French

It’s summer and Arnaud begins work for the family business, building garden sheds with his brother. Meeting under unusual circumstances, he becomes fascinated with the surly Madeleine.
Obsessed by survival and gripped by prophecies of doom, Madeleine determines to join an elite commando unit. Arnaud follows. As they begin at an army training camp, their bodies and emotions are put to the test.
An improbable mix of teen-movie, rom-com, and pre-apocalypse film, stretching the limits of each genre.Read More »

“For the first decades of their existence, movies were seen not as works of art deserving preservation but as disposable commodities. The notion that they might be preserved, collected and studied was in the air by the mid-1930’s, but it took the pluck and persistence of a single eccentric Frenchman to make the idea a reality. The name of Henri Langlois — subject of “Henri Langlois: Phantom of the Cinémathèque,” a long, affectionate documentary directed by Jacques Richard — is not as well known as those of some directors whose work and reputations he saved from oblivion. Still, Mr. Richard’s film makes a persuasive case for Langlois as one of the most important figures in the history of film and therefore in the history of 20th-century art. And he was, after his own fashion, an artist — a collector and curator with the temperament of a poet. A shabbily dressed, chain-smoking walrus of a man, Langlois emerges in the course of this fascinating film as a maddening, inspiring figure, afire with intelligence and passion.”Read More »

A woman who works for a non-governmental organization (NGO) forms a special relationship with a young boy in war-torn Chechnya.

Cannes Film Festival 2014 Nominated Palme d’OrRead More »

Synopsis by Dan Pavlides
Six directors combined efforts for this 1967 documentary, a searing anti-American indictment of U.S. involvement in Vietnam. Alain Resnais, William Klein, Joris Ivens, Agnes Varda, Claude Lelouch, and Jean-Luc Goddard all direct segments. They are quick to point out that the U.S. is radically divided about their country’s policy to stop the threat of communism.Read More »

Cannes 2014: Timbuktu review – searing fundamentalist drama
By Peter Bradshaw

Abderrahmane Sissako’s passionate and visually beautiful film Timbuktu is a cry from the heart – with all the more moral authority for being expressed with such grace and such care. It is a portrait of the country of his childhood, the west African state of Mali, and in particular the city of Timbuktu, whose rich and humane traditions are being trampled, as Sissako sees it, by fanatical jihadis, often from outside the country. The story revolves around the death of a cow, affectionately named “GPS” – an appropriate symbol for a country that has lost its way.Read More »

Amazon review:
This movie is about a sculptor who loves “making” statues and paintings of young nudes. He becomes obsessed with the daughter (Laura) of a friend, whom he knew a long time ago. He manages to get her mother to take pictures of her for him to use in making a sculpture of her body. Laura develops a crush on him (as did her mother) and after he is blinded, offers to help him finish the statue that he started by posing for him herself. He’s able to finish the clay sculpture by using his hands to feel along her body. They both get caught up in the moment and she becomes a women.

Those who argue about the plot or dialogue have missed the point of a David Hamilton movie. They simply don’t get it. At any rate, there are a few story plots intertwined in this movie if you can pick them out.
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“Maine-Ocean” is the name of a train that rides from Paris to Saint-Nazaire (near the ocean). In that train, Dejanira, a Brazilian, has a brush with the two ticket inspectors. Mimi, another traveler and also a lawyer, helps her. The four of them will meet together later and live a few shifted adventures with a strange-speaking sailor (Mimi’s client).Read More »

After 40 years Alain Tanner again travels to the port of Genoa, where he worked for a shipping company as a 22-year-old. On the back of his own memories he depicts the rough world of the dockworkers, another of those trades that has undergone fundamental changes as a result of recessions, modernisation and liberalisation. “The visual impression of the harbour and the city has changed very little, but what goes on there nowadays is completely different. The city is still as beautiful and alien and somewhat sad as before. But the port is dying, like so many other major ports. In Genoa, as elsewhere in Italy, the economic, social and political climate is highly explosive. But you also feel that things are in flow and the country is on the verge of some far-reaching changes. (…) In this film I wanted to explore my own memories of Genoa, uncover its present and guess at its future. Genoa, this beautiful, this sad, this alien town has become for me a metaphor for society in change.”Read More »

This collaborative film, banned for more than a decade by French censors as an attack on French colonialism (and now available only in shortened form), is a deeply felt study of African art and the decline it underwent as a result of its contact with Western civilization. Marker’s characteristically witty and thoughtful commentary is combined with images of a stark formal beauty in this passionate outcry against the fate of an art that was once integral to communal life but became debased as it fell victim to the demands of another culture.Read More »