The 1965 Tour de France was won by a young Italian called Felice Gimondi, riding only as a late inclusion. The French had hoped that the winner would be Raymond Poulidor relieved for once of riding against Jacques Anquetil who had always beaten him. By the Chartreuse, however, Gimondi was unbeatable and even attacked Poulidor and left him behind “just to show Raymond that I could go faster and that I was the better man.”Read More »
Synopsis
L’Amour avec des si is a road movie that follows a middle aged man who gives a young woman a lift. On the car radio, news bulletins warn the population against a recently escaped sadist who is known to prey on yong women. Lelouch often cuts away from the main story, if only briefly, to parallel events that are not necessarily crucial to the story but illustrate what is suggested by the radio.Read More »
Synopsis
Subversive Italian satirist Marco Ferreri directed and co-wrote (with Rafael Azcona) this grotesquely amusing French black comedy about four men who grow sick of life, and so meet at a remote villa with the goal of literally eating themselves to death. The quartet comes from various walks of life — a pilot (Marcello Mastroianni), a chef (Ugo Tognazzi), a television host (Michel Piccoli), and a judge (Philippe Noiret) — but all are successful men with excessive appetites for life’s pleasures (food is used as mere metaphor here, as graphic as that metaphor becomes).
~ Robert Firsching, All Movie Guide
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Synopsis
Marcello Mastroianni stars in this French farce, an absurd “western” set in Paris, with Mastroianni as the incurably vain General George Armstrong Custer. Richard Nixon is the American president, but everyone is costumed appropriately for the previous century. Buffalo Bill (Michel Piccoli), the famous scout, is here portrayed as a limp-wristed bungler. Ugo Tognazzi plays one of Custer’s Native American opponents; he runs a curio shop selling Native artifacts made in sweatshops by white women. The climactic battle is held in a large construction excavation where Les Halles market used to be. The language the two sides use to justify their conflict is lifted from that used in the then-current Vietnam War.
~ Clarke Fountain, All Movie GuideRead More »
Synopsis
In another indictment of the flaws of our so-called civilization, this satire from the late director (Marco Ferreri) features (Christopher Lambert) as Michel, a miserable man who has failed at love and finds solace in a mechanical key holder. Michel has just been dumped by Barbara (Anemone) because he has not been able to get her pregnant. He is feeling pretty low when he finds a key holder with blue eyes and big red lips that responds to the sound of a whistle with “I Love You.” Michel tacks this gadget up on his TV set and whistles away. He seems happy with this fool-proof declaration of love until one day, the key holder responds to the neighbor’s whistle and Michel goes berserk. After all, if your key ring can’t be faithful, what’s the world coming to? ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie GuideRead More »
Inspired by a true story, this atmospheric drama set in 1865 explores the ability of passion to overcome one’s sense of self as young beauty Josephine’s (Isild Le Besco) comfortable life is thrown into chaos by the hypnotic presence of a wild vagabond named Timothee (Nahuel Pérez Biscayart). After Timothee assaults her, Josephine flees with him into the woods and enters into a life of sensual abandon, until neither can tell who is in controlRead More »
A modern drama freely based on real events. One sweltering afternoon in the south of France, four lives intersect: those of Stéphane and Luigi, two cousins barely out of adolescence, Georges, a retired worker, Amelie, Luigi’s girlfriend, and Anne, Amelie’s mother. Four mundane lives full of hurts, humiliations, fears and fatigue which converge on a tragedy.Read More »
In 1979, while making his epochal Holocaust film, “Shoah,” Claude Lanzmann filmed this interview with Maurice Rossel, a Red Cross doctor from Switzerland who, having visited Auschwitz and Theresienstadt in 1944, gave the latter a highly favorable report. Lanzmann questions Rossel insistently about the deceptions that the Germans forced the Jewish inmates of Theresienstadt to perpetrate for Rossel’s benefit—which fooled the doctor completely. Lanzmann culminates his interview by reading a speech with which the Jewish “mayor” of the concentration camp had welcomed Rossel, which, though vague enough to pass unnoticed by the German captors, resounds unambiguously as a thinly veiled cry for help—and an exhortation to Rossel to not be deceived by appearances. Rossel is easy to despise and easier to mock, but the cold light of his detachment serves as a reminder of the tyrannical deceits that, even now, conceal atrocities. Released in 1997.Read More »
A comedy/drama set in a village and centered on a battle of the sexes, where women threaten to withhold sexual favors if their men refuse to fetch water from a remote well.Read More »