Pierre Arditi

The Little Apocalypse is a 1993 French comedy film, an adaptation of Tadeusz Konwicki’s novel, directed by Costa-Gavras. It was entered into the 43rd Berlin International Film Festival. It follows the trials of a Pole who lives in France who wants his written work published. Unable to get anywhere, he starts to enlist help from others, resorting to some unusual extremes.

Synopsis:
An unknown Polish writer can’t publish his novels, so his ex-wife decides to help him and get some of the profit for herself. She finally finds a publisher, but there’s a strange single condition that could cost the writer his life.Read More »

Quote:
A young woman disguises herself as a knight to expose a gold-digging man divided between her and a Countess.

Jacquot began his career as assistant director of Marguerite Duras (Nathalie Granger, India Song) and as an actor in films directed by Jean-Claude Biette. Then turned to writing and directing with the 1975 film L’Assassin musicien (The Musician Killer) which starred Anna Karina.Read More »

In Paris in the 1920s, a concert violinist meets and falls in love with a stylish young flapper who’s the wife of an old friend. Romaine instigates the affair with Marcel, and carries it forward even as her husband, Pierre, falls ill. She may even be purposely giving Pierre a treatment that adds to his misery. After Marcel returns from a concert tour and Romaine stoops to a new low in abandoning Pierre for an assignation, she reconsiders the affair and takes a drastic step. Three years later, Pierre pays Marcel a visit to demand the truth. Will the jealous and aggrieved Marcel manage a convincing performance?Read More »

Quote:
Simon secretly loves Camille. Camille, due to a misunderstanding, falls for Marc Duveyrier. Marc, a handsome realtor, who’s also Simon’s boss, is trying to sell an apartment to Odile Lalande, Camille’s sister. Odile really wants this apartment, despite the silent disapproval of her husband, Claude. Claude, somewhat wan in character, finds it hard to stomach the reappearance, after many years, of Nicolas. Nicolas, an old friend of Odile’s becomes the confidant of Simon… The dialogue is in part made up of extracts of French hit songs, sung in situation by the actors.Read More »

Starring the dependable Pierre Arditi with a very bad case of unshakable hangdog expression, as well as Jean Reno, Pierre Jolivet’s first movie as a director (he had also co-written “Le Dernier Combat” with Luc Besson) , “Strictement Personnel” is – in some ways – a typical paranoid French thriller, in which the main character gets reunited with his estranged family, with some not-altogether-successful dream flashes.Read More »

Roberto Rosselini directs this fascinating program tracing the life and work of 17th century French mathematician, religious philosopher and physicist Blaise Pascal, who made pioneering contributions to the fields of geometry and probability. The legendary Rosselini created this television film as part of a remarkable series geared toward illuminating the evolution of knowledge and history in Western civilization.Read More »

Plot :
Guillaume de Burlador is a private tutor who hits a low point sufficiently severe for him to
contemplate a somewhat theatrical suicide. Instead he is taken off by flying boat to a mad French colonial possession bedecked by mad servants and crazy decor. Three rather gorgeous women live there,and old Guillaume is a randy old stoat.Read More »

The consequences of a housewife smoking or not smoking a single cigarette branch out into a dozen separate destinies and parallel universes, each with its own conclusion, in these two French features by Alain Resnais. Adapted and translated from six of the eight comic plays comprising British playwright Alan Ayckbourn’s Intimate Exchanges, they can be seen alone or together, and in either order. The project, a tour de force for two actors playing multiple roles (Pierre Arditi and Sabine Azema), succeeded at the box office when released in France in 1993, and as a unit the two films swept the Cesars (French Oscars) for best picture, director, actor, and set design.Read More »

English audio (Alexandra Stewart)

REMEMBRANCE OF THINGS TO COME, the latest “cine-essay” of Chris Marker, is dense and demanding, a splendid reminder that his nimble, capacious mind has lost none of its agility, poetry, and power. Ostensibly a portrait of photographer Denise Bellon, focusing on the two decades between 1935 and 1955, the film leaps and backtracks, Marker-style, from subject to subject, from a family portrait of Bellon and her two daughters, Loleh and Yannick (the latter co-authored the film), to a wide-ranging history of surrealism, of the city of Paris, of French cinema and the birth of the cinémathèque, of Europe, the National Front, the Second World War and Spanish Civil War, and postwar politics and culture.
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