French

A biopic of French pop star Claude Francois, most famous for co-writing the song ‘My Way’. Tracing his life from his childhood in Egypt through his success in France to his untimely death in Paris in 1978.Read More »

Ousmane Sembène was one of the greatest and most groundbreaking filmmakers who ever lived, as well as the most renowned African director of the twentieth century—and yet his name still deserves to be better known in the rest of the world. He made his feature debut in 1966 with the brilliant and stirring Black Girl. Sembène, who was also an acclaimed novelist in his native Senegal, transforms a deceptively simple plot—about a young Senegalese woman who moves to France to work for a wealthy white family and finds that life in their small apartment becomes a prison, both figuratively and literally—into a complexly layered critique of the lingering colonialist mind-set of a supposedly postcolonial world. Featuring a moving central performance by M’Bissine Thérèse Diop, Black Girl is a harrowing human drama as well as a radical political statement—and one of the essential films of the 1960s.Read More »

Paul Boyer (Gérard Blain), a jazz pianist in Paris, has lots of free time during the day, and spends it happily with his baby boy, Marc. But money is tight, and so, at his wife’s prompting, Paul takes a chance on running counterfeit dollars to New York for a big payoff. Caught at customs, he spends nine years in an American jail and returns home to find her remarried to a wealthy man and his own paternal rights revoked. The rest of the film—directed by Blain with the harrowing calm of an intimate confession—follows Paul in his obsessive, desperate, coldly calculated effort to see his son again. Though the story is part thriller, part family melodrama, part spiritual journey, part social drama, Blain purges it of all genre artifice: the purity of his method and his sentiments suggests the fresh, primal artistry of the early silent cinema. Released in 1973. In French. — Richard BrodyRead More »

A young couple marry in France in the 1940s and the film follows the arc of their marriage over the next decade. As France recovers from the trauma of the war, the wife finds herself increasingly caught up in acquiring material possessions while the husband prefers a more traditional lifestyle.Read More »

A municipal policeman, Yves steals cars and attacks post offices. But that’s not the money he’s looking for, his quest is of a different nature. He has always loved Aurore but does not admit to him his love or his double life.Read More »

In Belgium today, a young boy and an adolescent girl who have travelled alone from Africa pit their invincible friendship against the cruel conditions of their exile.Read More »

imdb wrote:
Dark, decadent, morbid, passionate – and 34 years later still the strangest memory regarding my very own personal history of watching movies since I was five years old. Despite the fact that this French/Italian production from the early seventies delivers incredibly strong performances by Helmut Berger at the peak of his career, the always excellent Francoise Fabian and the fabulous Paul Meurisse, that it shows you wonderfully filmed locations, and comes up with a solid script including a couple of interesting though perverted characters, the movie itself disappeared totally out of sight. Maybe you need to know Europe or even European or Italian movies to get along with it – I’m not sure about that. But I cannot understand why „Les Voraces” (German title „Die Gefraessigen”) fell into a black hole of total obscurity like hardly any other movie I’ve ever watched before and since.Read More »

An investigative reporter becomes entangled in deadly intrigue when she is assigned to get the story of the presidential candidate, and her job is complicated by a string of political assassinations and attempts.Read More »

Céline G. Arzatian wrote:
A photo shoot on the roofs and in the streets of Paris, under the astonished eyes of the inhabitants.

“The gaze is the way to be amazed again,” says François Reichenbach. A filmmaker of the moment, this intuitive, sometimes instinctive, explains that when you have to prepare a scene to film it, it is already too late. What happens will never happen again, you have to seize the moment. It is spontaneity that interests him: “I only like things that are not prepared, that are done, just like that, in the rush”, he says.Read More »