France

The unhappily married woman struggles to break free from social pressures and her boring suburban setting.Read More »

Review Summary
The title Life Love Death (originally La Vie, L’amour, la Mort) pretty much runs the gamut of the subject matter which normally appeals to French filmmaker Claude Lelouch. Awaiting execution for murder, Souad Amidou reflects on the events leading up to this sorry contingency. It seems that Amidou can only cohabit with prostitutes, thus he seeks out satisfaction in all the side streets of Europe. Disturbed by a whore’s insults when he was unable to perform, Amidou goes completely off the deep end and begins cutting a swath of death from one end of Spain to another. Lelouch’s principal stylistic decision in Life Love and Death is to draw as many parallels as possible between sex and bullfighting. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie GuideRead More »

Plot Synopsis:
An Egyptian prince has lost his beloved wife and he has sought a dervish who dwells at the base of the sphinx. The prince promises him a vast fortune if the dervish will only give him the opportunity of gazing once more upon the features of his wife. The dervish accepts the offer. He brings in from a neighboring tomb the receptacle containing the remains of the princess. He opens it and removes the skeleton, which he places upon the ground close beside him. Then, turning to the moon and raising his arms outstretched toward it, he invokes the moon to give back life to her who is no more. The skeleton begins to move about, becomes animated, and arises. The dervish puts it upon a bench and covers it with a white linen; a masque conceals its ghostly face.Read More »

Synopsis
Exciting Eddie Constantine outing finds Eddie playing a special agent searching for missing NATO weapons. When he encounters a scientist who has invented a ring that emits a paralysis spray, the hard-boiled spy saves the day with some very Bondian heroics…Read More »

A collective film of 33 shorts

Review:
The specter of the death of cinema and the communal movie experience hangs like an ironic shroud over “To Each His Own Cinema,” a mostly engaging compilation of 33 three-minute films made by leading international auteurs on the occasion of the Cannes Film Festival’s 60th birthday. Venture was conceived and produced by fest prexy Gilles Jacob as a way to celebrate the cinema rather than Cannes per se, and the directors were asked only to express “their state of mind of the moment as inspired by the motion picture theater.” Collection was televised throughout France on Canal Plus simultaneously with its Cannes preem and will be released on DVD in Gaul on May 25.Read More »

A man who returns to Los Angeles to wrap up his mother’s estate sets out in search of the mysterious woman named in her will.Read More »

Le Vent de la Nuit bears little resemblance to the first film in our series, Les Amants Réguliers, made only six years later. The latter, with its rich, fathomless depths of black-and-white photography and insular, period setting stands in stark relief to the former’s auburn-tinged, deep-focus, wide-angle lensing of modern-day Paris, Naples and Berlin. Even so, Le Vent is unmistakably a film by Philippe Garrel, with its deliberate pacing, recurring themes of bitter regret, lost love and longing across generations and relentless focus on the emotional landscape of its three central characters, all which immediately connect it to his other work.Read More »

A family goes on holiday, abandoning the little girl’s dog.

Quote:
Faithful regulars at screenings at La Cinémathèque française, the filmmakers of the New Wave received Langlois’s lessons as an inheritance and were, by their own admission, profoundly influenced by them. On the fringe of these habits and this famous movement, other directors, more fragile or isolated, also carried in them, thanks to other roundabout means, the teachings of the Cinémathèque’s founder who had, himself, briefly trod the path of apprentice filmmaker. In touch with young directors, he supported them as much as he could, showing their works, often previously unseen, and rightly considered it his duty to watch over them.Read More »

A young Kurdish refugee finds friendship from an unlikely source in Welcome, writer-director Philippe Lioret’s dramatic (chronicle of intersecting lives. The tale unfurls in Calais, a seaside community in the north of France where one can glimpse the white cliffs of Dover, England with the naked eye. Vincent Lindon stars as Simon, a local swimming instructor privately reeling in turmoil because he dreads an imminent divorce from his wife (Audrey Dana). Soon, his path unexpectedly criss-crosses with that of Bilal (Firat Ayverdi), a 17-year-old Kurdish refugee with two aspirations: swim the English Channel, and join his girlfriend in England following a lengthy separation. Despite their differing ages, the two men discover that they have a fair amount in common, and soon forge a tight bond marked by similar goals.)Read More »