French

Jonathan Rosenbaum in the Chicago Reader wrote:
Soft and Hard (A Soft Conversation Between Two Friends on a Hard Subject)
Soft and Hard, a highly intimate 48-minute video made by Godard and Anne-Marie Mieville for English television three years later, shows Godard and Mieville at their home in rural Switzerland. In many ways the most intimate and domestic of Godard’s works, it broaches the matter of what distinguishes film from video. Can be viewed in retrospect as necessary preludes to his recently completed magnum opus, the eight-part Histoire(s) du cinema.Read More »

Pediatric Alex Beck (François Cluzet), still devastated by the savage murder of his wife Margot (Marie-Josée Croze) in the early days of their marriage eight years ago, receives an anonymous email.
When he clicks on the link he sees a woman’s face standing in a crowd and being filmed in real time – Margot’s face. Is she still alive? And why does she instruct him to ‘tell no one’?Read More »

Their grown-up son has left home, the draw in her office desk is full of ants, and her husband runs off after the bus leaving her standing on the street. Pomme’s life has become a series of disappointments. Over the years, Pomme and Pierre have drifted apart and their relationship, though not yet dead, is no longer really alive. Even their attempt to drink champagne together fails when the bottle explodes in the freezer. They are out hiking together one day when Pomme suddenly decides to stay behind in the forest, alone …Read More »

The shooting diary of a film shot in France and in the United States. Using photos of Paris and of New York City, excerpts of his former films, statements by friends of his and shooting sequences of the film itself, tormented filmmaker Marcel Hanoun has made a heterogeneous and unclassifiable film about the difficulty of filming.Read More »

Synopsis
A filmmaker witnesses an act of racist police violence in Paris. He discusses with a lady whether and how he should make a film out of this.

Gossip: Vautier wrote the script for this short film in 1957 already and wanted to shoot it. Yet he couldn’t find an actor. All those he asked saw their respective main directors represented in the piece and didn’t want to take the risk of offending them. So only 17 years later Vautier shot the film – and played the role himself…Read More »

Quote:

Determined 15-year-old Lara is committed to becoming a professional ballerina. With the support of her father, she throws herself into this quest for the absolute at a new school. Lara’s adolescent frustrations and impatience are heightened as she realizes her body does not bend so easily to the strict discipline because she was born a boy.Read More »

Quote:
Abouna is a gently heartbreaking look at the lives of two boys growing up impoverished and fatherless in Chad. Filmmaker Mahamat-Saleh Haroun mixes in telling bits of documentary realism with his story of the two boys’ lackadaisical search for their father. The filmmaker takes his time with the tale, lingering on details, like a long shot of the two boys meandering across a field, roughhousing and walking on their hands. Haroun also pointedly displays posters for Charlie Chaplin’s The Kid, Idrissa Ouedraogo’s Yaaba, and Jim Jarmusch’s Stranger Than Paradise outside the little movie theater that the boys visit.Read More »

Synopsis
Jupiter comes down from Mount Olympus and disguises himself as a mortal to romance a woman…Read More »

Quote:
Two crooks flee in a stolen Ford Mustang. they have stolen it from the husband of the girl they rape in the forest. They take her with them to their refuge, a nice modern villa in the countryside. Here, their boss or protector is not so pleased with this girl: this was not planned. But his wife (the one with curly hair) is a lesbian, so she is very pleased with the girl, who has sex with everyone (the two crooks, the boss, his wife, her maid, the girlfriends of the crooks). At the end, the boss hires a killer, who kills the two crooks. And before we reach that scene, there is a long orgy scene with obsessive music, another surprising editing by BénazérafRead More »