France

Jonathan Rosenbaum in the Chicago Reader wrote:
Soft and Hard (A Soft Conversation Between Two Friends on a Hard Subject)
Soft and Hard, a highly intimate 48-minute video made by Godard and Anne-Marie Mieville for English television three years later, shows Godard and Mieville at their home in rural Switzerland. In many ways the most intimate and domestic of Godard’s works, it broaches the matter of what distinguishes film from video. Can be viewed in retrospect as necessary preludes to his recently completed magnum opus, the eight-part Histoire(s) du cinema.Read More »

Pediatric Alex Beck (François Cluzet), still devastated by the savage murder of his wife Margot (Marie-Josée Croze) in the early days of their marriage eight years ago, receives an anonymous email.
When he clicks on the link he sees a woman’s face standing in a crowd and being filmed in real time – Margot’s face. Is she still alive? And why does she instruct him to ‘tell no one’?Read More »

Their grown-up son has left home, the draw in her office desk is full of ants, and her husband runs off after the bus leaving her standing on the street. Pomme’s life has become a series of disappointments. Over the years, Pomme and Pierre have drifted apart and their relationship, though not yet dead, is no longer really alive. Even their attempt to drink champagne together fails when the bottle explodes in the freezer. They are out hiking together one day when Pomme suddenly decides to stay behind in the forest, alone …Read More »

The shooting diary of a film shot in France and in the United States. Using photos of Paris and of New York City, excerpts of his former films, statements by friends of his and shooting sequences of the film itself, tormented filmmaker Marcel Hanoun has made a heterogeneous and unclassifiable film about the difficulty of filming.Read More »

Synopsis
A filmmaker witnesses an act of racist police violence in Paris. He discusses with a lady whether and how he should make a film out of this.

Gossip: Vautier wrote the script for this short film in 1957 already and wanted to shoot it. Yet he couldn’t find an actor. All those he asked saw their respective main directors represented in the piece and didn’t want to take the risk of offending them. So only 17 years later Vautier shot the film – and played the role himself…Read More »

Quote:
Two crooks flee in a stolen Ford Mustang. they have stolen it from the husband of the girl they rape in the forest. They take her with them to their refuge, a nice modern villa in the countryside. Here, their boss or protector is not so pleased with this girl: this was not planned. But his wife (the one with curly hair) is a lesbian, so she is very pleased with the girl, who has sex with everyone (the two crooks, the boss, his wife, her maid, the girlfriends of the crooks). At the end, the boss hires a killer, who kills the two crooks. And before we reach that scene, there is a long orgy scene with obsessive music, another surprising editing by BénazérafRead More »

Nico is an ethereal poet haunting the gaps between scenes of Jean-Pierre Kalfon, Bulle Ogier, Laurent Terzieff, and Garrel’s father, Maurice, discussing the filmmaker’s staple topics: love, psychoanalysis, and the failures of May ’68.Read More »

Jacques d’Athys, a French adventurer, returns to his home in Nice after an expedition to Indochina where he has picked up a Eurasian fiancée and a book that, unbeknownst to him, contains a coded message revealing the whereabouts of both secret treasures and sensitive government intelligence. This makes him the target of foreign spies, including a Marquise of mysterious Latin origin, a Hindu hypnotist and an evil German doctor, who will stop at nothing to obtain the book.Read More »

Quote:
This three part French TV serial for children (alternate versions exist as a feature, Manoel’s Destinies, and a 4 part Portuguese TV serial, Adventure in Madeira) is the favourite of many devotees of Raúl Ruiz. This is because it ties the enchantment and mystery of Lewis Carroll, Carlo Collodi and the Brothers Grimm to the filmmaker’s experiments with narrative strategies and what he calls the pentaludic model of storytelling (where characters are thrown dice-like into combinations and situations governed by the play of Chance and Destiny).Read More »