A brutal murder in Le Havre: 38 people must have noticed, but say they heard or saw nothing. A claustrophobic, moving, beautifully shot film with a strong cast including Yvan Attal, Sophie Quinton and Nicole Garcia. A clear picture of what fear and shame do to people.

Outside an apartment complex in the French port city of Le Havre, a female student is gruesomely murdered in the middle of the night. The complex’s 38 inhabitants say they heard or saw nothing. Until one of them, the introverted pilot Pierre (Yvan Attal), decides to break the silence. He admits to the police that he was awakened by a desperate, primeval cry. A cry that cannot have escaped his neighbours’ attention.Read More »

Storyline

An episodic look at Grace Elliott (1760-1823) and Philippe, the Duke of Orleans, during the French Revolution. In 1790, they are friends, no longer lovers. He suggests she leave France, she warns him to quit the Revolution. In 1792, she must escape Paris on foot. Less than a month later, she returns on an errand of mercy and shows great courage saving the governor of Tuileries. The Duke in turn steps in to protect Grace. In early 1793, she demands a promise from the Duke that he vote to spare Louis’s life; he does not, and Grace is furious. In April, he warns her of a search; she is arrested and brought before the committee. Orleans, too, is suspect. The guillotine awaits. (From IMDb)Read More »

Dušan Makavejev’s anarchic 1974 comedy goes even further than his previous W.R., depicting more trangressions than the average viewer’s imagination could conjure up.

From Time Out London:
Potentially one of the most scandalous films ever made—except that it has been little seen outside France and has not aged well. Seemingly completely episodic, the ‘plot’ follows the adventures of a beauty queen (Laure), a certified virgin who escapes a disastrous honeymoon with the richest man in the world to join a group of carefree sensualists. The latter are the once-notorious Otto Muehl troupe, who delight in pissing and shitting as a public spectacle. This is cross-cut with the journey of the good ship SS Survival (which sports Karl Marx for a masthead) on the Seine. Laure herself sought legal suppression of certain shots which, in their blanked out form, ironically suggest even more sexual activity on her part. Sadly, this highly idiosyncratic melange of sex and politics, for all its liberating pretensions, only served to put Makavejev’s career back a good few steps. –David ThompsonRead More »

Renowned actress-turned-director Liv Ullmann helms this bleak, nuanced film about marriage and betrayal penned by legendary filmmaker Ingmar Bergman. The story is straightforward — Marianne Vogler (Lena Endre) is a beautiful actress who is married to Markus (Thomas Hanzon), whose job as an orchestra conductor requires numerous concerts abroad, and who dotes on their young daughter Isabelle (Michelle Gylemo). Yet when Marianne has an affair with family friend David (Kirster Henriksson), a film director with a volcanic temper and little regard to those around him, the fallout destroys the marriage and brings grief and suffering to all involved, particularly Isabelle. Ullman and Bergman frame this plot with a tale about an elderly director named Bergman (Erland Josephson, who played opposite Ullman in Bergman’s landmark Scenes from a Marriage) who is trying to write a script about infidelity. In his austerely decorated house on a remote island, Bergman invites an actress, who may or may not be a figment of his imagination, to breathe life into the character of Marianne. Read More »

Umay is a young woman of Turkish descent, fighting for an independent and self-determined life in Germany against the resistance of her family. Her struggle initiates a dynamic, which results in a life-threatening situation.Read More »

Synopsis:

Histoire d’eaux (Bernardo Bertolucci) – A whimsical, cross-cultural melding of east meets west romantic comedy presented in highly fractured (if unremarkable) ellipses that chronicle the couple’s chance encounter, marriage, extramarital temptation, and bizarre separation.

About Time 2 (Mike Figgis) – Multichannel split screening in the vein of Timecode, sometimes converging towards the encounter, other times intersecting temporal planes between childhood and adulthood, life and death. At each transection, the incompleteness of connection, the failure of intimacy, the painful awareness of intranscendable distance.

One Moment (Jirí Menzel) – Poetic, affectionate, lyrical, and elegy for actor Rudolf Hrusinsky composed of a wordless montage of slowed film footage spanning Hrusinsky’s entire career that embodies the human experience: toil, rest, education, romantic love, rejection, desire, aging, frailty. A recurring interstitial black screen with the words “ten minutes” becomes a constant reinforcement of transience, a career and life distilled to the precious few minutes of the film, a reflection of its brevity.Read More »

Synopsis
Tinto Brass scored his first major international success with this shocking but stylish tale of decadence in the Third Reich, inspired by a true story. Madame Kitty (Ingrid Thulin) is the proprietor of one of Berlin’s most luxurious brothels, where many members of the Nazi high command are her regular customers. Kitty is approached by Helmut Wallenberg (Helmut Berger), an S.S. official who orders her to shut down her business and act as his partner as he founds a new bordello, which will exclusively cater to the elite of the Nazi Party and the German military. Unknown to Kitty, Wallenberg’s brothel has been staffed entirely by women recruited by the S.S. for their loyalty to the Reich, and each room has been equipped with secret recording devices, which will allow Wallenberg and his staff to not only gather blackmail material against troublesome officers, but to discover who might be expressing disloyal thoughts about Hitler’s regime when their guard is down. Margherita (Teresa Ann Savoy), a pretty young prostitute working for Kitty, is especially devoted to both her job and her country, but when she falls in love with Biondo (John Steiner), a German officer and frequent customer who has grown disillusioned with both the war and National Socialism, she discovers the true purpose of “Salon Kitty,” and sets out to destroy the operation, with Kitty’s help. Both a scandal and a success in Europe, Salon Kitty initially played the exploitation circuit in the United States in an edited version titled Madame Kitty, though the shorter version still earned an X rating.
~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide
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AMG: Gallic actress-turned-director Josiane Balasko – a Euro cinema mainstay best known for her unconventional romantic lead in Bertrand Blier’s 1989 Trop belle pour toi – helms and co-stars in Cliente, a quirky and offbeat look at the bittersweet life of a male prostitute, which Balasko co-adapted from her 2005 novel with screenwriter Franck Lee Joseph. Eric Caravaca stars as Marco, a French hustler in his mid-30s whose path criss-crosses with that of infomercial actress Judith (Nathalie Baye) in a local park. A nascent divorcee, she’s in the mood for a quick fling, and follows suit with Marco, but this infuriates her sister, Irene (Balasko). Both sexual partners intend to enjoy the liaison as a one-time engagement; for better or worse, it soon repeats itself on multiple occasions and evolves into a deep-seated and very sticky relationship with lots of emotional strings. Significantly, this makes matters very complex and messy for Marco, who happens to be married to hairdresser Fanny (Isabelle Carre) and shares a residence with her, her mother (Catherine Hiegel) and her goth-decked sister (Marilou Berry, Balasko’s real-life daughter)). Fanny, it seems, harbors no knowledge of Marco’s real profession; when she discovers the truth, she systematically attempts to use her husband’s profession to her own selfish advantages in lieu of objecting passionately or leaving him.Read More »

One of the very first prison escape movies, Grand Illusion is hailed as one of the greatest films ever made. Jean Renoir’s antiwar masterpiece stars Jean Gabin and Pierre Fresnay as French soldiers held in a World War I German prison camp, and Erich von Stroheim as the unforgettable Captain von Rauffenstein.Read More »