France

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A woman arrives in Paris with her little girl to look for work. With limited funds and no luck, they end up penniless, homeless and dependent on the rare kindness of strangers.Read More »

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Walking towards the fire. In a ceaseless stream of light, people, landscapes and objects lead us to mysterious regions. French filmmaker Patrick Bokanowski’s work is hard to classify – and all the richer for it. Together with his wife Michèle, whose musique concrète compositions form the basis of the sound design, Bokanowski offers a prolonged, dense and visually visceral experience of the kind that is rare in cinema today. Difficult to define and locate, its strangeness is quite unique.Read More »

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Film directed from the play Orpheon, directed by François Tanguy, played by the Compagny of Raft.Read More »

Minne is a very imaginative young lady. She pretends to have had lovers and can’t think of anything better to do other than… to tell Antoine, her husband, the day she marries him. Bad beginning for the couple… As the marriage is not consummated for years, Minne feels frustrated and tries to find elsewhere the carnal knowledge she does not find at home. But Antoine is a kind-hearted man and on the occasion of a trip, a sexual balance is at last found between the two partners.
– Written by Guy BellingerRead More »

The conflict between the generations is a recurring theme in the cinema of Claude Sautet. Often as not, it is peripheral to the main drama, but in Un mauvais fils it is absolutely central, the lightning conductor in a raging emotional thunderstorm. The fraught relationship between a middle-aged father and his estranged son Bruno is mirrored by one of a gentler hue, that between a gay bookshop owner and his attractive employee Catherine, who is his adopted daughter in all but name. Bruno appears to have more in common with Catherine, a perfect stranger, than with his father, and so whilst one relationship withers, another flourishes.Read More »

An English girl and an Indian elephant, born on the same day, share a common destiny.

Tusk review contributed by Steve Puchalski at Shock Cinema

Even though my print of this ultra-obscure Jodorowsky pic was in French with NO subtitles, you really don’t need a translation in order to get the gist of this self-termed “fable panique.” Set in turn of the century India, Jodorowsky drops most of his crazed mystical/religious/hallucinogenic stylings in order to tell a relatively straightforward story of a little girl, Elise, and a little elephant, Tusk, both of whom are born at the same time, and how their lives interconnect over the years (yawn). It begins on a good note, with Jodorowsky intercutting an elephant and a woman, each giving birth.Read More »

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Jacques Audiard made his directorial debut in a spectacular fashion with Regarde les hommes tomber, one of the most visually striking and disturbing French thrillers of the 1990s. The son of the acclaimed French screenwriter Michel Audiard, he had scripted several films (going back to the mid-1970s) before he gravitated to the role of director and pretty well redefined the French film noir with this and his subsequent thriller offerings – Sur mes lèvres (2001), De battre mon coeur s’est arrêté (2005) and, of course, the stunning Un prophète (2009). Those aspects which most characterise Audiard’s distinctive brand of cinema – the nihilistic bleakness, the fragmented narrative, the assortment of fragile outcasts living on the abyss – are present in his first film, an idiosyncratic study in solitude and friendship.Read More »

When the film Son nom de Venise dans Calcutta désert was initially shown in 1976, many viewers found it hauntingly beautiful but deeply perplexing. Some, seeing it as a sign of Duras’ inability to separate herself from the making of India Song, even ascribed the film to a kind of postpartum depression. Since that time, the film has been placed in perspective as an inseparable component of the India cycle as a whole, although little has been written, with certain notable exceptions, on its specific relation to the other works. Son nom de Venise dans Calcutta désert is a purely metanarrative epilogue that culminates the progressive decomposition of spectacle as well as the dismantling of the neocolonial subject conceived as specular identity that was initiated by previous works in the India cycle.Read More »

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A leading member of the French cinema’s avant-garde movement and the director of the Impressionist classic Coeur fidèle (1923), Jean Epstein broke with his more modernist colleagues in the late 1920s to make documentaries and fiction films grounded in the realities of everyday life. Before that evolution, however, Epstein filmed this adaptation of two Edgar Allan Poe stories: “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839) and “The Oval Portrait” (1850). The film’s significance lies not so much in its fidelity to Poe’s stories as in its atmospheric evocation of the author’s gothic sensibility. Read More »