French

This is a documentary on the 70’s French porn industry. There are generally two kinds of porn documentaries–those that actually take an insightful look behind the scenes, and those that are just an excuse to show a lot of nudity and XXX porn footage. This is actually somewhere in between. It’s generously seasoned with porn footage, but there are also a lot of (fully-clothed) interviews, and they even talk to the owners of porn theaters, some typical porn customers (including some pre-adolescent boys who are walking by the the theater–I wonder what their parents thought of that?), as well as a guy who makes promotional billboards for porn movies although he claims never to have seen one!Read More »

Synopsis:
In the town of Thiers, summer of 1976, teachers and parents give their children skills, love, and attention. A teacher has his first child, a single mother hopes to meet Mr. Right, another mom reaches out to Patrick, a motherless lad who is just discovering the opposite sex. Patrick befriends Julien, a new student who lives in poverty with his mother and has a terrible secret. Bruno shows his friends how to chat up girls. Sylvie stages a witty protest against her parents. Brothers give a friend a haircut. A toddler falls from a window and is unhurt. Everybody goes to the cinema. At camp, Martine catches Patrick’s eye. A teacher explains: “Life is hard, but it’s wonderful.”Read More »

A 13-year old boy who lives with his single sick mom in a trailer near the beach, comes in contact with the father he never knew when the man performs as a conductor at the local music theater.Read More »

Synopsis
An ambitious project of Chile-born, Paris-based Raul Ruiz, this psychological drama brings to the screen the famous classic of Marcel Proust with fidelity to its interior monologues and streams of consciousness. Proust (Marcello Mazzarella), on his deathbed in his small apartment on Rue Hamelin, is looking through old photos and remembering his life, as real characters intermingle with fictional ones from his novels. The period is 1914-18, when WWI is raging. Hidden in Paris, thanks to his asthma, Marcel Proust wanders into the night. He finds an aging courtesan in Café de la Paix, which is deserted by the curfew. Charlus, the seducer of young boys, is at the Palais des Felicites where he meets his lovers.Read More »

Quote:
In the forties and the fifties,Henry Decoin’s forte was the film noir:”non coupable” which remains ignored today might be his masterpiece,but there are other interesting works such as “la vérité sur Bébé Donge”or “les inconnus dans la maison” .The almost documentary approach of “Razzia sur la chnouff” (about drugs) seems modern even today.And some works which are difficult to see (“Maléfices” “Bonnes à tuer” and “tous peuvent me tuer” probably deserve to be watched).Read More »

Clement Mathieu has written a book, La cage aux rossignols, which recounts his recent experiences as a teacher in a typical French boys’ school. Having tried, in vain, to get the book published Mathieu succeeds in persuading a friend to print it in the newspaper he works for. The story he tells moves the thousands of people who read it, but it has most impact on the woman who is shortly to be his wife. In the 1930s, Clement Mathieu took up a teaching post at a school run with an iron fist by the authoritarian headmaster Monsieur Rachin. Read More »

Documentary about the 1962 capes fashion, from the designing process by the stylists of “Elle” magazine to photo studio to the women wearing capes in the street.

avec FOULI ELIA, BERTHE GRANVAL, HÉLÈNE LAZAREFF & JEAN LESCOT
scénario DENISE DUBOIS-JALLAIS & JACQUES ROZIER
image WILLY KURANT
musique SERGE GAINSBOURGRead More »

Director Barbet Schroeder makes an ambitious attempt to revisit, in spirit, some of the great B-movies and thrillers of the past in ‘Inju, the Beast in the Shadow,’ which starts out as a smart romp through exotic Japan, only to spiral down into disappointing predictability after a hot opening half-hour. Inspired by a book by cult writer Edogawa Rampo and shot in French and Japanese, the film promises much more than it ultimately delivers. Commercial prospects will rest on the imaginatively recreated Kyoto atmosphere and vivid characters, not least a beautiful geisha into S&M.Read More »

“The Manuscript Found in Saragossa collects intertwining stories, all of them set in whole or in part in Spain, with a large and colorful cast of Gypsies, thieves, inquisitors, a cabbalist, a geometer, the cabbalist’s beautiful sister, two Moorish princesses (Emina and Zubeida) and others that the brave, perhaps foolhardy, Walloon Guard Alphonse van Worden meets, imagines or reads about in the Sierra Morena mountains of 18th-century Spain while en route to Madrid. Recounted to the narrator over the course of sixty-six days, the novel’s stories quickly overshadow van Worden’s frame story. Read More »