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 […]
Directed by Mia Hansen-Love Produced by Charles Gillibert Written by Hansen-Love and Sven Hansen-Love Music by Daft Punk, Joe Smooth, Frankie Knuckles, Terry Hunter, and MK Released by Broad Green Pictures English and French with English subtitles France. 131 min. Not rated With Félix de Givry, Pauline Etienne, Vincent Macaigne, Hugo Conzelmann, Arsinée Khanjian, and […]
Directed by André Téchiné Written by Téchiné, Jean-Charles Le Roux, and Cédric Anger Produced by Olivier Delbosc and Marc Missonnier Released by Cohen Media Group French with English subtitles France. 116 min. Rated R With Catherine Deneuve, Guillaume Canet, and Adèle Haenel A mild-mannered lawyer attaches himself to a wealthy casino matriarch. He wins the […]
Written and Directed by Cédric Jimenez Produced by Alain Goldman Released by Drafthouse Films French with English subtitles France. 135 min. Rated R With Jean Dujardin, Gilles Lellouche, Céline Sallette, and Benoît Magimel The Connection, a ’70s-era crime-thriller, opens with a bike chase sequence along the coastal highway of Marseille. From the start, director Cédric […]
Written and Directed by David Oelhoffen, based on “The Guest,” a short story by Albert Camus Produced by Marc du Pontavice and Matthew Gledhill Released by Tribeca Film French, Arabic, and Spanish with English subtitles France. 110 min. Not rated With Viggo Mortensen, Reda Kateb, Vincent Martin, and Djemel Barek Loosely based on a short […]