Catherine Deneuve

In the countryside near Normandy’s beaches lives Marie, unhappy. It’s 1944, she’s married to Jérôme, a somewhat fussy milquetoast, diffident to the war around him and unwilling to move his wife to Paris, where she longs to live, shop, and party. A German outfit is bivouacked at Jérôme and Marie’s crumbling château because its commanding officer is pursuing Marie. She’s also eyed by a French spy working with the Allies as they plan D-Day. He woos her (posing to the Germans as her brother) and, in his passion, forgets his mission. Heroics come from an unexpected direction, and Marie makes her choice.Read More »

Synopsis
An ambitious project of Chile-born, Paris-based Raul Ruiz, this psychological drama brings to the screen the famous classic of Marcel Proust with fidelity to its interior monologues and streams of consciousness. Proust (Marcello Mazzarella), on his deathbed in his small apartment on Rue Hamelin, is looking through old photos and remembering his life, as real characters intermingle with fictional ones from his novels. The period is 1914-18, when WWI is raging. Hidden in Paris, thanks to his asthma, Marcel Proust wanders into the night. He finds an aging courtesan in Café de la Paix, which is deserted by the curfew. Charlus, the seducer of young boys, is at the Palais des Felicites where he meets his lovers.Read More »

Synopsis
One evening, an attractive middle-class woman, France, is pushed out of her car by her irate husband. When her husband drives off, she insists on waiting by the side of the road, certain that he will return once he has cooled off. Whilst waiting, she meets Charles, a man of her own age, who has been struggling for the past two days to repair his car. Although initially frosty towards her, Charles finds himself drawn to France and tries to convince her that her husband has abandoned her for good. France cannot accept this and clings to the faint hope that her husband still loves her…Read More »

Synopsis:
A male Parisian driving school owner who goes to see his doctor and complains of feeling run down is pronounced four months pregnant. When the diagnosis is confirmed by a specialist, the result is an international media frenzy.Read More »

Amanda Weber is a museum employee. Her nephew, Victorien, who feels that wild animals should not be kept in zoos, while hitchhiking saw a mysterious bus with 50 dead tourists that later was found by autorities at the bottom of a lake. When Victorien gets in very serious problems due to what he saw Amanda seeks to find out what happened and soon also becomes a target.Read More »

PLOT:
This family drama by Monicelli features an impressive international cast: Liv Ullmann, Catherine Deneuve, Philippe Noiret, Stefania Sandrelli and Bernard Blier, and it won a series of prestigeous film awards upon its release. It is a less comedic film, than most of Monicelli’s oeuvre up to this point, although the folly of the Italian male is still a central theme, as it had been in so many of his films from the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s.
In this case, a group of several generations of women are pulled together, when an accident strikes the padre familias (Noiret) that they all in various ways are, or have been, involved with. Thus, the second half of the film focusses on this group of very different women, and how they manage to relate to each other and get along, when they are faced with a series of serious challenges.Read More »

Criterion wrote:
In Arnaud Desplechin’s beguiling A Christmas Tale (Un conte de Noël), Catherine Deneuve brings her legendary poise to the role of Junon, matriarch of the troubled Vuillard family, who come together at Christmas after she learns she needs a bone marrow transplant from a blood relative. That simple family reunion setup, however, can’t begin to describe the unpredictable, emotionally volatile experience of this film, an inventive, magical drama that’s equal parts merriment and melancholy. Unrequited childhood loves and blinding grudges, brutal outbursts and sudden slapstick, music, movies, and poetry, A Christmas Tale ties it all together in a marvelously messy package.
Read More »

Le Vent de la Nuit bears little resemblance to the first film in our series, Les Amants Réguliers, made only six years later. The latter, with its rich, fathomless depths of black-and-white photography and insular, period setting stands in stark relief to the former’s auburn-tinged, deep-focus, wide-angle lensing of modern-day Paris, Naples and Berlin. Even so, Le Vent is unmistakably a film by Philippe Garrel, with its deliberate pacing, recurring themes of bitter regret, lost love and longing across generations and relentless focus on the emotional landscape of its three central characters, all which immediately connect it to his other work.Read More »

When the young would-be artist Tino arrives in Venice to live at the house of his uncle while he studies art, he soon discovers that his Austrian/Venetian uncle’s house is packed with mystery — there are abandoned rooms from which strange sounds emanate. Eventually, he is told that his uncle’s insane brother is being kept in rooms on the top floor, and only Uncle Fabio (who is seldom home) is permitted to visit them. However, youth and curiosity impel him onward to even more discoveries.Read More »