Close-Up is a feature that spotlights films now playing on Mubi. Jean Renoir's The Crime of Monsieur Lange (1936) is playing August 31 - September 30, 2017 in the United States as part of the series Jean Renoir.From the beginning, Jean Renoir embraced dualities. One wants to say he played with them, and that’s often true, but he also took them seriously. When these two things are happening at the same time, his work is imbued with a magic that still casts a spell, just as it did over French New Wave filmmakers of the 1960s who rightly took him as a father figure. A striking example of contrasting impulses, his first film on his own, La fille de l’eau (Whirlpool of Fate, 1925) is one of his open-air works—a heroine’s journey out in the world—but at its heart is a dream sequence and very theatrical. That set Renoir’s aesthetic course.
- 8/31/2017
- MUBI
The 23rd entry in an on-going series of audiovisual essays by Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin. Mubi is showing Jean Renoir's The Testament of Dr. Cordelier (1959) is August 3 - September 2, 2017 in the United States as part of the series Jean Renoir.Jean Renoir’s The Experiment of Dr. Cordelier (a.k.a. The Doctor’s Horrible Experiment, 1959), shot using the multi-camera set-up of a television production, is a free variation on Robert Louis Stevenson’s immortal tale, Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886). However, Renoir’s take on this material owes less to the horror genre than to a kind of speculative, philosophical fiction. Unlike in most screen versions of the Jekyll/Hyde duality, Renoir goes easy on the conventional distinction between the good and evil sides of a single personality. Yes, the figure of Opale, into whom Cordelier transforms himself, is destructive, bestial, cruel, and sadistic.
- 8/4/2017
- MUBI
Close-Up is a feature that spotlights films now playing on Mubi. Grand Illusion (1937) is showing July 27 - August 26, 2017 in the United States as part of the retrospective Jean Renoir.Considering Jean Renoir's Grand Illusion today in no small part involves an awareness of status and stature, the most prominent (or maybe just the most intimidating) aspect of which surely being the cherished status the film continues to enjoy in the canon of film history. To this day, it remains a singular achievement, not only as one of Renoir's foundational masterpieces, but also as a film of its time whose contents have remained timeless. Released in 1937 to great acclaim, it bid farewell to one era of European history and warfare as another, far darker one was about to begin; thus, more than the grimly comical The Rules of the Game (made and released two years closer to the brink...
- 7/27/2017
- MUBI
Mark and Aaron continue the French 1930s series by exploring the early career of Jean Renoir, easily the most recognizable director from the period. We begin with the beginning, by looking at his origins and childhood. We look at his early silent films, his first sound adaptations, and a couple of films from the middle of the decade where he began to settle into his poetic realist style.
7:00 – Why Renoir?
9:30 – Origins of Renoir
20:00 – Silent Renoir (Catherine, Whirlpool of Fate, Nana, Charleston Parade, The Little Match Girl)
51:30 – Early Sound (On purge bébé, La Chienne, Boudu Saved From Drowning)
1:21:30 – Poetic Realism in Mid-Thirties (Toni, A Day in the Country)
French 1930s Episode 1 Jean Renoir Taschen book Republic of Images Renoir Paintings at the Art Institute of Chicago DVD Beaver – Jean Renoir Collector’s Edition Aaron West – A Day in the Country David Blakeslee – A Day in the Country...
7:00 – Why Renoir?
9:30 – Origins of Renoir
20:00 – Silent Renoir (Catherine, Whirlpool of Fate, Nana, Charleston Parade, The Little Match Girl)
51:30 – Early Sound (On purge bébé, La Chienne, Boudu Saved From Drowning)
1:21:30 – Poetic Realism in Mid-Thirties (Toni, A Day in the Country)
French 1930s Episode 1 Jean Renoir Taschen book Republic of Images Renoir Paintings at the Art Institute of Chicago DVD Beaver – Jean Renoir Collector’s Edition Aaron West – A Day in the Country David Blakeslee – A Day in the Country...
- 12/23/2016
- by Aaron West
- CriterionCast
The already-incredible line-up for the 2016 New York Film Festival just got even more promising. Ang Lee‘s Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk will hold its world premiere at the festival on October 14th, the NY Times confirmed today. The adaptation of Ben Fountain‘s Iraq War novel, with a script by Simon Beaufoy (Slumdog Millionaire), follows a teenage soldier who survives a battle in Iraq and then is brought home for a victory lap before returning.
Lee has shot the film at 120 frames per second in 4K and native 3D, giving it unprecedented clarity for a feature film, which also means the screening will be held in a relatively small 300-seat theater at AMC Lincoln Square, one of the few with the technology to present it that way. While it’s expected that this Lincoln Square theater will play the film when it arrives in theaters, it may be...
Lee has shot the film at 120 frames per second in 4K and native 3D, giving it unprecedented clarity for a feature film, which also means the screening will be held in a relatively small 300-seat theater at AMC Lincoln Square, one of the few with the technology to present it that way. While it’s expected that this Lincoln Square theater will play the film when it arrives in theaters, it may be...
- 8/22/2016
- by Jordan Raup
- The Film Stage
Danièle Delorme: 'Gigi' 1949 actress and pioneering female film producer. Danièle Delorme: 'Gigi' 1949 actress was pioneering woman producer, politically minded 'femme engagée' Danièle Delorme, who died on Oct. 17, '15, at the age of 89 in Paris, is best remembered as the first actress to incarnate Colette's teenage courtesan-to-be Gigi and for playing Jean Rochefort's about-to-be-cuckolded wife in the international box office hit Pardon Mon Affaire. Yet few are aware that Delorme was featured in nearly 60 films – three of which, including Gigi, directed by France's sole major woman filmmaker of the '40s and '50s – in addition to more than 20 stage plays and a dozen television productions in a show business career spanning seven decades. Even fewer realize that Delorme was also a pioneering woman film producer, working in that capacity for more than half a century. Or that she was what in French is called a femme engagée...
- 12/5/2015
- by Andre Soares
- Alt Film Guide
Qui aime les films français ?
If you do and you live in St. Louis, you’re in luck! The Seventh Annual Robert Classic French Film Festival — co-presented by Cinema St. Louis and the Webster University Film Series begins March 13th. The Classic French Film Festival celebrates St. Louis’ Gallic heritage and France’s cinematic legacy. The featured films span the decades from the 1930s through the early 1990s, offering a comprehensive overview of French cinema. The fest is annually highlighted by significant restorations.
This year features recent restorations of eight works, including an extended director’s cut of Patrice Chéreau’s historical epic Queen Margot a New York-set film noir (Two Men In Manhattan) by crime-film maestro Jean-Pierre Melville, who also co-stars; a short feature (“A Day in the Country”) by Jean Renoir, on a double bill with the 2006 restoration of his masterpiece, The Rules Of The Game, and the...
If you do and you live in St. Louis, you’re in luck! The Seventh Annual Robert Classic French Film Festival — co-presented by Cinema St. Louis and the Webster University Film Series begins March 13th. The Classic French Film Festival celebrates St. Louis’ Gallic heritage and France’s cinematic legacy. The featured films span the decades from the 1930s through the early 1990s, offering a comprehensive overview of French cinema. The fest is annually highlighted by significant restorations.
This year features recent restorations of eight works, including an extended director’s cut of Patrice Chéreau’s historical epic Queen Margot a New York-set film noir (Two Men In Manhattan) by crime-film maestro Jean-Pierre Melville, who also co-stars; a short feature (“A Day in the Country”) by Jean Renoir, on a double bill with the 2006 restoration of his masterpiece, The Rules Of The Game, and the...
- 3/4/2015
- by Tom Stockman
- WeAreMovieGeeks.com
Translators introduction: This article by Mireille Latil Le Dantec, the first of two parts, was originally published in issue 40 of Cinématographe, September 1978. The previous issue of the magazine had included a dossier on "La qualité française" and a book of a never-shot script by Jean Grémillon (Le Printemps de la Liberté or The Spring of Freedom) had recently been published. The time was ripe for a re-evaluation of Grémillon's films and a resuscitation of his undervalued career. As this re-evaluation appears to still be happening nearly 40 years later—Grémillon's films have only recently seen DVD releases and a 35mm retrospective begins this week at Museum of the Moving Image in Queens—this article and its follow-up gives us an important view of a French perspective on Grémillon's work by a very perceptive critic doing the initial heavy-lifting in bringing the proper attention to the filmmaker's work.
Filmmaker maudit?...
Filmmaker maudit?...
- 11/30/2014
- by Ted Fendt
- MUBI
Coming to Blu-ray for the first time from the Cohen Media Group, Claude Chabrol’s late career thriller, Nightcap (better known by its French title, Merci Pour Le Chocolat) is often lumped into conversation as merely one of the seven films the director made with actress Isabelle Huppert. While it is certainly outshined by some of their finer achievements together (particularly The Story of Women and La Ceremonie), it stands firmly on its own as an odd exercise that’s more character study than murder mystery. Chabrol seems amused at the convention and convenience of the narrative, supplied by Charlotte Armstrong’s nonsensically titled 1948 novel The Chocolate Cobweb. Armstrong was in high regard in the 1950’s (her novel Don’t Bother to Knock was turned into a very strange Marilyn Monroe vehicle in 1952), and Chabrol seems keen on retaining the rather deliberate ambience from a tradition of genre gone by.
- 10/7/2014
- by Nicholas Bell
- IONCINEMA.com
French director Jacques Audiard's bleak, brutal crime films have led to him being called the new Scorsese. His latest, Rust and Bone, is a love story – but as intense and inquisitive as ever
For a man who is a bundle of intense, nervous energy, Jacques Audiard is a surprisingly slow worker. Since he started directing, in 1994, he has completed just six features, with lengthy gaps between them. Indeed, the three-year run up to his new film, Rust and Bone, represents something of an acceleration. "I am free," Audiard shrugs, "because I work for a producer [Pascal Caucheteux] who says, 'We'll go when it's ready.' He doesn't give me a deadline. The films take a long time to write – too long, perhaps. That is where the time is spent."
But what films they are. His last, A Prophet, the coruscating study of a French-Arab convict who becomes a player in the Corsican mafia,...
For a man who is a bundle of intense, nervous energy, Jacques Audiard is a surprisingly slow worker. Since he started directing, in 1994, he has completed just six features, with lengthy gaps between them. Indeed, the three-year run up to his new film, Rust and Bone, represents something of an acceleration. "I am free," Audiard shrugs, "because I work for a producer [Pascal Caucheteux] who says, 'We'll go when it's ready.' He doesn't give me a deadline. The films take a long time to write – too long, perhaps. That is where the time is spent."
But what films they are. His last, A Prophet, the coruscating study of a French-Arab convict who becomes a player in the Corsican mafia,...
- 10/24/2012
- by Andrew Pulver
- The Guardian - Film News
Every time I watch a Jean Grémillon film I feel compelled to write about the experience here. Either the films are excellent, like Gueule d'amour, or they're something more than that, like Maldone or La petite Lise—attempts to reinvent cinema or to send the talking picture spinning off into a new direction.
Daïnah la métisse (1932) shows Gremillon still pushing the expressive possibilities of sound cinema that he had opened up in the poorly-received La petite Lise. If the rejection of that first talkie, regarded as both too seedy and downbeat and too experimental and strange, caused him to rethink his approach, there's little evidence here, since Daïnah is a tragic tale delivered with a similarly somnambular pace, making free use of unexpected angles and a bold approach to both sound effects and narrative. It's as if Grémillon trusted the world to come around to his way of looking at things.
Daïnah la métisse (1932) shows Gremillon still pushing the expressive possibilities of sound cinema that he had opened up in the poorly-received La petite Lise. If the rejection of that first talkie, regarded as both too seedy and downbeat and too experimental and strange, caused him to rethink his approach, there's little evidence here, since Daïnah is a tragic tale delivered with a similarly somnambular pace, making free use of unexpected angles and a bold approach to both sound effects and narrative. It's as if Grémillon trusted the world to come around to his way of looking at things.
- 8/23/2012
- MUBI
After much media hoopla about "Vertigo" toppling "Citizen Kane" in its poll, Sight and Sound magazine have now released the full version of its once a decade 'Top 250 greatest films of all time' poll results via its website. The site also includes full on links showcasing Top Tens of the hundreds of film industry professionals who participated in the project.
For those who don't want to bother with the individual lists and to save you a bunch of clicking, below is a copy of the full 250 films that made the lists and how many votes they got to be considered for their positions:
1 - Vertigo (Hitchcock, 1958) [191 votes]
2 - Citizen Kane (Welles, 1941) [157 votes]
3 - Tokyo Story (Ozu, 1953) [107 votes]
4 - La Règle du jeu (Renoir, 1939) [100 votes]
5 - Sunrise: a Song for Two Humans (Murnau, 1927) [93 votes]
6 - 2001: A Space Odyssey (Kubrick, 1968) [90 votes]
7 - The Searchers (Ford, 1956) [78 votes]
8 - Man with a Movie Camera (Vertov, 1929) [68 votes]
9 - The Passion of Joan of Arc (Dreyer,...
For those who don't want to bother with the individual lists and to save you a bunch of clicking, below is a copy of the full 250 films that made the lists and how many votes they got to be considered for their positions:
1 - Vertigo (Hitchcock, 1958) [191 votes]
2 - Citizen Kane (Welles, 1941) [157 votes]
3 - Tokyo Story (Ozu, 1953) [107 votes]
4 - La Règle du jeu (Renoir, 1939) [100 votes]
5 - Sunrise: a Song for Two Humans (Murnau, 1927) [93 votes]
6 - 2001: A Space Odyssey (Kubrick, 1968) [90 votes]
7 - The Searchers (Ford, 1956) [78 votes]
8 - Man with a Movie Camera (Vertov, 1929) [68 votes]
9 - The Passion of Joan of Arc (Dreyer,...
- 8/18/2012
- by Garth Franklin
- Dark Horizons
Ten years ago, Jean-Pierre Jeunet's syrupy story about a simpering busybody, played by Audrey Tautou, became a worldwide hit. So why is the dream still not over in 2011?
I have it on good authority that Amélie turned Montmartre into a "tourist shithole". The Café des 2 Moulins, the film's key location, was flooded with sightseers, and sold on. Someone put a banner over Rue Lepic reading "Welcome to the quartier of Amélie Poulain". Megaphones pumped out accordion music in the street, turning the area into some kind of Marcel Marceau wet dream. Amélie has that kind of effect. Watching it for the second time on the eve of its 10th-anniversary re-release, I still find Audrey Tautou's boulevard busybody simpering to the point of psychosis. (As our own Peter Bradshaw said of her flat-rearranging antics: "Does the director know that this is precisely what Charles Manson claimed to love doing?...
I have it on good authority that Amélie turned Montmartre into a "tourist shithole". The Café des 2 Moulins, the film's key location, was flooded with sightseers, and sold on. Someone put a banner over Rue Lepic reading "Welcome to the quartier of Amélie Poulain". Megaphones pumped out accordion music in the street, turning the area into some kind of Marcel Marceau wet dream. Amélie has that kind of effect. Watching it for the second time on the eve of its 10th-anniversary re-release, I still find Audrey Tautou's boulevard busybody simpering to the point of psychosis. (As our own Peter Bradshaw said of her flat-rearranging antics: "Does the director know that this is precisely what Charles Manson claimed to love doing?...
- 10/18/2011
- by Phil Hoad
- The Guardian - Film News
Among the most fruitful collaborations between director and screenwriter in the history of cinema is the one between Marcel Carne and Jacques Prevert. Prevert’s supremely literate approach to screenwriting was summarized by critic John Simon in this way: let the camera do what it will but the literature will remain. The finest of the films in which the two collaborated may have been The Children of Paradise (1945) – which was reviewed in this column – but Le Jour Se Leve (1939) or Daybreak comes a close second. Between them, Carne and Prevert were responsible for much of the poetic realism in the French cinema of the period – films largely about the working class but giving their working-class heroes a rounded presence generally lacking in later European cinema, notably from Italy. The actor Jean Gabin contributed strongly to many of these films through his presence and the highpoint of his working-class performances is...
- 7/15/2011
- by MK Raghvendra
- DearCinema.com
The Criterion Collection will release The Complete Jean Vigo on Blu-ray and DVD on Aug. 30 for the list prices of $39.95 and $29.95, respectively.
A collection of all four films made by the French cinema legend before he died of tuberculosis in 1934, at the way-too-young age of 29, The Complete Jean Vigo marks the first time the filmmaker’s entire canon has been compiled in one collection.
L'Atalante (1934)
Film scholars will tell you that Vigo helped to establish French cinema’s poetic realism movement of the 1930s and 1940s, a swell that yielded such masterpieces as Renoir’s Grand Illusion and Carne’s Children of Paradise. And later on, Vigo’s work was the spark that ignited the artistic explosion that became known as the French New Wave. What I can tell you is that you don’t need a film class to enjoy Vigo’s final movie, 1934’s L’Atalante, a sensual...
A collection of all four films made by the French cinema legend before he died of tuberculosis in 1934, at the way-too-young age of 29, The Complete Jean Vigo marks the first time the filmmaker’s entire canon has been compiled in one collection.
L'Atalante (1934)
Film scholars will tell you that Vigo helped to establish French cinema’s poetic realism movement of the 1930s and 1940s, a swell that yielded such masterpieces as Renoir’s Grand Illusion and Carne’s Children of Paradise. And later on, Vigo’s work was the spark that ignited the artistic explosion that became known as the French New Wave. What I can tell you is that you don’t need a film class to enjoy Vigo’s final movie, 1934’s L’Atalante, a sensual...
- 5/27/2011
- by Laurence
- Disc Dish
From the pioneers of the silver screen to today's new realism, French directors have shaped film-making around the world
France can, with some justification, claim to have invented the whole concept of cinema. Film historians call The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station, the 50-second film by the Lumière brothers first screened in 1895, the birth of the medium.
But the best-known early pioneer, who made films with some kind of cherishable narrative value, was Georges Méliès, whose 1902 short A Trip to the Moon is generally heralded as the first science-fiction film, and a landmark in cinematic special effects. Meanwhile, Alice Guy-Blaché, Léon Gaumont's one-time secretary, is largely forgotten now, but with films such as L'enfant de la barricade trails the status of being the first female film-maker.
The towering achievement of French cinema in the silent era was undoubtedly Abel Gance's six-hour biopic of Napoleon (1927), which...
France can, with some justification, claim to have invented the whole concept of cinema. Film historians call The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station, the 50-second film by the Lumière brothers first screened in 1895, the birth of the medium.
But the best-known early pioneer, who made films with some kind of cherishable narrative value, was Georges Méliès, whose 1902 short A Trip to the Moon is generally heralded as the first science-fiction film, and a landmark in cinematic special effects. Meanwhile, Alice Guy-Blaché, Léon Gaumont's one-time secretary, is largely forgotten now, but with films such as L'enfant de la barricade trails the status of being the first female film-maker.
The towering achievement of French cinema in the silent era was undoubtedly Abel Gance's six-hour biopic of Napoleon (1927), which...
- 3/22/2011
- by Andrew Pulver
- The Guardian - Film News
Jonathan Franzen's family epic, a new collection from Seamus Heaney, Philip Larkin's love letters, a memoir centred on tiny Japanese sculptures ... which books most excited our writers this year?
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
In Red Dust Road (Picador) Jackie Kay writes lucidly and honestly about being the adopted black daughter of white parents, about searching for her white birth mother and Nigerian birth father, and about the many layers of identity. She has a rare ability to portray sentiment with absolutely no sentimentality. Isabel Wilkerson's The Warmth of Other Suns (Random House) is a fresh and wonderful history of African-American migration. Chang-rae Lee's The Surrendered (Little, Brown) is a grave, beautiful novel about people who experienced the Korean war and the war's legacy. And David Remnick's The Bridge (Picador) is a thorough and well-written biography of Barack Obama. The many Americans who believe invented biographical details about Obama would do well to read it.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
In Red Dust Road (Picador) Jackie Kay writes lucidly and honestly about being the adopted black daughter of white parents, about searching for her white birth mother and Nigerian birth father, and about the many layers of identity. She has a rare ability to portray sentiment with absolutely no sentimentality. Isabel Wilkerson's The Warmth of Other Suns (Random House) is a fresh and wonderful history of African-American migration. Chang-rae Lee's The Surrendered (Little, Brown) is a grave, beautiful novel about people who experienced the Korean war and the war's legacy. And David Remnick's The Bridge (Picador) is a thorough and well-written biography of Barack Obama. The many Americans who believe invented biographical details about Obama would do well to read it.
- 11/27/2010
- The Guardian - Film News
The Moving Arts Film Journal has put together a list of the 100 Greatest Movies of All Time. Check it out below. Do you agree with this list of films? Every list is going to be spot on for some and piss others off. I personally am a fan of the list. Take a look and let us know your thoughts!
#1. 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968, Kubrick)
#2. Citizen Kane (1941, Welles)
#3. The Godfather (1972, Coppola)
#4. Andrei Rublev (1966, Tarkovsky)
#5. The Rules of the Game (1939, Renoir)
#6. Casablanca (1942, Curtiz)
#7. Vertigo (1958, Hitchcock)
#8. La Dolce Vita (1960, Fellini)
#9. Seven Samurai (1954, Kurosawa)
#10. The Godfather Pt. II (1974, Coppola)
#11. The Third Man (1949, Reed)
#12. The Wizard of Oz (1939, Fleming)
#13. Dr. Strangelove (1964, Kubrick)
#14. Goodfellas (1990, Scorsese)
#15. Aguirre: The Wrath of God (1972, Herzog)
#16. 8½ (1963, Fellini)
#17. Singin’ In The Rain (1952, Donen, Kelly)
#18. Raging Bull (1980, Scorsese)
#19. Lawrence of Arabia (1962, Lean)
#20. Solaris (1972, Tarkovsky)
#21. The Night of the Hunter (1955, Laughton)
#22. On the Waterfront (1954, Kazan)
#23. Intolerance (1916, Griffith)
#24. L’Atalante (1934, Vigo)
#25. Apocalypse Now (1979, Coppola...
#1. 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968, Kubrick)
#2. Citizen Kane (1941, Welles)
#3. The Godfather (1972, Coppola)
#4. Andrei Rublev (1966, Tarkovsky)
#5. The Rules of the Game (1939, Renoir)
#6. Casablanca (1942, Curtiz)
#7. Vertigo (1958, Hitchcock)
#8. La Dolce Vita (1960, Fellini)
#9. Seven Samurai (1954, Kurosawa)
#10. The Godfather Pt. II (1974, Coppola)
#11. The Third Man (1949, Reed)
#12. The Wizard of Oz (1939, Fleming)
#13. Dr. Strangelove (1964, Kubrick)
#14. Goodfellas (1990, Scorsese)
#15. Aguirre: The Wrath of God (1972, Herzog)
#16. 8½ (1963, Fellini)
#17. Singin’ In The Rain (1952, Donen, Kelly)
#18. Raging Bull (1980, Scorsese)
#19. Lawrence of Arabia (1962, Lean)
#20. Solaris (1972, Tarkovsky)
#21. The Night of the Hunter (1955, Laughton)
#22. On the Waterfront (1954, Kazan)
#23. Intolerance (1916, Griffith)
#24. L’Atalante (1934, Vigo)
#25. Apocalypse Now (1979, Coppola...
- 11/15/2010
- by Tiberius
- GeekTyrant
You will not like something about this list. In your mind, undeserving inclusions and unthinkable omissions probably abound. That is as it should be. Film, for all the scholarship, expertise and pretense that surrounds it, remains, like all art, firmly subjective. Feel free to tell us what we missed, what we misplaced, or congratulate us on a job well done, if you feel so inclined. Just remember to keep it clean, civil and respectful. With that said, these are The Moving Arts Film Journal’s 100 Greatest Movies of All Time:
#1. 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968, Kubrick)
#2. Citizen Kane (1941, Welles)
#3. The Godfather (1972, Coppola)
#4. Andrei Rublev (1966, Tarkovsky)
#5. The Rules of the Game (1939, Renoir)
#6. Casablanca (1942, Curtiz)
#7. Vertigo (1958, Hitchcock)
#8. La Dolce Vita (1960, Fellini)
#9. Seven Samurai (1954, Kurosawa)
#10. The Godfather Pt. II (1974, Coppola)
#11. The Third Man (1949, Reed)
#12. The Wizard of Oz (1939, Fleming)
#13. Dr. Strangelove (1964, Kubrick)
#14. Goodfellas (1990, Scorsese)
#15. Aguirre: The Wrath of God (1972, Herzog)
#16. 8½ (1963, Fellini)
#17. Singin’ In The Rain (1952, Donen,...
#1. 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968, Kubrick)
#2. Citizen Kane (1941, Welles)
#3. The Godfather (1972, Coppola)
#4. Andrei Rublev (1966, Tarkovsky)
#5. The Rules of the Game (1939, Renoir)
#6. Casablanca (1942, Curtiz)
#7. Vertigo (1958, Hitchcock)
#8. La Dolce Vita (1960, Fellini)
#9. Seven Samurai (1954, Kurosawa)
#10. The Godfather Pt. II (1974, Coppola)
#11. The Third Man (1949, Reed)
#12. The Wizard of Oz (1939, Fleming)
#13. Dr. Strangelove (1964, Kubrick)
#14. Goodfellas (1990, Scorsese)
#15. Aguirre: The Wrath of God (1972, Herzog)
#16. 8½ (1963, Fellini)
#17. Singin’ In The Rain (1952, Donen,...
- 11/13/2010
- by Eric M. Armstrong
- The Moving Arts Journal
French actor famed for his long-running role as Simenon's Maigret
Georges Simenon described his creation Jules Maigret, the gruff, pipe-smoking, Parisian police inspector, thus: "His build was plebeian. He was enormous and bony. Hard muscles stood out beneath his jacket… Above all, he had his very own way of planting himself in a spot… He was a solid block and everything had to break against it." Simenon could have been describing the French actor Bruno Crémer, who has died of cancer aged 80. Crémer, who played Maigret on French television in 54 episodes over 14 years (from 1991 to 2005), had hard acts to follow in Pierre Renoir, Jean Gabin and Jean Richard in France, but the role fitted him as perfectly as the hat and heavy overcoat he wore most of the time.
Maigret was the hero of 75 novels, 28 short stories, many films and endless TV series in numerous languages, including Japanese. In the two British series,...
Georges Simenon described his creation Jules Maigret, the gruff, pipe-smoking, Parisian police inspector, thus: "His build was plebeian. He was enormous and bony. Hard muscles stood out beneath his jacket… Above all, he had his very own way of planting himself in a spot… He was a solid block and everything had to break against it." Simenon could have been describing the French actor Bruno Crémer, who has died of cancer aged 80. Crémer, who played Maigret on French television in 54 episodes over 14 years (from 1991 to 2005), had hard acts to follow in Pierre Renoir, Jean Gabin and Jean Richard in France, but the role fitted him as perfectly as the hat and heavy overcoat he wore most of the time.
Maigret was the hero of 75 novels, 28 short stories, many films and endless TV series in numerous languages, including Japanese. In the two British series,...
- 8/25/2010
- by Ronald Bergan
- The Guardian - Film News
Jean Grémillon's Gueule d'amour (Lady Killer) of 1937 is almost an archetypal French film of its period. It uses North African colonial settings, like Pepé le Moko. It features the French foreign legion, like La bandera and Le grand jeu. It celebrates male friendship over the perfidy of women, like La belle equipe. It stars Jean Gabin, like everything else.
Partly, the movie succeeds in avoiding the appearance of an identikit picture because it's so well-crafted: Grémillon was a supremely stylish and sensitive filmmaker, whose films typically not only fulfill their genre requirements but hint at broader, more mysterious concerns—in Renoir's phrase, he's adept at "leaving a door open." His collaborators on this one include Günther Rittau, who worked on Metropolis, and Charles Spaak, who worked for almost every major director and whose continuing neglect is one of the more regrettable consequences of the auteur theory. (Partial credits for Spaak: La grand illusion,...
Partly, the movie succeeds in avoiding the appearance of an identikit picture because it's so well-crafted: Grémillon was a supremely stylish and sensitive filmmaker, whose films typically not only fulfill their genre requirements but hint at broader, more mysterious concerns—in Renoir's phrase, he's adept at "leaving a door open." His collaborators on this one include Günther Rittau, who worked on Metropolis, and Charles Spaak, who worked for almost every major director and whose continuing neglect is one of the more regrettable consequences of the auteur theory. (Partial credits for Spaak: La grand illusion,...
- 7/8/2010
- MUBI
When Maigret met Magritte.
I'm not, in seems, the first to compare Jean Renoir's La nuit du carrefour (The Night at the Crossroads) to Carl Dreyer's Vampyr. It's an odd congruence—Renoir's film is a policier based on one of Georges Simenon's popular Maigret novels, and Dreyer's is a supernatural thriller based on a vampire yarn by the Irish writer Sheridan Le Fanu—which perhaps needs a little unpacking.
The first sense of a resemblance starts early, in the odd way in which the movie moves. This was the thirties, another country far more distant than France, and they do things differently there. The rhythms are different, the camera placement is eccentric, the movement of the camera has a cumbersome quality. While Dreyer's camera has a somnambular drift of its own, Renoir's does move with a greater sense of narrative emphasis...but what he chooses...
I'm not, in seems, the first to compare Jean Renoir's La nuit du carrefour (The Night at the Crossroads) to Carl Dreyer's Vampyr. It's an odd congruence—Renoir's film is a policier based on one of Georges Simenon's popular Maigret novels, and Dreyer's is a supernatural thriller based on a vampire yarn by the Irish writer Sheridan Le Fanu—which perhaps needs a little unpacking.
The first sense of a resemblance starts early, in the odd way in which the movie moves. This was the thirties, another country far more distant than France, and they do things differently there. The rhythms are different, the camera placement is eccentric, the movement of the camera has a cumbersome quality. While Dreyer's camera has a somnambular drift of its own, Renoir's does move with a greater sense of narrative emphasis...but what he chooses...
- 6/3/2010
- MUBI
You remember the scene in "Casablanca" in which Victor Lazlo (Paul Henreid) ticks off the Nazis by leading a stirring rendition of "La Marseillaise," the French national anthem. That scene was copied from one in "La Grande Illusion," Frenchman Jean Renoir's brilliant 1937 antiwar movie -- one of 22 films unreeling in a Renoir retrospective at Bam Rose Cinemas. The series was programmed by Jake Perlin and Florence Almozini, who had this to...
- 4/11/2010
- by By V.A. MUSETTO
- NYPost.com
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