French

Quote:
Wooden Crosses (1932) – Hailed by the New York Times on its Paris release as “one of the great films in motion picture history,” Raymond Bernard’s Wooden Crosses, France’s answer to All Quiet on the Western Front, still stuns with its depiction of the travails of one French regiment during World War I. Using a masterful arsenal of film techniques, from haunting matte paintings to jarring documentary-like camerawork in the film’s battle sequences, Bernard created a pacifist work of enormous empathy and chilling despair. No one who has ever seen this technical and emotional powerhouse has been able to forget it.Read More »

SYNOPSIS
Cabrera’s cousin discovers himself in Chris Marker’s La Jetée: a photo of him and his parents on the observation deck of Orly airport. They had arrived there from Algeria in 1962.Read More »

Two women from very different worlds bond over an unlikely connection — both of them have a husband serving time in the same prison — in Visiting Hours, a study of class and economic disparity that avoids certain narrative familiarities while succumbing to others. Veteran French director Patricia Mazuy reunites with her The Kings Daughters (2000) star Isabelle Huppert, who plays a bourgeois wife who takes an interest in Hafsia Herzi’s working-class dry-cleaner, although the reason for her fascination is, intriguingly, never explicitly laid out. The two characters become friends, although both women’s ulterior motives give this uneven but compelling film its tense energy.Read More »

The Girl on the Train is a 2009 French drama film directed by André Téchiné. Jeanne is a young woman, striking but otherwise without qualities. Her mother tries to get her a job in the office of a lawyer, Bleistein, her lover years ago. Jeanne fails the interview but falls into a relationship with Franck, a wrestler whose dreams and claims of being in a legitimate business partnership Jeanne is only too happy to believe. When Franck is arrested, he turns on Jeanne for her naivety; she’s stung and seeks attention by making up a story of an attack on a train. Is there any way out for her?Read More »

PLOT:
A mother tells her son an episode from her childhood.
During a walk one autumn morning, when she was a little girl of ten years, she saw a fox. Immediately fascinated by this animal, she forgets all fear. She spends her time to find it and attempt to approach it. The girl and the fox gradually bind friendship, despite the fierce and mysterious nature of the animal. The little girl lives thus an adventure that will change her life and her attitude towards nature.Read More »

Désiré Ecaré’s ”Faces of Women” is a technically rough, cheerfully rude, folkloric comedy about the status of women in the Ivory Coast, where Mr. Ecaré was born and raised. It is, in fact, two separate fables with a common frame, that of a street festival where the singing and dancing is nonstop.

In the first story, a bored wife is accused by her tyrannical farmer-husband of having an affair with his younger brother, a nattily dressed layabout. The wife isn’t, but would like to. At her wit’s end, she takes karate lessons in order to best her husband physically.Read More »

Quote:
Wooden Crosses (1932) – Hailed by the New York Times on its Paris release as “one of the great films in motion picture history,” Raymond Bernard’s Wooden Crosses, France’s answer to All Quiet on the Western Front, still stuns with its depiction of the travails of one French regiment during World War I. Using a masterful arsenal of film techniques, from haunting matte paintings to jarring documentary-like camerawork in the film’s battle sequences, Bernard created a pacifist work of enormous empathy and chilling despair. No one who has ever seen this technical and emotional powerhouse has been able to forget it.Read More »

unifrance wrote:
7 films by Denis Gheerbrant.
La République Marseille leads us through seven worlds that make up a city and give it the aspect of a republic: the world of dockers, activist workers, women in the garden projects or the inhabitants of an enormous ghetto, and, in all its nooks and crannies, ready to encounter all kinds of people, from an ex-junkie, a boxer, or young women on the brink of life. The Republic, a main street in the middle of the city. Confronted by a brutal real estate operation, all these stories come into play again.Read More »

A guideless old tour proprietor trumps his new-fangled rival by offering a genuine mystery trip. The takers are a crowd of eccentrics and dropouts from all backgrounds.Read More »