France

synopsis:
This dark offbeat comedy from Marco Ferreri features Marcello Mastroianni and Catherine Deneuve. Mastroianni plays Giorgio, who lives on a island somewhere off the Mediterranean coast of France. He lives there with his dog, and the remains of an old German World War II airbase.

He earns his living drawing cartoons. Liza (Deneuve) swims to the island from a rich man’s yacht, and the yacht’s crew confirm the end of her relationship with the owner by bringing her luggage to the island. She and Giorgio meet and become involved. She is jealous of his relationship with the dog and kills her rival while assuming its duties: wearing a collar, fetching sticks, etc.Read More »

Mr Hublot
Director: Laurent Witz, Alexandre Espigares
11 min. – Genre: Animation – Short

Mr. Hublot is a man who lives in a tiny apartment located in a crowded futuristic city. He wears several layers of eye wear and has an odometer-like counter in his forehead which runs forward and backward. Mr. Hublot also displays several OCD symptoms, such as turning the lights on and off several times before leaving the living room and meticulously straightening the pictures on his wall.
Mr. Hublot sees a tiny puppy-like robot shivering in a box. When the box is taken away for garbage disposal, Mr. Hublot takes the robot to his house…Read More »

Winter, Beirut. On a beach littered with cans washed up from the sea, Lili and Michel meet. Perhaps they know each other from before. As they struggle to piece together the fragments of an uncertain past, memories emerge: an act of terrorism, an explosion and the disappearance of a child, Elena.

Woven throughout these fragments is the deep voice of a Japanese narrator who recounts his own experience of a weeping Beirut, and his 27 clandestine years fighting alongside the Palestinians as a member of the Japanese Red Army. His voiceover shapes Michel and Lili’s story, their fate dictated by the enigma created for them by this narrator who turns out to be legendary Japanese New Wave filmmaker Masao Adachi.Read More »

Criterion Synopsis:
Two restless young men (Sami Frey and Claude Brasseur) enlist the object of their desire (Anna Karina) to help them commit a robbery––in her own home. French New Wave pioneer Jean-Luc Godard takes to the streets of Paris to re-imagine the gangster genre, spinning an audacious yarn that’s at once sentimental and insouciant, romantic and melancholy. The Criterion Collection is proud to present the convention-flauting postmodern classic Band of Outsiders (Bande à part).Read More »

Review from the New York Times website, by Vincent Canby :
“Thérèse”, Alain Cavalier’s cool, unsentimental, astonishingly handsome consideration of the life of St. Therese of Lisieux (1873-1897), is a far cry from “The Song of Bernadette.” Here are no heavenly choirs, no visions bathed in celestial light, no skeptics suddenly transformed into believers by miraculous, not otherwise explicable phenomena. Instead, “Thérèse” is resolutely objective. It examines the religious faith and exaltation of Thérèse Martin, later to be known as the Little Flower of Jesus, in the pragmatic way with which she herself seems to have accepted the experience of her conversion. As played – radiantly and with a good deal of humor – by Catherine Mouchet, Thérèse remains a mystery not to be analyzed but to be accepted as a fact of church history.Read More »

Synopsis :
A sexually-troubled young man runs away from home, while a girl wakes up one morning with a single cyclops breast…

____________________

A quatorze ans, l’amour et le sexe intriguent. Entre les phantasmes, les phobies, les incertitudes et les croyances, comment reagir? Roudoudou, qui est tres amoureuse, reve d’avoir une poitrine imposante comme celle de sa mere, mais cela ne marche qu’a moitie. Romain et Francis, quant a eux, sont persuades que leurs meres sont homosexuelles et qu’il leur faudrait coucher avec elles pour les sauver…Read More »

SUMMARY: “It’s a simple subject. A married woman and a single man meet. They love each other, fight, blows rain down. A dog wanders between town and countryside. Seasons pass. The man and woman get back together. The dog comes between them. The other is in one of them. One of them is in the other. And then there are three people. The ex-husband makes everything explode. A second film begins. The same as the first. And yet, not. From the human species, we move on to metaphor. It will end in barking. And a baby’s cries.” JLGRead More »

Daniel Schmid sets this amour fou in exquisite interiors against the glittering backdrop of a clash of cultures: European colonialism on the one hand and the dark, secretive labyrinth of the Arab world on the other.Read More »

Junie (Lea Seydoux) is a beautiful 16 year-old girl who arrives at a new school after the death of her mother. Introduced by her cousin to a band of his close friends, Junie finds herself the subject of constant attention as the colorful group of boys woo her in turn. Eventually she strikes up a close relationship with Otto (Gregoire Leprince-Ringuet), the most gently-mannered of the bunch. Otto seems to genuinely care for Junie, but she soon falls in love with Mr. Nemours (Louis Garrel), her Italian teacher. Nemours is a charmer with a serious penchant for his students, driven crazy by Junie’s mysterious nature. A fresh adaptation of the classic novel La Princesse de Clevese by Mademoiselle de Chartres, LA BELLE PERSONNE is director Christophe Honore’s free and modern interpretation of the classic story of young love.Read More »