Greece 1974 – during the brutal era of the military government, an innocent tourist manager (Ugo Tognazzi) is accused of being a member of the illegal resistance movement. Two secret agents (Michel Piccoli and Mario Adorf) are bringing the innocent victim to Athens.Read More »
Dr. Brézé and his sons, all surgeons with limited abilities fight any competition on their sector with all means. Especially a well-known operating surgeon Pierre Losseray, which wants to operate again after a cardiac infarct and a longer recovery break. Night for night he is terrorized by the old Brézé with calls, being accused by him of the murder of patients, threatens with measures of the physician chamber.Read More »
From slantmagazine
In a 1994 interview, director Claude Sautet, who had a particular fondness for his Max et les Ferrailleurs, expressed directly and unequivocally his disdain for its protagonist, the police detective Max (Michel Piccoli), an efficient, dedicated policeman with no home life and a hard-won icy exterior. Cops like Max weren’t new in 1971—not in French movies, not in the American thrillers and noirs that inspired the French film industry, not even in Sautet’s work. But like a lady once said about a reporter, you may have met hard-boiled before, but Max, he’s 10 minutes. He’s also independently wealthy. Read More »
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Subversive Italian satirist Marco Ferreri directed and co-wrote (with Rafael Azcona) this grotesquely amusing French black comedy about four men who grow sick of life, and so meet at a remote villa with the goal of literally eating themselves to death. The quartet comes from various walks of life — a pilot (Marcello Mastroianni), a chef (Ugo Tognazzi), a television host (Michel Piccoli), and a judge (Philippe Noiret) — but all are successful men with excessive appetites for life’s pleasures (food is used as mere metaphor here, as graphic as that metaphor becomes). ~ Robert Firsching, All Movie GuideRead More »
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In 1798, Napoleon lands his army in Egypt, defeats the Mameluke warlords (the remnants of Ottoman rule), and goes on to Cairo. Three brothers, who are Egyptian patriots, chafe under Mameluke rule and reject the prospect of French domination. Bakr, the eldest, is a hothead, quick to advocate armed rebellion; Ali is more philosophical and poetic; Yehia is young and impressionable. One of Napoleon’s generals, the one-legged intellectual Caffarelli, wants to make Frenchmen out of Ali, Yehia, and other Egyptians, opening a bakery where their father works, becoming a tutor, and declaring his love for them. Is tragedy the only resolution of these conflicting loyalties?Read More »
Marseilles, 1919. Georges Sarret is a distinguished and respected lawyer, recently honoured for his services in the First World War. He takes as his lover Philomène Schmidt, a young German woman, who has just lost her job and home. To enable Philomène to remain in France, Georges finds her a husband – who dies conveniently of natural causes a month after the wedding. Georges repeats the trick with Philomène’s sister, Catherine – marrying her off to an old man who dies suddenly so that the scheming trio can profit from his life insurance. When an accomplice in the scheme, Marcel Chambon, threatens to blackmail them, Georges and his two lovers have no option but to kill him and his mistress…Read More »
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A, an American film director of Greek ancestry, is making a film that tells his story and the story of his parents. It is a tale that unfolds in Italy, Germany, Russia, Kazakhstan, Canada and the USA. The main character is Eleni, who is claimed and claims the absoluteness of love. At the same time the film is a long journey into the vast history and the events of the last fifty years that left their mark on the 20th century. The characters in the film move as though in a dream. The dust of time confuses memories. A searches for them and experiences them in the present. (Written by Theo Angelopoulos)Read More »
Marcel Spandice, a famous homosexual writer during the sixties in Paris, is trying to make a young Arab into the greatest tightrope walker in the world. Behind the figure of Spandice, author, poet and lover of the circus (“because there one truly risks getting killed,” in his own words)
The story of this film was allegedly based on a true story witnessed by the director Nico Papatakis during his filmmaking collaboration with the controversial and much-lionized monstre sacrée Jean Genet.Read More »
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This wicked adaptation of the Octave Mirbeau novel is classic Luis Buñuel. Jeanne Moreau is Celestine, a beautiful Parisian domestic who, upon arrival at her new job at an estate in provincial 1930s France, entrenches herself in sexual hypocrisy and scandal with her philandering employer (Buñuel regular Michel Piccoli). Filmed in luxurious black-and-white Franscope, Diary of a Chambermaid is a raw-edged tangle of fetishism and murder—and a scathing look at the burgeoning French fascism of the era.Read More »