Lili, a woman-child alone in this tough port city, tries to restore order to her life after the death of her lover, a computer “composer.” She has to deal with four local dockworkers — symbolizing fire, water, earth, and wind — struggling between destruction and the path to self-discovery.Read More »
Pierre Collier is dead… He was murdered at the home of senator Henri Pagès and his wife Eliane, where he was spending the weekend with friends. His wife Claire is the number one suspect. She was arrested when found standing next to the victim’s corpse, a gun in her hand. She no doubt had reasons for seeking revenge on her fickle husband. But appearances may be misleading. The weapon is not the one used to commit the crime, and each guest becomes a potential suspect. Pierre’s mistress Esther, Léa his humiliated former girlfriend, Philippe his rival… they all have a motive. And then there’s the senator himself, who is crazy about guns. Captain Grange finds himself confronted by this complex affair – which then becomes even murkier when another murder takes place.Read More »
Quote: Edouard Coleman (Alain Delon) spends his days and nights chasing criminals, but doesn’t see the crook right under his nose. Simon (Richard Crenna), a smooth nightclub owner, works with a small crew to execute daring heists with big payoffs, while the beautiful Cathy (Catherine Deneuve) is torn between them. As cop and criminal do what they do best, paths converge and old scores must be settled. The 13th and final film from Gallic great Melville (Bob Le Flambeur, Army of Shadows) doubles-down the ice-blue look that had been the director’s signature in Le Samourai and Le Cercle Rouge, both starring the equally cool Delon.Read More »
Quote: A young opera-loving mailman, Jules, becomes inadvertently entangled in murder, when a young woman fleeing two mob hit men drops an incriminating cassette into his mailbag. Jules has just recently recorded opera star Cynthia Hawkins’ latest concert, something of a coup as Hawkins refuses to make recordings of any kind. Soon Jules finds himself the target of the hit men, who want the voice recording, and also of another couple of ominous and mysterious agents.Read More »
Quote: In cinematic enfant terrible Jean-Claude Brisseau’s latest outing, “A l’aventure,” the explicit eroticism of his recent oeuvre topples over into outright porn — not because of graphic sex scenes, but rather due to a plot of unalloyed ludicrousness. Granted, levitating 14th-century Flemish nuns rep an inventive step up from randy milkmen, but Brisseau’s humorless intellectual pretentions founder in very shallow waters. Skedded for an April 1 release in France, pic was pre-bought by IFC Stateside, where its Playboy-ish presentation of elegantly writhing naked women brought to ultimate orgasm, combined with disquisitions on the more cosmological Big Bang Theory, might attract horny eggheads.Read More »
Quote: Truffaut and Godard gave a bad name to the “quality” French cinema that preceded them. This film was one of their pet examples of what they saw as staid, boring, unadventurous cinéma de papa. Without an axe to grind, it is actually a breathtakingly bold modernization of the Faust legend, ravishing to look at with its highly stylized sets (Trauner on LSD) and containing multi-layered undercurrents, including a message on the unthinking destructiveness of youth which seems almost like a prescient reply to its New Wave critics.Read More »
FilmLinc wrote: The late Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman brings us an intellectual comedy about a mother and daughter who find themselves living together for the first time in decades. Charlotte, a freelance writer, invites her recently widowed mother, Catherine, to live in her apartment, and the ensuing clutter becomes a source of irritation and strife. When Catherine decides to revitalize her career as a piano teacher, the claustrophobia reaches new and absurd levels. Charlotte continues to pursue her desperate quest for peace as Tomorrow We Move develops into a slyly Jewish tale of rootlessness and familial burdens.Read More »
Plot Synopsis: Two very violent men have conspired to steal a valuable solid gold image of an African deity from the museum in Mali where it is being kept. They had it smuggled out with a number of well-made but very cheap replicas. The plan was to give each of the replicas to the members of a new squash club as a diversion, and profit from the original (worth $1 million) themselves. There is a slip-up, however, and the real statue goes to one of the players. The deliveryman now has to track down all the statues, and in this antic caper comedy, that’s easier said than done. – AllmovieRead More »