France

Synopsis:
‘In 1954, at the height of the Indochina War, a French platoon comprising four French soldiers and around forty Laotians is instructed to abandon Luong Ba, an outpost on the border with Laos, and relieve Lao Tsaï, a town 150 kilometres to the south. The platoon is led by the young lieutenant Torrens and his adjutant, Willsdorff, who served in the German army during the Second World War. The expedition will last eight days and will end in dismal failure. Amid the setbacks and personal traumas, Torrens and Willsdorff form a close friendship and learn something about themselves…’
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Great early short film by the underrated French filmmaker Jacques Rozier. The film follows two teenage boys trying to pick up girls in a resort town.
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Marcel, a simple-minded factory worker, is tricked into buying a high-priced American convertable car by a widow determined not to let it fall into the hands of her late husband’s secretary/secret lover. Once in pocession of the car, Marcel only encounters one bad luck episode after another with the excessive gasoline consumtion, his wife trying to sell it to make ammends meet, getting into traffic jams, accidently riding into a car wash with the top down, and more.Read More »

Quote:
“Why would I tie myself to one woman if I were interested in others?” says Jerôme, even as he plans on marrying a diplomat’s daughter by summer’s end. Before then, Jerôme spends his July at a lakeside boardinghouse nursing crushes on the sixteen-year-old Laura and, more tantalizingly, Laura’s long-legged, blonde stepsister, Claire. Baring her knee on a ladder under a blooming cherry tree, Claire unwittingly instigates Jerôme’s moral crisis and creates both one of French cinema’s most enduring moments and what has become the iconic image of Rohmer’s Moral Tales.Read More »

IMDB wrote:
Shocking and disturbing

This obscure French film, still unavailable in English, is a more fictionalized and much more exploitative version of the same real-life murder later covered in Peter Jackson’s “Heavenly Creatures”. The two girls in this movie, however, are decidedly less sympathetic than the heroines of the later movie and they commit not only murder, but every form of religious sacrilege, as well as some unforgivable cruelty to some birds belonging to a poor, retarded handyman. It is thus pretty hard to feel much sympathy toward them (even if I could understand most of what they were saying).
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Quote:
Guy Debord’s final film, In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni (1978) (a Latin palindrome meaning ‘We go round and round in the night and are consumed by fire’), is structured as a dual reflection on the misery of (then) contemporary cinema, and the memory of those revolutionary moments that might have led to another cinema. The central image of the film is the charge of the light brigade, from Michael Curtiz’s 1936 film of the name, which figures the adventure of the Situationists. This is not simply an image of heroic futility, but the image of the evanescent eruption of the Situationists into history. In his commentary Debord argues that the film is organized by two elemental themes: water, as the representation of the flowing time, and fire, as the representation of momentary brilliance, in which water always drowns out this ‘fire.’ While it would be quite possible to give this a quasi-mystical reading it is, in fact, deeply political.Read More »

A news-reel like movie about early part of the French Revolution, shown from the eyes of individual people, citizens of Marseille, counts in German exile and, of course the king Louis XVI, showing their own small problems.

Quote:
“An heroic romanticized telling of the French Revolution of 1789.”
Reviewed by Dennis Schwartz

An heroic romanticized telling of the French Revolution of 1789. It covers the events beginning in 1789, when a constitutional monarchy was created after the storming of the Bastille. It leaves off in 1792, when the aristocracy led a counterrevolution that led to their overthrow and the citizen soldiers were last seen in battle with the invading Prussian army in the Battle of Valmy. It’s directed with great skill and feeling by Jean Renoir (“Whirlpool of Fate”/”Grand Illusion”/”The Rules of the Game”). This episodic epic (told in five chapters: The Court, The Civil and The Military Authorities, The Aristocrats, The Marseilles Locals, and The Ordinary Citizens), co-written with Renoir, Carl Koch and N. Martel-Dreyfus, comes with a cast of thousands dressed appropriately in period costumes. It effectively uses the director’s noted naturalistic style of filmmaking in its well-choreographed battles and chatty behind the scene political intrigues. Read More »

Synopsis
A talented young photographer, Claire is hired by a Canadian tabloid magnate, Mac Roi, to improve his company’s image. Claire knows that her mother once had an affair with this charismatic man and suspects that she may be his daughter. She meets Clève, an honest 30-something publisher whose company has just been bought up by Mac Roi. Claire is so taken by Clève’s unassuming charms that she agrees to marry him. But when she takes an interest in Némo, a photographer involved with illicit tracking, Clève starts to become very jealous…
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Quote:
Thought of by some as the last truly great film of Jean Rollin’s career, the 1982 feature La Morte Vivante (The Living Dead Girl) is a fascinating but flawed feature graced with two of the most unforgettable performances in all of Rollin’s canon. A frustrating work brought to life by some of the most iconic imagery seen in a Rollin film, The Living Dead Girl is a simultaneously ferocious and poetic work deserving of its reputation as one of Rollin’s most important films…Read More »