France

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Gérard Depardieu and Catherine Deneuve star as members of a French theater company living under the German occupation during World War II in François Truffaut’s gripping, humanist character study. Against all odds—a Jewish theater manager in hiding; a leading man who’s in the Resistance; increasingly restrictive Nazi oversight—the troupe believes the show must go on. Equal parts romance, historical tragedy, and even comedy, The Last Metro (Le dernier métro) is Truffaut’s ultimate tribute to art overcoming adversity.Read More »

From frenchfilms.org

Georges Simenon’s 1940 novel Les Inconnus dans la maison is a brooding study in social breakdown and youth disaffection that contains a powerful critique of western society of the 1940s. The same can equally be said of Henri Decoin’s magnificent film adaptation, one of the earliest and most successful attempts to bring Simenon’s bleak, melancholic world to the big screen. This was the second film that Decoin made for the German-run film company Continental-Films during the Nazi Occupation of France and it could hardly be more different in tone and subject from his first, the American-style romantic comedy Premier rendez-vous (1941).Read More »

Plot :
Helen Taylor, a favorite of the London public on stage, is torn between the attention of Lord Stamford (principal shareholder of the theater) and Herbert Campbell, a fervent admirer, novel author, who does not hesitate to abandon his wife to follow The star of the scene.Read More »

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The scenes of “Life as it is” resemble nothing of what has been done so far by the various film producers in the world. They are an attemp at realism carried for the first time to the screen as it was taken before to literature, theater and the arts.Read More »

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When the easygoing would-be novelist Zorg (Jean-Hugues Anglade) meets the tempestuous Betty (Béatrice Dalle, in a magnetic breakout performance) in a sunbaked French beach town, it’s the beginning of a whirlwind love affair that sees the pair turn their backs on conventional society in favor of the hedonistic pursuit of freedom, adventure, and carnal pleasure. But as the increasingly erratic Betty’s grip on reality begins to falter, Zorg finds himself willing to do things he never expected to protect both her fragile sanity and their tenuous existence together. Adapted from the hit novel 37°2 le matin by Philippe Djian, Jean-Jacques Beineix’s art-house smash—presented here in its extended director’s cut—is a sexy, crazy, careening joyride of a romance that burns with the passion and beyond-reason fervor of all-consuming love.Read More »

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A night in a club. The magic of little things happening and ‘dishappening’ with some kind of ironic tendernessRead More »

Synopsis:
When the accident-prone daughter of a French businessman disappears in Mexico and the detective sent down to find her returns empty-handed, the businessman’s company psychologist comes up with an unusual plan – send someone equally accident-prone to find her. Despite detective Campana’s objections and disbelief in bad luck, he and Francois Perrin, the accident-prone man in question, are teamed up and head back down to Mexico to pick up the girl’s trail.Read More »

Synopsis:
No one would think that Manuel Ismora, an esteemed society photographer, is an audacious thief and con artist. The newspapers are ?lled with accounts of Ismora’s criminal exploits, which involve the fraudulent sale of a château and the theft of some valuable jewels, but the police are slow in bringing him to justice. Instead, it is Gabriel Dupon, a modest button salesman who bears a remarkable physical resemblance to Imora, who ends up being taken into custody. Positively identi?ed by Imora’s many victims, Dupon is branded a criminal, and even when he is released by the police through lack of evidence, his reputation is in tatters.Read More »

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In a ballroom dance, a shy young man tries to find a young girl to dance with … The clumsiness and ease of the dancers, the hesitations of the flirters, an atmosphere of celebration and derision, filmed with sensitivity, without comment or dialogue.Read More »