Melville’s first straight-out gangster film is also one of his best. A sharp, twisting, and fascinating rumination on friendship and loyalty in the criminal underworld, it is infused with a perverse sense of violence andContinue reading
Category: French Cinema
The Earrings of Madame de … (Max Ophuls, 1953)
Like Ophuls’s other French-language films of the 1950s, this is an opulent spectacle, the frame filled with lavish mise-en-scène and decadent characters whose perch at the upper stratum of society would seem to render themContinue reading
The Earrings of Madame de … (Max Ophuls, 1953)
Like Ophuls’s other French-language films of the 1950s, this is an opulent spectacle, the frame filled with lavish mise-en-scène and decadent characters whose perch at the upper stratum of society would seem to render themContinue reading
Le plaisir (Max Ophuls, 1952)
This is the kind of film your savor—so full of life, creativity, and sly ironic commentary. Ophuls’s cinematic style is on full display, but so are his storytelling gifts, and his lightness of touch inContinue reading
La ronde (Max Ophuls, 1950)
Ophuls’s triumphant return to continental filmmaking after several years in Hollywood is generally considered one of his greatest masterpieces, and while it is certainly enjoyable, I can’t help but feel that it is little moreContinue reading
The Last Mistress (Catherine Breillat, 2007)
Given the explosive potential of combining the fearlessly provocative director Catherine Breillat with the fearlessly provocative actress Asia Argento (who has also proved herself to be quite fearless behind the camera), one might expect somethingContinue reading
Tell No One (Guillaume Canet, 2006)
This crafty French mystery-thriller about a man whose world is turned upside down when he is led to believe that his wife, who was murdered eight years ago, may still be alive weaves its labyrinthineContinue reading
Trafic (Jacques Tati, 1971)
Especially when compared with Playtime, “the masterpiece that wrecked his career,” as Jonathan Rosenbaum so aptly put it, Trafic is easily the least of Tati’s four Hulot films. In the wake of Playtime’s critical andContinue reading
Vampyr (Carl Th. Dreyer, 1932)
Initially upstaged by Tod Browning’s Dracula, the great Carl Theodor Dreyer’s stab at genre filmmaking is an evocative masterpiece of hallucinatory imagery and dream-logic narrative. It makes sense that Dreyer’s horror film is so unnervinglyContinue reading
Classe tous risques (Claude Saudet, 1960)
Despite its obvious merits, Claude Sautet’s feature directorial debut, Classe tous risques, didn’t jump-start his career in the manner in which it probably should. A low-key, intimate portrait of a former gang leader trying toContinue reading