L’Homme qui Marche is a short, elliptical film that takes us on a long, slow, nearly silent walk through Paris over a period of 14 years, between 1974 and 1998, in the company of one man. Victor Atemian (played by … Read More
Here is a film that just misses out on being great for lack of an editorial scalpel. La Graine et le Mulet, directed by Abdellatif Kechiche and winner of three prizes at the Venice Film Festival, has an engaging plot … Read More
The world has been going to the dogs ever since, back at the dawn of time, people began looking askance at the loutish offspring of their neighbors. It’s still going to the dogs as I write and, I sincerely trust, … Read More
How strange to watch a deeply misogynistic film written, directed by and starring women. In Actrices, directed by Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, most of the female characters are depicted as highly irrational and hysterical (if not insane) sexual predators whose main … Read More
Benoît Poelvoorde. You probably don’t recognize the name, but you might remember him as the charismatic serial killer in his 1992 debut, Man Bites Dog. Since then he has gone on to become one of France’s most beloved actors (even … Read More
This is a film full of good intentions. In his first full-length movie, Laurent de Bartillat has assembled a top-class cast, led by the wonderfully versatile Sylvie Testud (how many other young actresses are willing to be portrayed in unglamorous … Read More
If Tolstoy were alive today, he might have rephrased the famous first sentence of Anna Karenina to read: “Happy families are all alike; every dysfunctional family is dysfunctional in its own way.” Faut que ça Danse (Gotta Dance), directed by … Read More
French filmmakers seem to remain as obsessed as ever with the German occupation of France during World War II. As one French friend of mine remarked recently, from the number of films about the subject, you would think that the … Read More
Take an Agatha Christie novel, transport it to an old-fashioned house on the Brittany coast in the 21st century, throw in a few actresses who have even more famous parents (Laura Smet, daughter of Johnny Hallyday and Nathalie Baye, and … Read More
During his long career, the now 87-year-old French director Eric Rohmer has made some 50 films, many of them literally “talkies” that follow the physical, philosophical and emotional wanderings of two or three attractive young people plunked down in a … Read More
