The polarizing result of the collaboration between French New Wave pioneer Resnais and famed “New Novelist” Alain Robbe-Grillet, this is a film that challenges at every turn and is guaranteed to thrill some with itsContinue reading
Category: French Cinema
Empire of Passion (Nagisa Oshima, 1978)
How to follow up one of the most scandalous art-house hits of all time? If you’re Japanese provocateur Nagisa Oshima, you do more of the same, but different. His followup to In the Realm ofContinue reading
In the Realm of the Senses (Nagisa Oshima, 1976)
Defenders of Oshima’s sexually explicit depiction of an obsessive relationship argue that it is a pure, uncomplicated, and therefore challenging depiction of love fully unleashed from social conformity and moral complications. The problem is thatContinue reading
JCVD (Mabrouk El Mechri, 2008)
A bold attempt to humanize the fading action icon Jean-Claude Van Damme, not by trying to ignore his personal and professional pitfalls (which are many), but by reminding us that behind ever movie star, lovedContinue reading
Danton (Andrzej Wajda, 1983)
Wajda’s powerful evocation of the political struggles following the French Revolution as embodied by its two most fiery ideologues—Georges Danton and Maximilien Robespierre—has the visual trappings of a costume drama, is shot like a particularlyContinue reading
The Last Metro (François Truffaut, 1980)
As with many of his films, this beautifully mounted tragic-romantic-thriller about a struggling theater in Nazi-occupied France is replete with Truffaut’s autobiographical memories, which shapes it into something more intimate and personal than its broadContinue reading
Taken (Pierre Morel, 2008)
There is little to distinguish it from dozens of interchangeable straight-to-DVD concoctions except for the fact that is stars Liam Neeson, who brings an immediate sense of heavyweight gravitas to what could have easily beenContinue reading
The Taking of Power by Louis XIV (Roberto Rossellini, 1966)
After famously declaring the cinema to be “dead” in 1962, famed Italian neorealist director Rossellini turned his attention to television and dedicated the last 15 years of his career to making historical TV movies. HisContinue reading
Fanfan la Tulipe (Christian-Jaque, 1952)
The title character of Christian-Jaque’s comic swashbuckler originated in 18th-century folk songs, and although he was first introduced on screen in an eight-part serial in 1925, this is the one that most people remember. AsContinue reading
Le deuxième soufflé (Jean-Pierre Melville, 1966)
An ambitious meditation on fate disguised as a crime caper, Melville is attempting to stretch the genre to its existential limits, using traditional cops-and-robbers plot machinations as a foundation to explore desperation and the desire toContinue reading