Varda by Agnès, the final film by Agnès Varda, starts as a filmed masterclass. Varda sits before a rapt crowd and begins speaking of her work, her worldview, her creative approach, and her life. For an artist, life and work ar...
Midway through Céline Sciamma’s masterful Portrait of a Lady on Fire, we get the film’s thematic archstone. So much of this painterly, poetic queer romance is about looking at someone we desire and the feeling of being se...
Every now and then I’ll see a movie that I don’t particularly like but I find thought provoking. Every now and then I’ll see a movie I find thought provoking not because of the depth of its ideas but because of the ideas i...
French cinema is an area of filmmaking I’m really enthused by, and since learning about it as a student, the sheer novelty of the New Wave has always remained an area of fascination. Like many before me, I have a lot of respect fo...
I'm not usually one for movies about teenagers going through the perils of teenage life. I lived through it, it sucked, and why on Earth would I want to relive those memories again? Being a teenager sucked, but filmmakers love to make movie...
Hoo boy was I hoping for something better out of this. I'll start by saying it has some gorgeous shots throughout, and the performances are largely ok. They don't make up for the general dragginess the movie has, nor it's lack believable ch...
I feel like I might have appreciated Rock'n Roll more if I was familiar with French pop culture and the country's film industry. Writer, director, and star Guillaume Canet packs his comedy with real-life French celebrities playing surreal c...
While playing at film festivals last year, the hype over Raw was insane. Writer/director Julia Ducournau's coming-of-age horror/cannibal drama purportedly caused audience members to faint, to vomit, to leave screenings in distress. These ar...
There's this pervasive idea that children are resilient, that they're able to cope well even in dire circumstances. In stories about forlorn kids, a combination of optimistic pluck and boundless imagination helps them through their troubled...
There's so much going for Lucile Hadzihalilovic's Evolution, a film expertly lensed from the deliberate first shot: looking up to the sky from underwater. From beneath, the ripples and waves on the ocean surface produce undulating shadows, ...
Elle has been billed as a rape-comedy, but that's a misnomer. It's a comedy in the classical sense given the events of the story, but it's not necessarily funny (there are funny scenes, though). And yes, it's about rape. Elle has been laude...
Though Showgirls eventually achieved camp/cult status, it was a major strike against Paul Verhoeven's career. He couldn't find steady footing in Hollywood afterwards, Starship Troopers notwithstanding. Showgirls also torpedoed Elizabeth Ber...
Animated films are the best, aren't they? They give more life to their worlds than most live-action films do with their mixed use of CGI and human actors. Even as technology advances to the point where CG characters will be flawless and sea...
When Michel Gondry writes his own films, I've noticed that his protagonists have a tendency to act like quirky, whimsical teenagers. The misfit oddballs of The Science of Sleep and Be Kind Rewind probably found a Zoltar machine, made a wish...
While you may not know Mia Hansen-Løve yet, her husband, and dare I say muse, Olivier Assayas is certainly more recognisable. As a fan of them both, it is easy to see how they inspire the best in each other, and with Eden, it seems H...
Oh man, The Little Prince is one of my absolute favorite books, so when I heard they were making a new animated film version, my attention went up. The first trailer, while entirely in French, gave an impressive look at the blending of dif...
Sometimes you watch a movie and you immediately know how you're going to feel about it. There's something about the atmosphere that it creates that just strikes you. You know exactly what the film is trying to do, and you know how you'll re...
In Space Cat Hob, we meet Hob, an anthropomorphic cat with a fancy space suit who has crash landed on a dangerous planet. Despite just wanting to do the right thing, Hob finds himself in trouble after trouble as he navigates his way throug...
Director Xavier Dolan's film Mommy examines the tumultuous lives of a mother and son as they go through the challenge of growing up. Unable to do everything alone, the sassy widowed mother finds balance when their neighbor offers to help h...
Whoa, why hasn't anyone told me about Whiplash? Starring J.K. Simmons and Miles Teller, as a jazz student and incredibly harsh teacher, Whiplash looks like it's going to be one of my favorites this year if the rest of it is as good as the ...
Tempête Sur Anorak - or Storm Hits Jacket - is an upcoming French animated short film by animator and artist Paul Cabon. It's not everyday we see a trailer for a short film, and it's certainly that much more rare to see one as intere...
Last week, I saw a movie I didn't like very much, but I found the fact that I didn't like it interesting. I got about halfway through writing the review when I realized that I would rather talk about it than write. Hence this week's editio...
It's a stereotype that the French are more cultured than Americans, but obviously that's a hard claim to either prove or disprove. There are any number of examples that could be used to show it either way, but here's evidence that, as far a...
There are many examples of desire in Blue Is the Warmest Color that are nuanced and downright erotic. These moments are communicated in coy shifts in facial expression, through the brinkmanship of flirtation, the intimate risks of proximity...
Our Day Will Come (Notre jour viendra) is the debut feature film of Romain Gavras, best known as the music video director behind "No Church in the Wild" by Kanye West and Jay-Z and "Born Free" by M.I.A. Released in France in 2010, the film...
At last year's New York Asian Film Festival I saw a documentary called Golden Slumbers, which focused on the lost cinema of Cambodia. The Khmer Rouge had destroyed cinema houses and film negatives throughout the country, wiping out an entir...
Blue is the Warmest Color is a French romantic drama directed by Abdellatif Kechiche, and it's been making quite an impression on the indie and film festival crowds. The film follows a young girl named Adele, played by Adèle Exarcho...
So you know how you like Amélie, but you sometimes think, "Man, I wish that movie could be even more adorable and heartwarming." Check out the trailer for Jean-Pierre Jeunet's (director of Amélie) newest movie,...
Here is the trailer for The Young and Prodigious Spivet, the latest from Amelie and City of Lost Children director Jean-Pierre Jeunet. The film is an adaptation of the book The Selected Works of T. S. Spivet by Reif Larsen, and stars Helen...
Confession time: the only Olivier Assayas movie I'd seen prior to Something in the Air was Irma Vep starring Maggie Cheung, which I really enjoyed. Summer Hours, Clean, and Carlos have been on my to-see list for a while, and I hope to get t...
There's a great short story in Richard Yates's Eleven Kinds of Loneliness called "Builders." In it, one of the characters naively but sincerely thinks of writing in terms of building houses, and the windows are places where light can shine ...
There's a moment in Möbius where I expected a turn toward high-stakes adventure and evasion. As in any story of spies and espionage, this is where a fine plan goes horribly, uncontrollably wrong. People who shouldn't get involved get i...
I really loved Jean-Pierre Jeunet's and Marc Caro's films in high school and college, wearing down my VHS copies of Delicatessen and The City of Lost Children, and watching Amelie pretty regularly on fancy, new-fangled DVD. I still hope for...
The third installment in Richard Linklater's series of movies -- which include indie darlings Before Sunrise and Before Sunset -- Before Midnight finds characters Celine and Jesse (played by Julie Deply and Ethan Hawke) in their early 40s ...
Something in the Air is the newest tale from director Olivier Assayas. Assayas is well-known for his 2010 TV mini-series Carlos, which told the tale of revolutionary/terrorist Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, also known as Carlos the J...
Mood Indigo (titled L'Écume des Jours or "Froth on the Daydream" in French) is director Michel Gondry's newest dealings with love and loss. With such previous heavy-hitters as Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and The Science of...
[Over the next few days we'll be looking at some of the films from Rendez Vous with French Cinema 2013, an annual showcase of contemporary and classic French films running from February 28th to March 10th. The screenings will take place at ...
Mood Indigo is Michel Gondry's return to the surreal and mysterious much like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. It's world is one where you can ride around in a cloud, fall in love with a woman who inhales a lily into her lung, a...
The French animation director Sylvain Chomet’s next film will most likely be Swing Popa Swing. This new film is to follow the success of Chomet’s first feature-length film, The Triplets of Belleville, where it will follow the th...
Artist Marjane Satrapi has two excellent films under her belt: Persepolis and Chicken with Plums, both of which were co-directed with Vincent Paronnaud. With The Gang of Jotas (La Bande de Jotas), Satrapi's flying solo as a writer and...
