France

Jonathan Rosenbaum wrote:
Jacques Rozier is perhaps the least known of the most talented French New Wave directors, if only because his output is so limited—about one feature per decade. His subject is teenagers, and his method owes a lot to cinema verite. This first feature, made toward the beginning of the 1960s, is also probably his best; it concerns a young TV worker who is dating two 18-year-old girlfriends and can’t choose between them. Rozier’s graceful style is a mixture of sweetness and light, devoid of pretension and open to youthful energies. Recommended.Read More »

Jonathan Rosenbaum wrote:
To gauge the historical significance of Jean-Luc Godard’s Band of Outsiders (1964) — getting a week’s run in a lovely new print at the Music Box — it helps to know that it was made four years after François Truffaut’s Shoot the Piano Player and three years before Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde. Both Band of Outsiders and Shoot the Piano Player are low-budget black-and-white French thrillers adapted from American crime novels translated into French for the celebrated Serie Noire collection, and they were abject box-office flops on both sides of the Atlantic — though today they embody the glories of the French New Wave in a good many people’s minds. By contrast, Bonnie and Clyde, a Hollywood movie in color that was profoundly influenced by these two films, was a huge success, and its lyrical depictions of violence changed the direction of American cinema.Read More »

Quote:
A young woman returns home after the breakdown of a relationship to discover her father is dating a woman her age.Read More »

Synopsis:
Emak-Bakia shows elements of fluid mechanical motion in parts, rotating artifacts showing his ideas of everyday objects being extended and rendered useless. Kiki of Montparnasse (Alice Prin) is shown driving a car in a scene through a town. Towards the middle of the film Jacques Rigaut appears dressed in female clothing and make-up. Later in the film a caption appears: La raison de cette extravagance (The reason for this extravagance)and it cuts to a car arriving and a passenger leaving with briefcase entering a building, opening the case revealing men’s shirt collars which he proceeds to tear in half. The collars are then used as a focus for the film, rotating through double exposures.
When the film was first exhibited, a man in the audience stood up to complain it was giving him a headache and hurting his eyes. Another man told him to shut up, and they both started to fight. The theatre turned into a frenzy, the fighting end up out in the street, and the police were called in to stop the riot.Read More »

Quote:
Is there a more extraordinary auteur career than that of Bruno Dumont? Having started as one of Europe’s foremost purveyors of extreme cinema and extreme seriousness, he made a startling move to wacky broad comedy, and is handling it as if to the manner born. Now he gives us Ma Loute, or Slack Bay, a macabre pastoral entertainment by the seaside from the belle époque: it’s an old-fashioned provincial comedy with something of Clochemerle, a world in which everyone seems to have drunk their bodyweight in absinthe. There’s also the surreal meta-strangeness of Ken Russell’s version of The Boyfriend.Read More »

Quote:
As summer drags by, 13-year-old Jimmy, forced by circumstance to become an adult too soon, runs up against the limits of his small hometown and his turbulent life, caught between a mother on the slide and a stepfather who keeps her down.Read More »

Quote:
Salomé Lerner just finished writing an autobiograpy. She goes to a TV show called “Apostrophes”, hosted by French TV showman Bernard Pivot. Pivot then imagines a film that could be created from her gripping story. A film entirely made of music because after seeing the young pianist Erik Berchot, Salomé believes seeing her long lost brother, who was a musician as well. A brother she had lost along with her parents in 1943. However, the Lerners did in fact escape the gestapo and might have based themselves in Paris…Read More »

Quote:
The Big Bad Wolf and his friends are plotting to kidnap and ransom Mrs. Rada the Goat’s children for a bag full of gold.Read More »

Synopsis:
An exploration into our planetary past and a search for humanity’s place in the future. With narration by Cate Blanchett.

Review:
In the six years since it was made, Terrence Malick’s poetic odyssey The Tree Of Life has come to be acclaimed as a masterpiece. This is odd for those of us who watched it early on and recall critics complaining about – or even walking out of – its opening sequence, which takes the audience on a rapid trip through swirling nebulae from the big bang to the present day. Malick’s new work, Voyage Of Time, expands on that sequence. Though the original was considered by some to be far too long at 20 minutes, it has now been expanded to 45 for IMAX screenings and to 90 for traditional cinemas. This time around, critics and audiences alike have a better idea what to expect. If you’re the kind of person to consider it at all, you won’t be able to take your eyes off it.Read More »