French

Quote:
Agnès Varda and JR have things in common: a passion for and the exploration of images in general, and more precisely, for places and for ways of showing, sharing, and exhibiting them. Agnès chose cinema. JR chose to create open air photography galleries. When Agnès and JR met in 2015, they immediately wanted to work together, to shoot a film in France, far from cities, during a trip in JR’s photographic (and magical) truck. Through chance encounters and prepared projects, they reached out to others, listening to them, photographing them, and sometimes putting them on posters. This film also tells the story of Agnès and JR’s friendship, which grew stronger throughout the film shoot, between surprises and teasing, and while laughing about their differences.Read More »

Synopsis:
Jean Valjean (Jean Gabin) is paroled after serving 19 year term in a hard labor prison for stealing some bread. After spending a night in a missionary, he tries to steal some silverware, but he is set straight by a kindly bishop (Fernand Ledoux) who protects him from the police and gives him a set of expensive candlesticks and makes him promise that he has to become a new man that day. Nine years later, Valjean is now a wealthy industrialist and a mayor.Read More »

Quote:
Sombre, as Grandrieux’s first feature film, establishes some of the important characteristics of his art: An insistence on vision, with characters beyond psychologies, driven by biology or metaphysical forces.

Love (a mix of brotherly and sexual Love, a true awareness of the other, a communion) mostly overrules all, and its discovery by Jean creates waves that emanate in every shot, every cut and every sound in the rest of Sombre.Read More »

From slantmagazine

In a 1994 interview, director Claude Sautet, who had a particular fondness for his Max et les Ferrailleurs, expressed directly and unequivocally his disdain for its protagonist, the police detective Max (Michel Piccoli), an efficient, dedicated policeman with no home life and a hard-won icy exterior. Cops like Max weren’t new in 1971—not in French movies, not in the American thrillers and noirs that inspired the French film industry, not even in Sautet’s work. But like a lady once said about a reporter, you may have met hard-boiled before, but Max, he’s 10 minutes. He’s also independently wealthy. Read More »

Synopsis:
In a Parisian suburb of Bagnolet two receptionists who work in the lobby of the titular high-rise drift from one enigmatic situation to the next going to the pool, visiting a maze-like sex club and hunting for new employment.Read More »

Quote:
In a revelatory film debut, the dynamic, fresh-faced Sandrine Bonnaire plays Suzanne, a fifteen-year-old Parisian who embarks on a sexual rampage in an effort to separate herself from her overbearing, beloved father (played with astonishing magnetism by Pialat himself), ineffectual mother, and brutish brother. A tender character study that can erupt in startling violence, À nos amours is one of the high-water marks of eighties French cinema.Read More »

Synopsis:
Thanks to the support and influence of a kindly parole officer, Gino Strabliggi is released from prison and has a chance to start a new life. However, things soon begin to go wrong for him. First his wife is killed in a car accident and then a ruthless police commissioner, Goitreau, begins to taunt him. In spite of his parole officer’s continued presence in his life, Gino soon finds himself on the wrong side of the law – and this time he is unlikely to be given another chance…Read More »

The world sometimes seems divided into two camps: those who recall their teenage years as having been an exhilarating dream, and those who remember them as having been an infernal, nightmarish hell. So it might do to describe Passe ton bac d’abord… [Graduate First… / Pass Your Bac First…] as Maurice Pialat’s “The Best Years of Our Lives”, while bearing in mind all that such a description might suggest: an unsparing portrait of the era when the words ‘sixteen candles’ still might have first conjured the image of flames.Read More »

Synopsis
Stanley Kubrick was very quiet. This bewitching documentary gives us the rare opportunity to hear the rare words of a filmmaker as brilliant as he is secretive, through the interviews he gave to film critic Michel Ciment. Inspired by Kubrick’s famous travelling shots, slow camera movements take us on a walk through a labyrinthine museum, with a décor inspired by “2001: A Space Odyssey”.Read More »