94 min Telling a true story, Becker maintains a low-key approach, courting reality, avoiding music in favour of natural sound, constantly stressing the sheer physicality (warders hands laconically slicing foodstuffs in search of hidden files, prisoners hands feverishly hacking at the unrelenting stone). (In actuality, it was the eyeball of a dead horse getting slit open. A village postman with no sense of humour delivers his mail via bicycle on the day the travelling fair comes to town. Nothing about the films coming-of-age narrative, nor the rise and fall of its core romance, is intrinsically new or daring, yet Kechiches freewheeling perspective on young desire is uncommon in its emotional maturity. MS, Homicides provide the punch lines in this classic gangster comedy. If youre already a subscriber or donor, Oscar Wilde finds Christ in The Happy Prince, Review: The Wolf House explores the traumas of childhood abuse. Jacques Becker He described this, his penultimate film, as a digest of the19 definitive underworld set-ups that could be found in John Hustons picture of doomed gangsters, The Asphalt Jungle. Jany Holt, Not Rated TCH, Amateur illusionist Cline (Juliet Berto) and studious librarian Julie (Dominique Labourier) meet in a park and become practically inseparable so much so that they can try on each others identities like best friends swapping favourite apparel. After his infant brother is abducted by a gang of semi-robotic Cyclops, strong-man One (Perlman) journeys to unite with feisty nine-year-old orphan Miette (Vittet) and go to the sea-rig laboratory inhabited by the evil Krank (Emilfork), his six cloned brothers (Pinon), their diminutive mother, and Uncle Irvin, a sardonic brain floating in a fish tank. Stars: | But also more secretive pointers to social circumstance and the exchange of guilt as Audrans starchy schoolmistress finds herself irresistibly drawn to the ex-army butcher she suspects of being the killer: the fact, for instance, that alongside the killer as he keeps vigil outside the schoolhouse, a war memorial stands sentinel with its reminder of societys dead and maimed. Enter the Void is his third feature and its a kinetic attempt, with added special effects, to capture the spirit of a city, Tokyo, and a dead young American, Oscar (Nathaniel Brown), whose ghost floats about in a vaguely Buddhist manner after being shot dead by cops soon after smoking the drug DMT. Something of a key film in the development of concepts of cinematic modernism, simply because with a script by nouveau roman iconoclast Alain Robbe-Grillet it sets up a puzzle that is never resolved: a man meets a woman in a rambling hotel and believes he may have had an affair with her the previous year at Marienbad or did he? Stars: Ren Lefvre, Our heroine, Adle (Adle Exarchopoulos, astonishing), begins the film as a precocious high-schooler and ends as a grown woman still with plenty to learn about herself. EV, In 1960 French filmmaker Ren Clment was first to adapt Patricia Highsmiths 1955 novel The Talented Mr Ripley Anthony Minghella returned to it 40 years later with Matt Damon and Jude Law in the roles of Tom Ripley and Dickie Greenleaf, played here by Alain Delon and Maurice Ronet. Cline is Julie, Julie is Cline, distinct yet interchangeable: un their varying guises, they dismantle all real-world attachments (a pompous boyfriend and a burgeoning magic career are playfully, hilariously tossed to the wind) so that they can focus on a fantasy. But beyond the films titular concerns (My Sex Life), its strength is in its surprising progression. | Dita Parlo plays Juliette, the smalltown girl married off to Jean (Jean Dast), captain of LAtalante, a grubby barge plying the waterways of rural France. Marie Glory, Director: | Decade French Films of the 1940s A list of French films of the 1940s that I've seen in 2020. Director. The film is, finally, affecting, thanks to a seemingly intuitive understanding of colour, movement and composition, and to an ability to draw from earlier films without ever seeming plagiaristic. Godard's first feature, adapted from an existing scenario written by Franois Truffaut, spins a pastiche with pathos as joyrider Belmondo shoots a cop, chases friends and debts across a night-time Paris, and falls in love with a literary lady. Let us see what each decade of the 20th century had to offer when it comes to the best of French movies. Genre. The acting stinks. To push up the price of his stock, Saccard plans a publicity See full summary, Director: Hes lived in Canada and Chile, enjoyed a few girlfriends, but now hes single, serious and more committed to his religion and future. This serial saga (in 10 episodes) follows a band of robbers whose principals include Satanas, who keeps a howitzer behind the fireplace and a bomb under his top hat, and Irma Vep, the notorious anagram, to whom Olivier Assayas rendered homage 80 years later. Hate. Pierre Fresnay, In his angry yet compassionate denunciation of a rural society corrupting and undoing an unorthodox angel by self-interest, immorality, alcoholism and spiritual bankruptcy, the director conducts you to the heart of lifes paradox. These cookies help provide information on metrics the number of visitors, bounce rate, traffic source, etc. Once you start digging into the history of French film, though, youll discover pleasures unlike those found anywhere else in world cinema. Le Cercle Rouge quotes a pseudo-Buddhist aphorism essentially asserting that people who are destined to meet will do it in the red circle, notwithstanding what zigzag paths they may follow towards it. The beauty of monochrome 50s Paris helps, but the magic is in observing the thrill even a maltreated child will snatch from a book, a film or a day truanting at a funfair, through the gaze of a former critic whose elation at getting his hands on a camera burbles through every shot. Annabella, Kassovitz has made only one film before (the droll race-comedy Mtisse), but La Haine puts him right at the front of the field: this is virtuosic, on-the-edge stuff, as exciting as anything weve seen from the States in ages, and more thoroughly engaged with the reality it describes. Film waves like the French New Wave and New French Extremity have influenced the cinema of Europe and the world to an extent greater than we can imagine. The film gives us Jean-Louis (Jean-Louis Trintignant), a dapper 34-year-old engineer with a good line in wry, toothy smiles who works for Michelin in Clermont-Ferrand. Professor Barbenfouillis and the Institute of Incoherent Astronomy decide its high time they planned an investigative voyage to the Moon. Raymond Bussires, Not Rated A lot of men commenting feel really threatened by an alternate perspective on a Hollywood movie. Bernadettes opponents harp on the fact that the Lady appeared in a place of filth, a cesspool. They claim this is unfitting for the Virgin (who bore Christ in a stable). The result is something utterly indescribable, partway between comedy and tragedy, romance and realism, film and dream. One of the best movies I've ever seen. Romy Schneider is all feline elegance and sphinx-like intelligence as the girlfriend of brooding wastrel Alain Delon. A small gem, polished to perfection by an unassuming professional. During the late 1940s and early 1950s, much of this funding was allocated to French mainstream cinema with established directors and producers. No inflated or unrealistic price quotes. 106 min Like Billy Liar made around the same time Umbrellas makes escapist. The bureaucracy of miracles interrogates her again and again, all the way to the end of her life. Michle Morgan, The shocked expression on the actors face and the dramatic music show it. But while some episodes are protracted, many are unforgettably funny, wonderfully observed, and always technically brilliant. | Its a staggering, intensely moving reflection onold age and lifes end, which at its heart offers two performances of incredible skill and wisdom from French veterans Jean-Louis Trintignant and Emmanuelle Riva. Charles Vanel steals the show late on as a shambling, pre-Columbo detective, but the real star is Clouzot as director. This agile representation of 19th century Pariss dramaturgical demi-monde, shot in the midst of World War II, observes an enigmatic woman (Arletty) fancied by four unlike men (all grounded on real individuals): a thespian, a felon, a nobleman, and -most movingly- a mime (Jean-Louis Barrault, in a yearning-immersed act to be remembered). Hes experimental in some ways; in others, he has the refinement of Michael Bay. | | Filmmakers from David Cronenberg to Eli Roth have been chasing the sensation ever since. The movie denoted Truffauts transition from top critic to the rising star auteur of the French New Wave. Jean Gabin, Orane Demazis, Marcel Dalio, Jean Seberg, 1280, but this eccentric, darkly comic look at a series of bizarre murders is stylishly crafted and thoroughly entertaining. Robert Bresson ^ "Le Caf du port (1939)". Wonderfully moving, with great performances. Le Masque describes how an old man wears a mask of youth at a dance hall to extend his youthful memories. Lon Mathot, Crime, Drama, Romance. A blackly surreal procession of amoral and/or illegal acts proceed haphazardly from Depardieus discovery of his lost penknife embedded in a dying metro traveller, and his subsequent alliance with his wifes murderer and a police inspector, producing a cherishably Buuelian depiction of the far-from-discreet crimes of the bourgeoisie. Adrien Borel, See titles to watch instantly, titles you haven't rated, etc. Drama. Agns Jaoui aims for the droll slow burn, subtle ironies and wry observation. Now stop imagining things and go to see Sans Soleil, in which Marker, cinemas greatest essayist, sums up a lifetimes travels, speculations and passions. Pierre Renoir, Not Rated Often hailed as one of the best films of all time, The Rules of the Game, by Jean Renoir, is a contemptuous critique of crooked French high society disguised as a comedy of manners during which a short trip at a marquis provincial chteau uncovers a few unpleasant truths about an assembly of conceited bourgeois friends. 1. Gilles Margaritis, Jean Renoir A road movie set in the South of France, it chronicles through a series of comic and touching vignettes the burgeoning friendship among four men forced to share a station wagon. The earliest example of sci-fi and fantasy genres on film, it tells the story of a group of astronomers who voyage to the moon and do battle with giant insectoid aliens. Stars: CC, After a failed suicide, Claude Ridder (Rich) is visited by two men who invite him to take part in an experiment (already tried with a mouse) to project him into the past to see if he can recapture a moment of his life (since he has no wish to live, and therefore has no future, he is the perfect subject). Darker than Bob le Flambeur, Melvilles second foray into the Parisian underworld borrows its epigraph from Cline: One must choose: die or lie? Appropriately, in a film devoted to the principle of duplicity, Melville teases the spectator by reproducing the police station from Mamoulians City Streets, while his Paris features American lampposts, call-boxes and subway entrances. N'T Rated, etc some ways ; in others, he has the refinement Michael. Are unforgettably funny, wonderfully observed, and always technically brilliant a village postman no. Between comedy and tragedy, romance and realism, film and dream sense! 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