks a serial killer that none of her superiors believes in -- who ever heard of a female Bluebeard character, who marries 'em and burys 'em? Black Widow Blu-ray Twilight Time Limited Edition 1987 / Color / 1:85 widescreen / 102 min. / Ship Date October 13, 2015 / available through Twilight Time Movies / 29.95 Starring Debra Winger, Theresa Russell, Sami Frey, Dennis Hopper, Nicol Williamson, Terry O'Quinn, D.W. Moffett. Cinematography Conrad L. Hall Production Designer Gene Callahan Film Editor John Bloom Original Music Michael Small Written by Ronald Bass Produced by Harold Schneider Directed by Bob Rafelson

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

You know how sometimes one's significant other will insist on seeing a movie you don't want to see,...

Love’s Connections: Sautet’s Frustrating, Savvy Love Story

Out of the many representations of cinematic emotional complexities French filmmakers master over most is the messy actuality of that thing called love. Director Claude Sautet went on to make Cesar and Rosalie in 1972, his third consecutive film with star Romy Schneider (they would work on five films together, all told) and also his first union with frequent collaborator Yves Montand. An attempt to portray the complicated elusiveness of loving the one you’re with, at its core the film is about a love triangle, with a beautiful woman as the ever shifting apex. Its title is actually misleading, and could easily have been called Rosalie.

Rosalie (Schneider) is currently dating Cesar (Montand), a wealthy scrap metal dealer with significant business connections. As they get ready to attend a wedding, we get the sense he loves her more than she does him,...

Marguerite et Julien

Director: Valerie Donzelli // Writers: Valerie Donzelli, Jeremie Elkaim

Director and actress Valerie Donzelli has fostered a considerable career as a director over the past several years, starting the her utterly charming 2009 debut The Queen of Hearts. Often working with her partner, actor Jeremie Elkaim, their most notable collaboration was 2011’s Declaration of War, a highly autobiographical film that played in Critics’ Week and was France’s candidate for Best Foreign Language film in 2012. Donzelli’s third film, Hand in Hand took home Best Actor at the Rome Film Festival in 2012 but never received Us distribution. 2015 will be a big year for her, however, starring in two films (one of which is the new Joachim Lafosse title), and directing Marguerite et Julien, based on a 1971 script that Francois Truffaut almost made. Starring Elkaim and a scintillating cast headlined by quickly rising star Anais Demoustier, plus legend Geraldine Chaplin,...

Valérie Donzelli, the actress-turned director who we most recently caught as a supporting player in the garishly dressed Saint Laurent, Bertrand Bonello’s stylized biopic might have found a taste for risky content as cameras are set to lense next week on her fourth feature film. The Cineuropa folks report that Donzelli has completed the casting on Marguerite et Julien, a project that François Truffaut flirted with but ultimately passed on. Completing the cast we find Aurélia Petit (The Science of Sleep), vet thesps Sami Frey and Geraldine Chaplin, reuniting with her fellow Declaration of War‘s Frédéric Pierrot and Bastien Bouillon who join the previously announced duo of Anaïs Demoustier (you can find her in Ozon’s latest, the recently acquired Cohen Media’s The New Girlfriend) and Jérémie Elkaïm (full-time collaborator with Donzelli who we also discovered in Declaration of War). Rectangle Productions’ Edouard Weil (Benoît Jacquot’s...

Marco Bellocchio at the 2013 Open Roads: New Italian Cinema for Dormant Beauty (Bella Addormentata): "So the issue, the theme of awakening back to life is very present." Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze

The Museum of Modern Art and Luce Cinecittà organized by Jytte Jensen, Curator in the Department of Film at MoMA, and Camilla Cormanni and Paola Ruggiero of Luce Cinecittà are presenting Marco Bellocchio: A Retrospective running from April 16 - May 7, 2014. This is the third collaboration, following exhibitions for Pier Paolo Pasolini and Bernardo Bertolucci.

Il Gattopardo luncheon for Marco Bellocchio in New York Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze

The opening night screening of The Wedding Director (Il Regista di matrimoni) starring Sergio Castellitto, Donatella Finocchiaro, and Sami Frey was introduced by Marco Bellocchio. Tonight, Bellocchio and Maya Sansa will introduce Dormant Beauty (Bella Addormentata) which stars Isabelle Huppert, Toni Servillo, Alba Rohrwacher, Pier Giorgio Bellocchio and Sansa at MoMA.

At...

Chicago – “Band of Outsiders,” recently released in a newly-restored Criterion Blu-ray edition, was one of the most influential films of its era and made waves not only when it was released but continues to influence international cinema today. From Quentin Tarantino’s love for the film (reflected both in “Pulp Fiction” and the name of his production company, A Band Apart) to the numerous ways that the fashion and dancing resonate from Paris to “Saturday Night Live,” “Band of Outsiders” is mesmerizingly cool. It’s Godard’s most accessible film and yet it is also a deconstruction of the very genre that he’s presenting. It’s a crime flick in which the crime doesn’t really matter. It’s the people, the love triangle, and, most of all, the attitude that makes it memorable.

Rating: 5.0/5.0

There are few films, maybe none, cooler than “Band of Outsiders”. It is one...

Upstream Color Shane Carruth's new film found its way into 43 theaters and grossed $352,400 over the course of 31 days and now the self-distributed picture finds its way to DVD and Blu-ray. I've already discussed the film and its meaning on more than one occasion (here and here) and certainly recommend you give it a look. I'm not entirely sure it is a film you simply must buy, but I'm certain those of you intrigued by its mysteries will enjoy diving in yourselves.

 

The Rabbi's Cat Perhaps the best animated film released last year, The Rabbi's Cat was ignored by the Academy in favor of studio features. No surprise considering the worst Pixar film to date actually ended up winning the Oscar for Best Animated Feature. For those of you unafraid to watch a movie with subtitles, add Rabbi's Cat to your queue, you won't be sorry.

 

Jack Reacher As a...

Blu-ray Release Date: May 7, 2012

Price: Blu-ray $39.95

Studio: Criterion

Anna Karina makes it happen in Godard's Band of Outsiders.

Four years after his landmark Breathless, the great Jean-Luc Godard (Weekend) re-imagined the gangster film even more radically with his 1964 crime drama Band of Outsiders.

In the Nouvelle vague classic, two restless young men (Sweet Movie’s Sami Frey and Eyes Without a Face’s Claude Brasseur) enlist the object of both of their fancies (Pierrot le fou’s Anna Karina) to help them commit a robbery—in her own home. An audacious and wildly entertaining French New Wave gem, Band of Outsiders is at once sentimental and sour, effervescently romantic and melancholy, and it features some of Godard’s most memorable set pieces, including the headlong race through the Louvre and the ultra-cool Madison dance sequence.

Criterion released a DVD edition of Bande à part back in 2003 which is still available.

★★★☆☆ César and Rosalie (1972) is a piece of fanciful French whimsy by director Claude Sautet. An obscure little drama starring Yves Montand, Romy Schneider and Sami Frey, this film, though never really going anywhere, strangely manages to hold your attention with its languid, laid back approach. Rosalie (Schneider) is a divorced mother of one who happily divides her time between her mother's house, where she lives with her siblings and daughter, and her boyfriend César's apartment. César (Montand) has made a fortune dealing in scrap metal and, though he loves Rosalie dearly and she him, he seldom shows his appreciation for her outwardly.

Read more »...

Movie hits and misses on the dancefloor as clip joint looks at the be- Everybody Dance Now!

A Japanese proverb lurks behind this week's Clip joint: "We're fools whether we dance or not, so we might as well dance."

As probably our earliest form of storytelling, dance is an elemental expression of our humanity. It can embody every emotion, from love to sorrow to the yearning for legwarmers.

Frowsty film buffs might be wary of the form, perhaps due to associations with emotionally inauthentic pop videos and musicals. Perhaps that's why, sometimes, dance is smuggled into film, barely hinted at by all that has gone before. The surprise can be funny, magical and/or jarring. It can gild the viewer's goodwill or dash it to smithereens in one fell kick ball change. Let's one-two-step through five of the best examples:

1) The Fisher King sees Terry Gilliam swap the Holy Grail...

From a masterpiece of film noir to classic Gene Kelly musical An American in Paris, French film critic Agnès Poirier chooses her favourite sets in the city

As featured in our Paris city guide

Les Enfants du Paradis, Marcel Carné, 1943-45

Penned by poet Jacques Prévert and featuring the enigmatic Arletty, dashing Pierre Brasseur and melancholic Jean-Louis Barrault, Les Enfants du Paradis takes place in Paris in the 1840s and tells the story of the contrarian love of Garance and Baptiste. One key scene takes place in the boulevard du Temple, known at the time as boulevard du Crime. "You smiled at me! Don't deny it, you smiled at me. Ah, life's beautiful and so are you. And now, I shall never leave your side. Where are we going? What! We've only been together for two minutes and already you want to leave me. When will I see you again?...

Yesterday saw the release of The Town on Blu-Ray – a thriller that sees a group of Charlestown thieves rob a bank and take the manager hostage… a typical heist film that combines action and suspense in abundance. Films about robbers have been a staple of cinema for nearly 100 years, in fact the gangster film was an early success genre in Hollywood during the days of Edward G. Robinson and James Cagney.

Although the basic heist film narrative has proved to be popular worldwide, it has particularly flourished in the UK and France in particular, with a number of notable productions coming out of these countries. Below are ten heist films that combine the best elements of this sub genre, as we pit the U.S., U.K. and France against each other in a quest to find the best heist film out there!

10. The Day They Robbed The Bank Of England...

With this genre-transcending work, Jean-Luc Godard lifted all the heist elements out of the heist genre. When is a minute of onscreen silence not a minute of onscreen silence? When it's actually 37 seconds, to be exact. With the famous 'minute of silence' that actually clocks in at that significantly shorter time (and yet, oh how long it feels!), Jean-Luc Godard playfully and deftly drove Band Of Outsiders into the realm of genre-play that he commanded so well. Ostensibly a heist movie about a girl (Anna Karina, naturally) and a gun (ditto - in this case, those wielded by crooks Claude Brasseur and Sami Frey) and a holdup of some rich folks out in the country, the movie actually has little of the genre trappings, despite its inclusion in Film Forum's nicely programmed Heist retro. Laden with the sort of French, macho sexual overtones that dominate much of Godard's early work,...

Jazz and philosophy are your new passions as you stroll moodily by the moonlit Seine and bebop till dawn at the Caveau de la Hauchette

To Paris, where else! Take the ferry, not the Eurostar. Go on the deck, look intense and fix the horizon like Isabelle Adjani in Adèle H by François Truffaut. Don't forget to buy your weight in Gauloises at the duty free shop before setting foot on the continent. Now you're ready.

When in the City of Light, stay at the Esmeralda (4 rue St Julien le Pauvre, +33 1 43 54 19 20, hotel-esmeralda.fr; doubles from £95 a night), an authentic and just affordable den, right in the Latin Quarter overlooking the Seine, which is a favourite of impoverished but stylish writers and artists. On your first night, stroll by the river deep in thought and listen to one of the saxophonists playing in the shadow of Notre-Dame, like Jeanne Moreau in...

• Tons of stuff out on DVD worth watching, collecting, seeing for the first time, seeing for a second time and seeing for one time only (Duplicity). We begin with one of the best pictures of the year in Ramin Bahrani's Goodbye Solo (which comes equipped with a commentary track from the filmmaker and cinematographer Michael Simmonds). After bringing out films such as Branded to Kill, Criterion continues their further interest with a 5 film box set from Japan's Nikkatsu Noir period (I'll let their page do the heavy talking). Whit Stillman receives more Cc treatment, this time for his The Last Days of Disco and the one that is definitely worth checking out is Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (check out the clip on the Criterion site). The Last Days of Disco New, restored high-definition digital transfer, supervised and approved by director Whit Stillman Audio

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A scene from Kagemusha

Photo: Criterion Collection Back at the end of March it was sadly announced Akira Kurosawa's Ran would not be able to be release on Criterion Blu-ray due to some sort of a rights issue. This meant Criterion's only May Blu-ray release would be The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, which -- if you read my review -- was fine with me, but I am more interested in old classics rather than the new ones from Criterion and it now appears a Kurosawa gem is taking the place of Ran, with a much better selection if you ask me. A scene from Kagemusha

Photo: Criterion Collection While I am sure most people would rather see Yojimbo, Rashomon, Ikiru or Seven Samurai as the first Criterion Blu-ray, the just announced August 18 release of Kagemusha is fine by me. A scene from Kagemusha

Photo: Criterion Collection Just look...

The Film Forum is gird ing for a crime wave. A French crime wave. On the big screen.

On Friday, the West Houston Street movie mecca will begin a five-week, 39-flick festival of Gallic noir and thrillers spanning more than six decades.

The opener (Friday through next Sunday) is Jules Dassin's 1955 "Rififi," best known for the wordless 35-minute break-in. Magnifique!

A slew of French tough guys (Jean-Paul Belmondo, Alain Delon, Jean Gabin among them) and femme fatales (Jeanne Moreau, Catherine Deneuve,...

By Michael Atkinson

Like a missing-link hominid stepping out of the jungle, famous photographer William Klein emerges on 21st century DVD as the great bullgoose Art Film-era satirist we never knew we had. Hallowed for his still images and his documentaries, the Paris-based Klein also made three furiously hostile lampoons that were nominally released, ignored and then forgotten. Until now, you could only find "Who Are You, Polly Maggoo?" (1966), "Mr. Freedom" (1969) and "The Model Couple" (1977) in scruffy bootlegs from pro-am vendors like Pimpadelic Wonderland . and given the movies' paucity of reputation, you would've had little reason to do so. A busy '60s shutterbug for the French Vogue, Klein more or less fell in with the Left Bank New Wavers (Resnais, Demy, Marker, Varda) and the Panic Movement (Fernando Arrabal and Roland Topor both show up in "Polly Maggoo"). But his perspective was New Yawk pugilistic, his humor was mercilessly...

Marriage is not necessarily forever, especially if you Knock Off the groom at the ceremony. That's the plotting march in this dark and convoluted descent into premarital distress in "The Wedding Director" (Il Registra di Matrimoni), a filmic being whose overriding deceptions and flaws give ample cause for an early annulment with discerning viewers.

Centered on unsavory film director Franco Elica (Sergio Castellitto) whose professional ethics have warranted charges of sexual misconduct, the film is populated by an array of tawdry, self-absorbed jerks who not only make it impossible to root for anyone but also further muddle any course of thematic comment.

Depressed because his daughter has married a traditional Catholic and distressed by the downsliding course of his hack career, Franco detaches himself to a small village, where he is commissioned by a pompous prince to film his princess daughter's wedding. Not surprisingly, the predatory Franco becomes immediately infatuated with the princess (Donatella Finocchiaro) who, no surprise here, is depressed about her upcoming marriage. A callous opportunist, Franco decides to sabotage the marriage, rationalizing that he is saving her from an arranged union.

Along the way, he stumbles upon a rival director who has staged his own death as a good career move, thus winning the big film award that eluded him all his life. While this sideshow into the political shenanigans of the film-award universe is wonderful satire, it too is ground down by filmmaker Marco Bellocchio's heavy, gloomy hand. Once again, the "deceased" director is such a drunken lout that we're not even sympathetic with his high ruse.

Shot in somber tones of dark and darker, the film grinds along in a series of talky, static scenes. Sporadically, Bellocchio drowns out these leaden moments with bursts of clamorous piano or out-of-whack sounds. In essence, there is no aesthetic consistency to this hodgepodge and only vile characters to spend our time with.

Saddled with their individual odious roles, the cast's performances of venality and self-deception are ultimately monotonous, though Sami Frey's overarched histrionics as the Prince of Palagonia is unintentionally amusing for its camp dimension.

In a similar vein, director of photography Pasquale Mari deserves praise for his dimly lit compositions, nearly sparing us the ordeal of seeing this monstrosity.

THE WEDDING DIRECTOR

Filmalbatros, Rai Cinema, Dania Film, Surf Film in co-production with Filmtel with the support of Eurimages present a film by Marco Bellocchio

Credits: Director-screenwriter: Marco Bellocchio; Producers: Marco Bellocchio, Sergio Pelone; Executive producer: Luigi Lagrasta; Director of photography: Pasquale Mari; Art director: Marco Dentici; Editor: Francesca Calvelli; Costume designer: Sergio Ballo; Music: Riccardo Giagni.

Cast: Franco Elica: Sergio Castellitto; Bona Gravina: Donatella Finocchiaro; Prince of Palagonia: Sami Frey; Smamma: Gianni Cavina; Micetti: Maurizio Donadoni.

No MPAA rating, running time 100 minutes.