French

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Here is a lavish and charming film about a decade in the life of the multi-talented eighteenth century playwright and political activist. Under the guiding hand of director Edouard Molinaro, Fabrice Luchini gives a polished, witty, and mesmerizing performance as this French patron saint of freedom. Throughout his turbulent life, Pierre-Augustin Caron Beaumarchais swung back and forth between the pinnacles of success and the ignominy of imprisonment. His classic plays, The Barber of Seville and The Marriage of Figaro, were politically critical of the ruling class and corruption in high places. They both landed him in jail. But the resilient Beaumarchais found a new avenue for his creativity as a secret agent in England. There he got involved with an American who persuaded him to run arms for the American colonies. Beaumarchais, The Scoundrel is a convincing parable about the intoxicating enchantments and the spiritual firepower of freedom.Read More »

Thirty years ago, Palestinian actress Hiam Abbass left her village in Galilee to follow her dreams of acting in France. In this poignant portrait, both deeply personal and inescapably political, filmmaker Lina Soualem — who is also Abbas’ daughter — traces the story of her mother, her mother’s mother, and their extended family, all of whose lives have been defined by separation, exile, and displacement. Interwoven with nostalgic home video recordings and rich archival footage of Palestinian life through the decades, Bye Bye Tiberias is a moving memoir about the burden of leaving, the endurance of memory, and the determination to forge one’s own destinies and identities.Read More »

In Jean Vigo’s hands, an unassuming tale of conjugal love becomes an achingly romantic reverie of desire and hope. Jean (Jean Dasté), a barge captain, marries Juliette (Dita Parlo), an innocent country girl, and the two climb aboard Jean’s boat, the L’Atalante—otherwise populated by an earthy first mate (Michel Simon) and a multitude of mangy cats—and embark on their new life together. Both a surprisingly erotic idyll and a clear-eyed meditation on love, L’Atalante, Vigo’s only feature-length work, is a film like no other.Read More »

This is 1920: Sophia and Trofim Ivanytch have been living on Vassilievski Island, which is part of Petrograd, for thirteen years. In their house, which looks like a ship wreck, the atmosphere is gloomy. Sophia cannot have children and she is aware that, because of that, she is likely to lose her husband. That is why, when their neighbor dies, she asks Trofim to take in Ganka, his orphaned thirteen-year-old daughter. Trofim agrees and their new life begins…Read More »

PLOT: The fantasies and dreams of two over-the-hill actresses are intertwined with their realities, as the two roommates struggle to survive their day-to-day lives in the expensive and difficult world of Paris. In the end, their struggles are eased when the widow of a man they had both been married to gives them a small legacy.Read More »

Three French conscripts with diverse political motives, are sent to a disciplinary battalion in the midst of the Algerian war. Major Lecoq is to build an elite unit with these wayward soldiers who are exposed to war, torture and death.Read More »

Since his early masterpiece Pain In The Arse [L’emmerdeur, as writer, 1973; remade as director, 2008], Francis Veber, primarily as writer, occasionally as director, has been the genius behind many of the funniest French comedies and filmed farces of the last four decades, including such cheeky pleasures as La cage aux folles, Three Fugitives, and Le dîner de cons. His stock-in-trade is PC-tickling, broad knockabout, duo- or trio-based character comedy tied to tightly-scripted narratives, spot-on timing and slaying reaction shots. These are all present and correct in his highly enjoyable Paris-set latest, a criminal caper that harps back in many ways to that first triumph, this time with cow-eyed Jean Reno and strawberry-nosed Gérard Depardieu as the hard man/idiot couple playing off each other with the same delicious stupidity as did Lino Ventura and Jacques Brel 30-odd years ago. Okay, Tai-toi! isn’t exactly sophisticated entertainment: if you don’t find Depardieu’s electric-shock hairdo funny, you’ll probably hate it. Among the excellent support, Richard Berry gives good deadpan as the police commissaire and André Dussollier is superb as the prison psychiatrist who unwittingly unites the fifth arrondissement’s sharpest, most silent, criminal brain with its dumbest, most talkative ox.
— Wally Hammond, Time Out LondonRead More »

Un Ange follows the encounter of a prostitute, Fae, and a world-famous athlete, Thierry.Read More »

A young mother caught up in an uncontrollable spiral of passion after meeting a stranger abandons everything and leaves Paris. Clemence lives a happy but predictable life with daughter and husband-to-be in a sleepy town somewhere in the Auvergne. Then one day, she meets Camille, a man who turns her life upside down.Read More »