French

In the town of Litan, a local festival or celebration day is occurring—townsfolk dress in masks, play music, make merry. Nora (Marie-José Nat) awakens from a nightmare and is convinced that she’s prophesied some impending doom. Rushing to her husband, Jock (Mocky), who’s job involves some kind of demolition work at “the Black Rocks,” she plunges into a bigger nightmare, where telephone calls are routinely interrupted by crossed wires leading to mysterious messages from “the cemetery,” and strange rotoscoped glow-worms lurk in the waters, waiting to dissolve those who fall in…Read More »

Synopsis:
Hopson, a prestigious scientist, studies the effect of snake venom to cure many diseases of mankind. His son enlists in the army when the Great War breaks out. A series of circumstances will lead the scientist to change his way of thinking about values ​​and principles that until then he had as immovable.Read More »

“Le septième ciel” became Raymond Bernard’s last film; a black comedy about a female brewery owner who donates vast amounts of money to charitable causes. The funds to do this, she raises through her liaisons with wealthy gentlemen… who just “happen” to end up dead!Read More »

Synopsis:
With interests ranging from banking to commodities and publishing, the Schoudlers are one of France’s wealthiest and most powerful business families. The present head of this formidable dynasty is Noël Schoudler, a driven, plain-speaking magnate who runs his affairs with an unwavering ruthlessness, and this applies as much to his private life as it does to matters of business. Short of breaking the law, Schoudler is ready to resort to any means to protect his family’s wealth and good name, and anyone who dares to oppose him can expect nothing but the roughest of treatment. Noël Schoudler is a patriarch and a tyrant, a capitalist in every atom of his being. and he seems not to have an ounce of compassion in his soul. The pursuit of wealth and power is all that matters to him.Read More »

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Gérard Depardieu and Wojciech Pszoniak star in Andrzej Wajda’s powerful, intimate depiction of the ideological clash between the earthy, man-of-the-people Georges Danton and icy Jacobin extremist Maximilien Robespierre, both key figures of the French Revolution. By drawing parallels to Polish “solidarity,” a movement that was being quashed by the government as the film went into production, Wajda drags history into the present. Meticulous and fiery, Danton has been hailed as one of the greatest films ever made about the Terror.Read More »

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Unhappy women are being murdered by Emile (Jacques Perrin), a psychotic young man suffering from the delusion that his acts are mercy killings. The detective (Julien Guiomar) assigned to track down the killer resorts to seriously unorthodox and even unethical methods to get his man. In one instance, he impersonates a psychologist on a TV show he and Emile appear on together and attempts to provoke Emile into revealing himself.Read More »

As France is nearing the end of the first Indochina War, an open-minded teenage boy finds himself torn between a rebellious urge to discover love, and the ever-present, almost dominating affection of his beloved mother.Read More »

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Quite simply one of the neatest short films ever made. Directed by Jean-Claude Carriere, with assistance on script from Milos Forman, it’s a quite Bunuelian surreal tale, a portrait of a horrible relationship cut short by the sudden intrusion of the uncanny. I don’t want to say more! But OK: it’s a really great HOTEL MOVIE.

The presence of Michel Lonsdale ought to be enough to sell you on this one, but above and beyond his mere physical appearance on screen, there’s the fact that this is THE ROLE HE WAS BORN TO PLAY.Read More »

Like its predecessor (De l’origine du XXIe siècle), The Old Place examines the role of art in history, only this time in still rather than moving images. Says Michael Althen of this piece, commissioned by the New York Museum of Modern Art in 1999, “[T]he aim is not to give an overview of art history but to cut a path through the forest by asking how art relates to reality and its horrors.” Throughout its mid-length duration, reflections on art and its traces cross swords with future-oriented impulses. The questions it poses are not meant to be answered, but taken as wholesale embodiments of cultural memory, which tends to account for reality via myths and legends. As in the opening image of a monkey dangling from a tree, it is dependent on the presence of gravity to give hierarchical sensibilities a grounding from which to suspend our inhibitions.Read More »