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Screwball comedy master Ernst Lubitsch took a rare stab at straight drama with 1932’s “Broken Lullaby,” the tense story of a soldier who attempts to make amends with the family of a man he killed in World War I. Preeminent French director François Ozon also wanders into unconventional territory with “Frantz,” his astonishingly beautiful and inquisitive remake of Lubitsch’s film, using it as a springboard for a profound look at alienation and grief.Read More »
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Somewhere in France during the Middle Ages. Béatrice is impatient to see her father return from English captivity. She doesn’t expect however that the father whom she loves from distance will be the most hateful person who will submit her and her family to abuse and humiliation.Read More »
Since the IRS has ordered new taxes, all traders in the village are tormented. Only Torquato Pezzella, a wealthy merchant of rain does not give in to despair general. To escape the contributions it has offered a tax advisor, the very respectable Curto Hector, who is in reality an ignorant on the subject. Still, Pezzella that has so far managed to avoid the taxes through the valuable advice of his new partner. Until one day an inspector of the brigade versatile, the formidable Topponi Fabio decides to check himself the accounting of this individual who is enriched by eye and does not report to the state. The note is difficult to digest; home Pezzella owes more than fifteen million in contributions. However, an unexpected event will upset all the data …Read More »
From Stephen Holden review: “La Nuit des Temps, a mildly racy nightclub in the center of the sleepy French town of Belfort, is the equivalent of Pandora’s box in Anne Fontaine’s haunting erotic fable “Dry Cleaning.” Here is where Jean-Marie Kunstler (Charles Berling) and his wife, Nicole (Miou-Miou), a proper, buttoned-up French couple who have been married for 15 years, find themselves one evening watching a slithery gold-lamé-clad brother-sister drag act called the Queens of the Night lip-synch to Sylvie Vartan records.Read More »
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In 1984, the West German film director Thomas Harlan (maker of Torre Bela [1976] and author of the novel Rosa [2000]), directed Wundkanal: Execution for Four Voices, a joint French-German production about Dr S, a soldier impeached after the war for taking part in the massacre of Jews in Lithuania, and his slide towards suicide. To express his resistance to the forgetting of Nazism as war criminals aged, Harlan cast Alfred Filbert – an actual member of the SS during the War who spoke only German – as Dr S for this experimental fiction film shot in a French studio. (7) Filbert was not aware of what was to happen on set, in front of the camera, mor that the script was merely a pretext or ruse for a psychodramatic ‘happening’: Harlan, in fact, intended to interrogate and expose, ‘live’, his complicity with Nazi atrocities.Read More »
Montgomery Cliff (in his last role) plays James Bower, an American physicist visiting West Germany who’s recruited by a shady CIA agent, named Adam, to help them with the defection of a Russian scientist. But an East German secret agent, named Peter Heinzeman, learns of Bower’s meeting with Adam and threatens Bower to mind his own business, while Bower learns of a back story to all this involving stolen microfilm that each side wants.Read More »
Michèle Rosier (1930-2017) was a pioneering fashion designer (she created the vinyl-intensive V de V sportswear label), a journalist who worked as editor of the women’s lifestyle magazine Le Noveau Femina, and an avowed leftist. She also had a 40+ year career behind the camera, directing several documentaries for French television as well as a handful of theatrical features, most famously the George Sand biopic GEORGE QUI?, starring Anne Wiazemsky. Rosier’s cumulative body of work is staggering, and the movies bely an utterly idiosyncratic filmmaking sensibility: wryly funny, curious about people, jazz-suffused (with scores by Mal Waldron, Keith Jarrett and Aldo Romano) and forever interrogating the limits of liberation in post-1968 France.Read More »
In post-revolutionary France, two neighbouring aristocrats (Nicole Garcia and Jean-Pierre Marielle) embark on a dangerous game when they agree to help a Polish agent.Read More »
