French

Jonathan Rosenbaum from Essential Cinema: On the Necessity of Film Canons (2004), pp. 236-237:

Within my experience, Ruiz is the least neurotic of filmakers; he doesn’t even seem to care whether what he’s doing is good or not (and, as he’s aptly noted, bad work and good work generally entail the same amount of effort). No single film functions as the be-all or end-all of an evolving career but merely as part of an overall process. Example: the 1985 Régime sans pain — one of his films most influenced by his friend Jean Baudrillard, and perhaps the one that most calls to mind grade-Z SF — grew out of a commission to direct a music video. Ruiz offered a counterproposal that he direct several music videos rather than one; once this deal was made, he shot enough material to interconnect the various videos until he arrived at a feature.Read More »

This anthology helmed by four talented filmmakers, Claude Chabrol, Jean-Luc Godard, Hiromichi Horikawa, and Roman Polanski, allows viewers to meet and observe four international con artists. Each story is set within a different city. “Amsterdam” follows the attempts of a seductive Dutch woman to entice an elderly man into buying her an expensive necklace in exchange for sex. He does, and she immediately runs away and uses the bauble, not realizing that it is worth a fortune, to purchase a parrot. In “Paris,” a con man sells a tourist rube the Eiffel Tower.Read More »

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: Paris 1943. After her husband’s death, killed by the Germans, Cora joins the résistance under the pseudonym “La Chatte” (the she-cat). Very skillfully she succeeds in a dangerous mission. The same evening she meets a Swiss journalist, Bernard, and falls in love with him. Bernard is a German officer who now has to decide between his love for Cora and his mission.Read More »

Chains, a hook, white walls. A young woman came to film a man who is tortured … A relentless indictment.Read More »

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Like every summer, a wife and husband go to their beach house in Les Landes for the vacation. But this year, while Marie is napping on the beach, husband Jean disappears. Has he drowned? Run away? He’s vanished without trace. A few months later, we meet Marie again in Paris…Read More »

A grieving woman pursues a couple whom she suspects of killing her son in a hit-and-run.
Equipped with a few items of clothing, a little bit of money, and a weapon, Diane Kramer leaves for Evian. She has a sole obsession: to find the driver of the moka-colored Mercedes who ran over her son and turned her life upside down. But the path of truth has more bends than it appears. Diane discovers that she must confront another woman, both endearing and mysterious.

A lightly Hitchcock-like atmosphere, where fear and guilt take new forms.Read More »

This French musical comedy was based on the stage play Mademoiselle Mozart, written by Yvan Noe, who also co-directed the screen version. Danielle Darrieux plays Denise, the owner of a music shop that is facing closure. Wealthy young Maxime (Pierre Mingand) falls in love with Denise but knows full well that she despises rich folks and would refuse to accept his charity. Thus, Maxime arranges to secretly buy the store then takes a job with the establishment as a humble sheet-music salesman. When Denise finds out that her new employee is actually her boss, she is furious, but rest assured that Love Will Find a Way. The lovely Danielle Darrieux is permitted to sing on several occasions, which she does enthusiastically if not altogether expertly. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie GuideRead More »

Denis Cote chronicles the bizarre after-effects of a small-town tragedy, weaving supernatural elements into the tattered social fabric of a rural community.
Loosely adapted from the debut novel by Montreal-based writer Laurence Olivier, this is a curious film, deliberately threadbare in its plotting and muted in its emotional effect. But it is open to any number of interpretations, touching on fear of outsiders and otherness, the importance of reckoning with the past and the danger for insular small-town communities of being forgotten, as much due to their own closed-off nature as to big-city migration. It could just as easily be dismissed as slight, but you get out of it what you’re willing to put in.Read More »