French

  • Gérard Blain – Les Amis AKA The Friends (1971)

    1971-1980DramaFranceGérard Blain

    Philippe is an older man and an industrialist whose wife is confined to her bed. They have no children. As he is preparing to go on a vacation to the seaside, he strikes up an acquaintance with Paul, a young working-class boy, and decides to bring him along. This is Paul’s first glimpse of how the other half lives, with their first-class hotels and so on. When he meets some aristocratic young people at the resort, he tries to put over the fiction that he is of their class, with poor success.

    The film won the Golden Leopard at the Locarno International Film Festival.Read More »

  • Chantal Akerman – La captive AKA The Captive (2000)

    1991-2000ArthouseChantal AkermanDramaFrance

    An adaptation of Proust’s “La Prisoniere” (book five of “Remembrance of Things Past”). Set in Paris, France, it is a serious tale of a tragic and dysfunctional love.Read More »

  • André Téchiné – Les gens d’à côté AKA My New Friends (2024)

    2021-2030André TéchinéDramaFrance

    Plot:
    Lucie, a police officer, is fond of her new neighbors, a young couple. Soon she discovers that Yann, the father, has a heavy criminal record. Lucie has a moral conflict between her professionalism and her desire to help this family.Read More »

  • Jacques Pinoteau – Le triporteur AKA The Tricyclist (1957)

    1951-1960ComedyFranceJacques Pinoteau

    Antoine Peyralout is baker Mouillefarine’s tricycle delivery man. Comical and stuttering, Antoine shows more interest in the local soccer team than in professional integrity. A wedding cake pays the price for it and the young man is dismissed. Not dispirited in the least, Antoine decides to go to Nice, where his favorite team will play the final of the Cup. On his merry (and eventful) way, he has the opportunity to save a pretty camper, Popeline, with whom he falls in love. Once in Nice, he discovers that Dabek, the brilliant goal-keeper is not up to his task following bad news…Read More »

  • Mehdi Charef – La Fille de Keltoum AKA Daughter of Keltoum (2001)

    2001-2010African CinemaDramaFranceMehdi Charef

    imdb wrote:
    An extraordinary story of a young woman raised in Switzerland who travels back to Algeria, her birthplace, to meet and kill her natural mother, who abandoned her shortly after birth. Along the way, she is exposed to the brutality of desert life and, in particular, the abuses that men heap upon women in fundamentalist, third world countries. Birth, death and life in general, have little meaning as people struggle for survival. The scenery is stark but at the same time beautiful and the faces of the characters that she meet are marvelous. The film was made in Tunisia, as it does not cast a particularly good light on Algerian men and probably could not have gotten permission to be filmed in Algeria where Sharia is the law of the land.Read More »

  • François Truffaut – Jules et Jim AKA Jules and Jim (1962) (HD)

    1961-1970ArthouseDramaFranceFrançois Truffaut

    Quote:
    In the carefree days before World War I, introverted Austrian author Jules strikes up a friendship with the exuberant Frenchman Jim and both men fall for the impulsive and beautiful Catherine.Read More »

  • Raymond Bernard – Les croix de bois AKA Wooden Crosses (1932)

    1931-1940FranceRaymond BernardWarWorld War One

    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 »

  • Dominique Cabrera – Le cinquième plan de La Jetée (2024)

    2021-2030DocumentaryDominique CabreraFrance

    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 »

  • Patricia Mazuy – La Prisonnière de Bordeaux AKA Visiting Hours (2024)

    2021-2030ComedyFilm NoirFrancePatricia Mazuy

    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 »

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