"Watching the film I want the audience to embrace the journey of being a girl. Everyone in the room has to identify [with] a fifteen-year-old teenage girl. That’s why there are no adults in the movie, nor boys."
That’s screenwriter-director Céline Sciamma, talking about her widely praised first film, Naissance des pieuvres / Water Lilies. Initially [...]
Naissance des pieuvres / Water Lilies (2007)
Direction and Screenplay: Céline Sciamma. Cast: Pauline Acquart, Louise Blachère, Adele Haenel, Warren Jacquin, Christelle Baras
Writer-director Céline Sciamma’s Naissance des pieuvres / Water Lilies is a film about teens beginning to discover who they are. It is also a film that actually stars teens — as opposed to mid-twenty-year-olds [...]
World Cinema Clips: The clip below is from Jacques Becker’s Les Amants de Montparnasse / Montparnasse 19, a 1958 biopic in which French film idol Gérard Philipe plays troubled painter Amedeo Modigliani. Also in the cast, Lilli Palmer, Lea Padovani, Gérard Séty, Lino Ventura, and Anouk Aimée, who is seen here with Philipe.
The following year, [...]
La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc / The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928)
Direction: Carl Theodor Dreyer. Screenplay: Carl Theodor Dreyer and Joseph Delteil. Cast: Maria Falconetti, Eugene Silvain, André Berley, Maurice Schutz, Antonin Artaud, Michel Simon, Jean d’Yd
Carl Theodor Dreyer’s late silent film La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc / The Passion of Joan of Arc [...]
"There is cinema before and after La Roue as there is painting before and after Picasso."
That’s none other than Jean Cocteau, referring to the mammoth 1923 drama (original running time: nearly 8 hours) directed and written by Abel Gance — he of Napoleon.
Gance worked for three years on La Roue / The Wheel, which revolves [...]
Bienvenue chez les Ch’tis / Welcome to the Sticks (literally, Welcome to the Land of the Ch’tis), a comedy about French regional stereotypes, has been seen by more than 17.4 million people since its February 27 release. That makes it the most successful French production in history. (According to an Agence France Presse report, the [...]
World Film Clips: The story of a courtesan turned circus performer, Max Ophüls‘ Lola Montès (1955) — the most expensive (part-)French production to date — was a resounding commercial flop. The film was taken away from Ophüls and drastically recut by the producers. That only made matters worse.
A restored — apparently complete — version [...]
World Cinema Clips: Who is the best silent-film comedian? Most people would answer Charles Chaplin. Or Buster Keaton. Or Harold Lloyd. Or even Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle.
My favorite silent-film comedian? Someone who never made a film either in Hollywood or during the silent era. That’s Jacques Tati, who, had he been a Hollywood star, would [...]
Du rififi chez les hommes / Rififi (1955)
Direction: Jules Dassin. Screenplay: Jules Dassin, Auguste Le Breton, René Wheeler; from a novel by Auguste Le Breton. Cast: Jean Servais, Carl Möhner, Robert Manuel, Dominique Maurin, Jules Dassin, Janine Darcey, Pierre Grasset, Robert Hossein, Magali Noël, Marie Sabouret, Claude Sylvain, Marcel Lupovici
The easiest, most obvious point to [...]
French Academy of Film Arts and Sciences’ 33rd César Awards - 2007
2007 César du Cinéma nominations: January 25, 2008.
2007 César du Cinéma winners: the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris, on February 22, 2008. President of the ceremony: Jean Rochefort. Host: Antoine de Caunes.
("*" denotes the winner in each category)
BEST FILM / MEILLEUR FILM
* La graine [...]
2007 French Film Critics’ Étoiles d’Or
2007 Étoiles d’Or winners: Espace Pierre Cardin, Paris, February 18, 2008
("*" denotes the winner in each category)
According to French film critics, the top French film of 2007 was not the much-ballyhooed La Vie en Rose, but the (thus far) little-known internationally The Secret of the Grain. The winner of the [...]
Those looking for hints for the upcoming Academy Awards will be disappointed with the results of the pompous-sounding Orange British Academy of Film & Television Arts.
The British-made (with Hollywood financing) romantic melodrama Atonement (top photo), nominated for 14 BAFTAs, was supposed to have swept the awards ceremony, but ended up with only two awards: best [...]
Erica Abeel interviews Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud at indieWIRE, where they discuss family, politics, non-politics, and cartoon voices.
Satrapi and Paronnaud’s Persepolis will be screened in the US in a dubbed version — though I do hope that a print with the original French-dialogue track will be available somewhere here in Los Angeles. Catherine Deneuve, [...]
All public preview screenings are at screen #4 at the AMC Santa Monica 7. Passes are needed.
9 am - American East (US) - Dramatic comedy about Arab-Americans living in Los Angeles. Directed by Hesham Issawi. Starring Sarah Shahi, Sayed Badreya, Rais Nashif, Tony Shalhoub.
11 am - Chrysalis (top photo, France) - Paris, 2020. A dangerous [...]
Francis Ford Coppola, 68, on Youth Without Youth (see trailer below), his first film since the dreadful — and highly successful — 1997 courtroom melodrama The Rainmaker:
"When you venture into new territories … you know that it’s different than Spider-Man or Shrek or other films that are immediately met with success. So, part of being [...]
Ludivine Sagnier, Virginie Ledoyen, Catherine Deneuve, Danielle Darrieux, Isabelle Huppert, Firmine Richard, Emmanuelle Béart in François Ozon’s delightfully off-kilter 8 Women. The all-female cast shared best actress honors at both the 2002 European Film Awards and at the Berlin Film Festival.
The AFI Los Angeles International Film Festival (AFI FEST, presented by Audi) has announced that [...]
David Ehrenstein in the Los Angeles Times:
"Barbet Schroeder loves monsters. Especially when examined from the vantage point of their lair.
"Not the monsters of horror films such as Frankenstein and Dracula. Schroeder’s monsters are very real: Socialite Claus von Bulow in Reversal of Fortune, or the drug-dealing teenage hit men of Our Lady of the Assassins, [...]
The 26th Pordenone Silent Film Festival took off today with screenings of Hans Behrendt’s 1927 social comedy Die Hose / A Royal Scandal, starring Werner Krauss and Jenny Jugo, and D. W. Griffith’s 1921 melodrama Dream Street, a poor return to the setting of his 1919 success Broken Blossoms. In the cast, the bland Carol [...]
Director, screenwriter, and producer Costa-Gavras, 74, never one to shy away from inflammatory themes, will be honored with the second-ever Eisenstein Award handed out by the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts.
The Sept. 28 ceremony will launch a two-day Costa-Gavras mini-festival, with screenings of four of the director’s films: the Academy Award-winning [...]
Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud’s Persepolis is the French entry for the upcoming Academy Award for best foreign-language film.
Based on Satrapi’s autobiographical graphic novels, the black-and-white animated film follows a young girl growing up in Iran during the Islamic Revolution of the late 1970s.
Chiara Mastroianni (as Marjane), her mother Catherine Deneuve, veteran Danielle Darrieux, [...]
Nigel Andrews’s discusses Abdel Kechiche’s (right) The Grain of Life aka The Grain and the Mullet, in competition at the Venice Film Festival, in the Financial Times:
"… [Made] by a Tunisian-born Frenchman, [the film] was reportedly rejected by Cannes at three hours and still holds out at two and a half in Venice. But it [...]
The world premiere of Claude Miller’s Un Secret will close the 31st Montreal World Film Festival on September 3. . The director and lead actress Cécile de France — in my view, as charming an actress as can be — are expected to attend the screening.
Adapted by Miller from Philippe Grimbert’s novel, Un Secret [...]
I was in mid-teens when I first watched Edouard Molinaro’s 1978 film adaptation of La Cage aux folles. I found it hilarious; surely one of the best comedies I’d ever seen — and I’d seen a number of them by that time.
What a difference ten years make.
I was in my mid-20s when I [...]
Le Mépris / Contempt (1963)
Director: Jean-Luc Godard. Screenplay: Jean-Luc Godard, from Alberto Moravia’s novel Il Disprezzo. Cast: Brigitte Bardot, Michel Piccoli, Jack Palance, Giorgia Moll, Fritz Lang
By Dan Schneider of Cosmoetica:
Of the films I’ve seen so far of French New Wave director Jean-Luc Godard, his best is Le Mépris / Contempt (1963), adapted by [...]
In late August, the UCLA Film & Television Archive and the Hugh M. Hefner Classic American Film Program will present "Billy Wilder’s Europe," a seven-film series showcasing samples of the director’s movies with an European setting. The screenings will take place between Aug. 18-29 at the appropriately named Billy Wilder Theater in Westwood.
In the 1930 [...]
