Synopsis:
Inspector Maigret returns to his home town and is reminiscing over his past when he receives a call for help from the Duchess of Saint-Fiacre. She has just received an anonymous letter informing her that she will soon die. A short while later she does indeed die, from a heart attack. Convinced that she was murdered, Maigret begins his investigation…
– Films de FranceRead More »
Synopsis:
André, a small-time ex-convict, seems to owe money to everyone in Paris, including a crime boss who promises to kill him if he doesn’t repay him by midnight. After failing to find protection from the American embassy and the French police, a despairing André scrambles onto a bridge over the Seine, intending to leap to his death. He is surprised to see a tall, beautiful girl clinging to a rail on the same bridge, apparently preparing to end her life as well. She jumps, and he jumps too, suddenly resolving to save her life. After scrambling ashore, she tells him her name is Angel-A. Together, they take a cruise on the Seine, repay André’s creditors, visit a Parisian nightspot, and more, as Angel-A helps André.He learns that for this purpose she has fallen out of the sky and into his life. André finds himself falling in love with this mysterious beauty.Read More »
An ARTE chanell broadcast. Film quality is very good though. This is one of the first films by Assayas, featuring the great Jean Pierre Leaud. Enjoy.
The story: Nineteen-year-old Adrien comes back to his father’s flat to live; the two haven’t seen each other in three years. Clement has a teenage girl living with him who is using heroin. Louise, the girl, at first rejects Adrien, then later falls in love with him. An unstable situation becomes worse as we learn that Adrien is sought by the police for theft.Read More »
More a work in experimental Dadaism than a film, «Le Retour à la raison» was the first film to be made by the celebrated surrealist artist, Man Ray. The American-born artist made the film soon after he moved to Paris in the early 1920s to found the Dada movement.
The film is very short (three minutes in length) but includes some astonishing and evocative images. The early segments of the film iillustrates a technique which Man Ray pioneered in static photography, the rayograph (or photogramme). Here, an object is placed between a light source and photo-sensitive film, in contrast to traditional photography where photographic film captures light reflected off an object. Read More »
Quote:
Playwright Jean Anouilh was the guiding force behind the unorthodox murder mystery. During a provincial theatre production of Macbeth, several tragedies occur. The actors attribute these calamities to the “curse” supposedly hanging over the Shakespeare play, but police inspector Jean Brochard doesn’t buy this…Read More »
In the modernist high tide of l920s experimental filmmaking, L’ETOILE DE MER is a perverse moment of grace, a demonstration that the cinema went farther in its great silent decade than most filmmakers today could ever imagine. Surrealist photographer Man Ray’s film collides words with images (the intertitles are from an otherwise lost work by poet Robert Desnos’) to make us psychological witnesses, voyeurs of a kind, to a sexual encounter. A character picks up a woman who is selling newspapers. She undresses for him, but then he seems to leave her. Less interested in her than in the weight she uses to keep her newspapers from blowing away, the man lovingly explores the perceptions generated by her paperweight, a starfish in a glass tube.Read More »
Erotic diary of a young bridegroom who, just out of church, swears eternal love to his wife (A. Lualdi), naive, but not too much. Meanwhile, we go through his previous experiences: adulterous wife (D. Darrieux), luxury cocotte (Carol M.), widowed millionaire (E. Feuillère).
Written by Charles Spaak and Jacques Companeez, it is a libel against women in form of hilarious, smiling and amiable comedy, but imbued with poisons. An episodic film cleverly disguised. The underlying cynicism melts in foam of champagne.
(Morandini)Read More »
Quote:
A white Bull Terrier named Baxter is given to an elderly woman by her daughter. As time passes, the dog develops aggressive and murderous behavior in order to be adopted by another family.Read More »
