A searing character piece told in rough, nouvelle vague style, Louis Malle’s The Fire Within follows a recently recovered alcoholic during the last 24 hours before he plans to kill himself. On paper, it soundsContinue reading

Regarded as both revolutionary and scandalous (are the two ever far apart?) when it was released in the late 1950s in both Europe and the United States, Louis Malle’s sophomore feature, a dreamlike evocation ofContinue reading

One of the best things I can say about Persepolis is that I cannot imagine it being in any style other than the one in which its told. The film’s elegantly minimalist characters are drawnContinue reading

One of the best things I can say about Persepolis is that I cannot imagine it being in any style other than the one in which its told. The film’s elegantly minimalist characters are drawnContinue reading

Schnabel has done something close to miraculous in making the inherently noncinematic subject of Jean-Dominique Bauby, a man who was trapped inside his own body after a massive stroke, so gorgeously and vibrantly cinematic. TheContinue reading

They should have stuck with the original French title—Sans toit ni loi, which translates literally as “Without roof or law”—because the Americanized title Vagabond brings a hint of inappropriate romanticization to the film’s visually bareContinue reading

Described by Varda as “a summer peach with a worm inside,” Le bonheur (Happiness) is a beautiful and strikingly unnerving film that outraged audiences in the ’60s and still retains all of its moral-twisting powerContinue reading

Let’s get it out of the way: Yes, the title is technically misleading because the real-time journey of the heroine through Paris as she awaits some potentially life-threatening medical results is actually only an hourContinue reading

Predating the visual and thematic preoccupations of the French New Wave by a good five years, La Pointe Courte is an interesting, but ultimately failed experiment in mixing disparate filmic approaches. Half of the filmContinue reading