French

Depressed Alain Leroy leaves the clinic where he was detoxified. He meets friends, acquaintances and women, trying to find a reason to continue living. Will this help him?Read More »

Synopsis
From birth to death every subject remains intact. Three ages, three women. Daughter, mother, grandmother. Each of them before and after still and always. And the men too, those they meet those they love.Read More »

From imdb:
7 a.m. Catherine receives a phone call from someone called Kirsch. This untimely call throws her into a great state of agitation, which she takes out on her boyfriend, Raphaël. Upset, in turn, Raphaël fights with his employer and even succeeds in getting himself fired. To excuse himself for his early morning call, Kirsch decides to send Catherine a bouquet of flowers, which, in Catherine’s absence, winds up with her neighbors Alice and Antoine. The bouquet will go from hand to hand, setting off all manner of mistakes, misunderstanding and misinterpretations. The bouquet is the catalyst of a multitude of insignificant events, which reveal the whimsy of our lives today.Read More »

Synopsis
In 1974, the French erotic film “Emmanuelle” broke audience records: almost 350 million viewers worldwide and a twelve-year run on the Champs Elysées in Paris. After the success of the sexually explicit Last Tango in Paris, Emmanuelle appeared at a turning point in French society: The sexual emancipation following May ’68 in France.
(arte.tv)Read More »

Quote:
Guillaume Nicloux’s Valley of Love drops audiences in the more than appropriately named Death Valley, which ultimately functions not only as the perfect mirror for the film’s official title, but as the most suitable setting for the interaction between two cinematic giants. It’s as if the landscape had opened itself up into an unadorned crater of a stage to allow Isabelle Huppert and Gérard Depardieu to mingle with one another. They star as a divorced couple named Isabelle and Gérard—a humble acknowledgement from Nicloux that any attempt to forget the stature of these actors will be futile. Isabelle and Gérard haven’t seen each other in a long time, but they’ve reunited in California at the behest of their recently deceased son, Michael, who left them letters before he committed suicide intimating that they forge a reunion and that, if they follow his guidelines, he would reappear to them.Read More »

Quote:
Raúl Ruiz’s City of Pirates is (de)composed under the sign of Surrealism, with its trust in ecstasy, scandal, the call of the wild, mystification, prophetic dreams, humour, the uncanny. Given the surprising swerves and disorientations evoking Buñuel and Dalí, and the confidence in a poetic discourse recalling Eluard and Péret, one wonders if Ruiz didn’t elaborate his scenario using the Surrealist mode of automatic writing. Troubled, graceful Isidore – Ducasse and Duncan? – is a purely Surrealist heroine, part Ophelia, Salomé, Bérénice, prone to trances, somnambulism, hysterical seizure, contact with the ‘other side’. Her calm violence links her to the real life murderesses – Germaine Berton, the Papin sisters – exalted by Breton’s circle, and by Jacques Lacan. Indeed, Lacan’s notion of a psychoanalysis in which the analyst stays off his patient’s wavelength, inspired by the idea of ‘surrealist dialogue’ in which paired monologues at cross purposes strike sparks of meaning off each other, underpins the scatty trajectory of Ruiz’s own graphomania, snared this time as the tale of a Pirate’s City.Read More »

“I try to make films that move people when they are in the theater and make them think only after they leave.” Claude Berri

L’un reste, L’autre part is the story of two old time friends, both in their fifties, both married, who fall for two younger women. The cast is nothing less than stellar: Daniel Auteuil, Nathalie Baye, Pierre Arditi, Miou-Miou and Charlotte Gainsbourg

Attal’s real-life wife, Charlotte Gainsbourg, appears as one of two romantic foils a character drama in which over-middle-age men fall in love with younger women and must confront the ramifications of ending their marriages (one does and one doesn’t, or so the title would have you believe).Read More »

An early example of ultra-realism, this movie contrasts the quiet, bucolic life in the outskirts of Paris with the harsh, gory conditions inside the nearby slaughterhouses. Describes the fate of the animals and that of the workers in graphic detail.
Xavier Martin on IMDBRead More »

Quote:
More than 40 years ago, at the outset of his filmmaking career, Benoit Jacquot worked as an assistant director to the great French novelist and helmer Marguerite Duras, and now, with “Three Hearts,” he has made a film that feels more indebted to her romantic values than anything else in his oeuvre. Here, beneath the surface of a cool, contempo love triangle involving a Parisian man (Benoit Poelvoorde) and a pair of provincial French sisters (played by Charlotte Gainsbourg and Chiara Mastroianni), are all the values Duras held dear: love at first sight, spontaneous tears, all-consuming desire and impossible, self-destructive decisions.Read More »