France

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A young woman stares across a table at the judge who is reviewing her case. Her gaze is both searingly intense and curiously blank. Holding herself preternaturally still, muscles tensed against the turmoil of emotions, she pleads to see the two-year-old daughter who has been removed from her care. “Not all the time, I accept that. But just to change her diaper, to love her.” If there’s a more achingly sad moment in any film of the 2017 Cannes film festival, it’s hard to imagine what it could be. For 12 Jours, veteran documentarian Raymond Depardon (Modern Life, Journal de France) turns his lens on to the desperate, broken souls of the patients who have been involuntarily committed into the care of a Lyon psychiatric institution.Read More »

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“Valmont,” Milos Forman’s spin on “Les Liaisons Dangereuses,” is sumptuous suds, a broadly played trivialization of de Laclos’s 18th-century novel of boudoir intrigue. With its callow cast and playful tone, there is nothing dangerous about Forman’s variation on the novelist’s schemes. It’s a naughty costume dramedy in which the erotic conquests of bored libertines are transformed into children’s kissing games.

Colin Firth and Annette Bening play the story’s sexual strategists, the smarmy Vicomte de Valmont and the devious Marquise de Merteuil, whose machinations sully the virtuous Madame de Tourvel (Meg Tilly) and the virginal Cecile de Volanges (Fairuza Balk). A generation younger than the cast of Stephen Frears’s “Dangerous Liaisons,” the actors’ ages more closely mirror those of the novel’s young adults and teenagers, but they seem less bedroom Machiavellians than members of a 1700s Breakfast Club, not tragically flawed, hopelessly jaded, ultimately doomed and self-destructive, just wet behind the leers.Read More »

Press conference at the Cannes Film Festival, with the virtual participation of Jean-Luc Godard via FaceTime. It took place on May 12, 2018. [Dual audio, original french in the first track, english translation in the second track]Read More »

In 1965, Ingmar Bergman directed “Persona”, a cult film that sums up all the obsessions of the Swedish master, born a hundred years ago. This Arte TV documentary explores the film, based on interviews with film critics, collaborators and the maser himself. Read More »

“I had the idea to call my film ICI ET MAINTENANT, because the cinema is exactly the contrary of the here and now. The cinema is always elsewhere and before…It seemed important to rediscover the magic of the present, that is the here and now. I wanted the spectator during the film to return to himself and thus not to participate in the usual process of identification where he is able to escape from himself” (Serge Bard). Emblematic of the Zanzibar movement’s youthful, revolutionary zeal, the title of Bard’s film ICI ET MAINTENANT is a “seize the day” clarion call, fitting for a generation who sought to change the world. Shot in Brittany, with Caroline de Bendern and Olivier Mosset who were lovers at the time, and no script, the film took as its subject the idea of “contestation .” With its loose, radicalized narrative, and hyper-aestheticized flamboyance, ICI ET MAINTENANT depicts a series of symbolic attacks against society and an atomic factory threatened by sketchy characters. This was the final film Bard made before decamping for Africa and clandestinely converting to Islam, expeditiously sending his film crew, many of whom had worked on ICI ET MAINTENANT, back to Paris, bewildered.Read More »

Synopsis:
‘In a mysterious secure establishment, a prisoner named David effects a remarkable escape. Convinced that he is being pursued, he flees to the open countryside. Here, he meets a reclusive writer, Thomas, who lives in an isolated country house with his young wife, Julia. The couple offer to take David in for a few days and the fugitive reluctantly agrees to stay. Having formed a bond of trust with Thomas, David reveals that he is on the run from the authorities, and that he has discovered a state secret that puts all of their lives in danger. Although Thomas believes the mysterious stranger, Julia is more suspicious and soon becomes convinced that he is a madman who will kill both of them…’
– Films de FranceRead More »

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“Becoming someone else: oneself…, to pull out your heart and take off running.” This is the starting point in darkness and light that inspired French filmmaker Anne Fontaine to make Reinventing Marvin [+], premiered at the 74th Venice Film Festival in the Orizzonti section. An existential journey that starts as “a radical experience of exile” because “the poor, sad, gay child is totally out of place, is a stranger in his own home, within his own family.” This individual in internal exile is Marvin Bijoux (played at age 14 by Jules Porier and then by Finnegan Oldfield as a young man) who has an immense amount in common with the adolescent protagonist of Edouard Louis’s shocking autobiographical novel The End of Eddy, the bestseller from 2014 that served as the trigger for the script written by Anne Fontaine and Pierre Trividic, but the duo have deviated from the same by imagining his escape into a world that is larger than the small village he was born in.Read More »

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An alien has the ability to travel through time, visiting our planet at different times …Read More »

Storyline:
A couple find their erotic love mirrored perfectly in the architecture and mosaics of Iran.Read More »