Slapstick meets The Bad Seed in Julie Delpy’s fitfully charming tale, marked by contradictory impulses and abrupt, bewildering shifts in tone.

Within 11 days’ time, New Yorkers can see a significant slice of current French films that have won acclaim at Cannes and earned praise back home.

For brutal emotional impact, there is nothing like this film out now, It’s a highlight at this year’s Rendez-Vous with French Cinema series.

The annual festival offers up a wide range of moods, styles, and responses to the shifting times we inhabit. This year’s offerings draw on nostalgia, gazing back at feminism’s 1970s heyday.

Only a few films could pack a 2,300-seat theater at a 12:30 Thursday morning screening as did Gaspar Noé’s 3-D orgiastic opus Love when it premiered at the Cannes Film Festival. Sight unseen, it had already gained notoriety for the director’s declared intention to add emotion to explicit sex within a love story. Well, in […]

She’s your best friend. Your cruelest enemy. Sexier than you. Cooler. No one makes you feel as alive as she does. And no one knows better how to make you feel so small. She stole your boyfriend. Turned your girlfriends against you. But you’ll do anything to be around her. You love her. You hate […]

The premieres of films by internationally known directors attracted most of the coverage at Cannes: consider the critical love that was bestowed upon Todd Haynes’s Carol or the thumping Gus van Sant received for The Sea of Trees. Big names were represented from all over: Asian auteurs (Jia Zhang-ke and Hou Hsiao-Hsien) and the big […]

Written and Directed by Olivier Nakache and Eric Toledano, based on the novel Samba pour la France by Delphine Coulin Produced by Nicolas Duval Adassovsky, Yann Zenou, Laurent Zeitoun Released by Broad Green Pictures French with Arabic and Serbian dialogue with English subtitles France. 119 min. Rated R With Omar Sy, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Tahar Rahim, Izia […]

French actors did very well at Cannes 2015, and it was definitely the year of Emmanuelle Bercot. Standing Tall, a drama she co-wrote and directed, opened the festival, and she went on to share the best actress award (in a tie with Carol’s Rooney Mara) for starring in fellow actress/director Maïwenn’s rowdy hothouse drama Mon […]