France

Synopsis:
Young Queen Margot finds herself trapped in an arranged marriage amidst a religious war between Catholics and Protestants. She hopes to escape with a new lover, but finds herself imprisoned by her powerful and ruthless family.Read More »

A biopic of French pop star Claude Francois, most famous for co-writing the song ‘My Way’. Tracing his life from his childhood in Egypt through his success in France to his untimely death in Paris in 1978.Read More »

Review from TimeOut:
Shot in Paris, it chronicles a couple of distracted days in the life of Orlando (Miranda), an American sports journalist, during which her near-incestuous obsession with her late brother finally prompts her French lover to pack his bags and split. Little else happens: she misses a deadline (Scott Thomas cameos as her editor), meets a basketball team in their locker room and replays some of her brother’s old smell-o-vision software (designed by Chris Marker). But Shamberg uses digital editing to seamlessly integrate her memories/fantasies and larger reflections on the film’s themes into the minimal narrative, generating images of uncommon density and beauty and turning the film into a kind of nervous rhapsody. The ending consolidates the various levels of paradox, bringing us back to earth with an elegiac bump.Read More »

Paul Boyer (Gérard Blain), a jazz pianist in Paris, has lots of free time during the day, and spends it happily with his baby boy, Marc. But money is tight, and so, at his wife’s prompting, Paul takes a chance on running counterfeit dollars to New York for a big payoff. Caught at customs, he spends nine years in an American jail and returns home to find her remarried to a wealthy man and his own paternal rights revoked. The rest of the film—directed by Blain with the harrowing calm of an intimate confession—follows Paul in his obsessive, desperate, coldly calculated effort to see his son again. Though the story is part thriller, part family melodrama, part spiritual journey, part social drama, Blain purges it of all genre artifice: the purity of his method and his sentiments suggests the fresh, primal artistry of the early silent cinema. Released in 1973. In French. — Richard BrodyRead More »

One of two circus twins is cheated of an inheritance by his double, who sets himself up in a chateau.Only to be threatened by a sinister black hooded sect. Rollicking adventures follow, culminating with a big chase on the Eiffel Tower.Read More »

A young couple marry in France in the 1940s and the film follows the arc of their marriage over the next decade. As France recovers from the trauma of the war, the wife finds herself increasingly caught up in acquiring material possessions while the husband prefers a more traditional lifestyle.Read More »

A municipal policeman, Yves steals cars and attacks post offices. But that’s not the money he’s looking for, his quest is of a different nature. He has always loved Aurore but does not admit to him his love or his double life.Read More »

imdb wrote:
Dark, decadent, morbid, passionate – and 34 years later still the strangest memory regarding my very own personal history of watching movies since I was five years old. Despite the fact that this French/Italian production from the early seventies delivers incredibly strong performances by Helmut Berger at the peak of his career, the always excellent Francoise Fabian and the fabulous Paul Meurisse, that it shows you wonderfully filmed locations, and comes up with a solid script including a couple of interesting though perverted characters, the movie itself disappeared totally out of sight. Maybe you need to know Europe or even European or Italian movies to get along with it – I’m not sure about that. But I cannot understand why „Les Voraces” (German title „Die Gefraessigen”) fell into a black hole of total obscurity like hardly any other movie I’ve ever watched before and since.Read More »

IMDB wrote:
Le Gendarme est sans Culotte (or, “The Policeman is Without Trousers”) concerns a dim-witted cop named Foezel, who is played by Marcel Lévesque, best remembered as Mazamette in the great crime serial Les Vampires. Lévesque, whose comic relief character practically stole the show in that series, also starred in his own short comedies. To my way of thinking he suggests a Gallic version of Jimmy Finlayson, Laurel & Hardy’s familiar nemesis, not only in appearance but in his vigorous, over the top performance style. […]Read More »