France

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Chloé, a fragile young woman, falls in love with her psychoanalyst, Paul. A few months later she moves in with him, but soon discovers that her lover is concealing a part of his identity.Read More »

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Camille, a beautiful fourty-year-old woman, finds a mobile phone that Suzy lost in a station. When Suzy calls her own number, they arrange to meet at Camille’s place so that Suzy can get her phone back. During this encounter, Suzy also meets Clara, Camille’s girlfriend. But they are interrupted by Fabrice, Suzy’s rejected lover, who is drunk and tries to take Suzy back to his place. While Clara takes Suzy to hide in the apartment above theirs, where “Tonton,” a strange old man with a love of yoga, lives, Camille tries to calm down Fabrice. Little by little she consoles him. This is when strange interactions start to occur: Camille becomes passionately involved with Fabrice, while Tonton initiates Suzy into meditation and levitation. Little by little, everyone finds their own path toward happiness, their own place in the game of feelings.Read More »

Bob, a middle-aged gambler and thief, plans a complicated heist. He deals with a number of underworld characters while planning the robbery of the Deauville Casino. Bob eventually hires a gang that includes an ace safecracker. Unfortunately for them, Bob’s nemesis, an old cop who Bob once saved from death, is tipped off after a money-hungry croupier’s wife betrays them. The police are waiting when the gang begins the seemingly impossible task of robbing the casino vault. Meanwhile in the casino, Bob starts to gamble.Read More »

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Malik El Djebena is just 19 when he is sent to prison for six years. Immediately, he falls in with a group of Corsican prisoners who rule the roost. From his experiences with these hardened criminals, Malik learns some invaluable lessons and sets about building his own network…Read More »

Meurtrière is the second movement of a triptych by Philippe Grandrieux whose common thread is anxiety. This performance of four women dancers is the follow-up to White Epilepsy. The theme of Meurtrière is “Das Ding”. For Grandrieux, “it is on the edge of what can be shown and seen.” Read More »

Winner of the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival, Marker’s documentary film, Description d’un combat/Description of a Struggle, examines the condition and circumstances of the young state of Israel and its citizens. The film was made at the time when the Israeli state was 12 years old, and borrows its title from Kafka’s short story. It explores the historical, social, cultural and ethical contexts at the heart of Israel’s existence, and the impact of the tragic and not so distant past on the collective psyche of the nation.Read More »

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L’Amour à Mort (Love Unto Death) is one of the more difficult Resnais films of the 80s. Featuring a core of actors from La Vie Est un Roman who would also go on to make Mélo (and are still working with Resnais on his most recent films), the film has a chamber mood, an enclosed and tightly constructed meditation on two complex subjects – love and death.

Elisabeth (Sabine Azéma) and Simon (Pierre Arditi) have been together as a couple for only a few months when Simon dies. To everyone’s surprise he revives after a few minutes and appears to be quite healthy again. The couple’s relationship appears to become more intense, but Simon is unable to come to terms with his near-death experience, feeling an irresistible desire to withdraw from life. Their friends, a married couple of Protestant pastors, Judith (Fanny Ardant) and Jérôme (André Dussollier) try to rationalise how Simon and Elisabeth must feel, offering guidance and consolation through theological and philosophical discussions, but the couple are beyond the reach of human understanding or explanation, and the pervasive and persuasive music of ‘the other’, of a love beyond death, exerts an irresistible attraction.Read More »

In 1993, Chantal Akerman directed Sami Frey (actor who made the Jeanne Dielman’s making off in 74) in this episode of tv mini series Monologues (others episodes were made by Claire Denis, Romain Goupil, Jacques Renard and Claire Simon). He plays a man who just moved to a new building, and thinks about his situation. Why he leaved the older flat. He remembers about a summer a few years ago, the windows wide open. The air streams, the girls laughing next door… Read More »

Sébastien Grenier,a secret agent eliminates all his rivals in order to decipher who has killed some of his associates.

Sebastien Grenier (Lino Ventura), a former French spy, is working as a financial analyst in Zurich and cultivating an on-going relationship with Anna Gretz (Krystyna Janda), a German teaching at the university. Then his peaceful existence starts to disintegrate when he is recruited by a top French intelligence operative (Michel Piccoli) to discover how one of their own secret agents was found out and executed in broad daylight by a gang of terrorists. Sebastien starts to work but is immediately put off by the fact that his contacts are being murdered before he can reach them. As he gets deeper and deeper into the case, he comes to realize that he is being used in an elaborate political scheme, a scheme that leads to the death of Anna and a vow to get the killers who have now ruined what is left of his life. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie GuideRead More »