French

‘The Connection’ masterfully mixes police procedurals, gangster sagas, and chain smoking into a riveting crime drama.

What is love? Love is a pain, love is death, love is a bitch. But friendship, that’s even worse. Friendship is nebulous; it’ll steal your affections, spread rumors about you, scrawl dirty lies on your locker. Life-affirming and, ultimately, life-ending, friendship is like coffee laced with slow-acting poison. At least that’s how it works in Melanie Laurent’s gorgeous Respire, an unsettling usurpation of your usual coming-of-age story, and one of the most confident sophomore films of recent memory.

“I disappear between these two moments of speech/ self-portrait not autobiography” – Jean-Luc Godard Never has Godard been so melancholic and comedic in one film. JLG/JLG: self-portrait in December (hereafter referred to as JLG/JLG) is a portrait of an artist, the artist of cinema, at sixty four. Part documentary, part film essay, JLG/JLG is a …

Great film direction can reflect great fashion. Unlike its direct competition, the earlier 2014 film Yves Saint Laurent, director and co-writer Bertrand Bonello portrays the fashion mogul with saturated palettes of grandeur in Saint Laurent. The prior film is directed by actor-turned-filmmaker Jalil Lespert, who,having less directorial experience than Bonello, doesn’t quite transform the character of Laurent with the vision and divinity as its successor. Where Lespert is almost literal, Bonello is instead deep and as complex as the character himself, picking apart every detail of the icon and the space he walked in.

Expressing his appreciation for a painting of Proust’s bedroom, Yves Saint Laurent says, “There’s so much fidelity in it. The artist didn’t eclipse his subject.” Something similar can be said of Bertrand Bonello’s biopic of the iconic woman’s fashion designer, as the film seems content with offering fleeting glimpses of its subject drinking, smoking, pill-popping, and sketching in fervid bursts rather than trying to understand him. It doesn’t pontificate or wax philosophical or dig deeply into Saint Laurent’s psyche. It treats the man more like a piece of art to be displayed and observed. (To be fair, this year’s other Saint Laurent biopic, Yves Saint Laurent, does try to explain the man, and it fails pretty hard, so maybe Bonello has the right idea.)

Aux yeux des vivants Written and Directed by Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury France, 2014 Aux yeux des vivants is the newest film from the French extremist duo Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury. Their best known film, À l’intérieur, ushered their misanthropic and violent vision to genre fests across the world and became a much …

What is art if not an artist’s fiction translated into reality? A fiction wrought from fear, self-loathing and prejudice that escapes the confines of a sonnet and burrows its way into the collective consciousness. Now it is reality. Now it has power. Now it’s an idea, and ideas are poisonous. Rather than dispelling the poisonous reality, Polanski’s Venus in Fur toys with the delicate fiction lying beneath. It’s a study in role-playing, where the players and creators are equally baffled by the game. More importantly, this is the intensely personal work of an artist who understands that only by blurring the lines between fiction and reality can he approach what Herzog calls, “the ecstatic truth.”

Last May with the announcement of Bruno Dumont’s television debut, I wrote an article outlining accessibility issues when it comes to International television. With television becoming as increasingly artistically rich medium, demands for accessibility to international content is in greater demand. Certain shows have broken the threshold, most obviously those from the UK that found …

France ruled the film world in 2013, producing some of the most critically acclaimed and controversial titles. La Vie D’Adele took home the Palme D’Or and has since been subject to intense debate around the ethics of the film’s production and its depiction of sexuality. Among the other highlights was Alain Guirandie’s L’Inconnu du lac, …

Male bodies glisten in the summer sun while wandering eyes fall upon a murder that leads to a torrid love affair with a killer. This is the premise to Alain Guirandie’s L’inconnu du lac, an incredible thriller with the mood and atmosphere of a great horror.

Camille Claudel 1915 is a 3-day portrait of great sculptress Camille Claudel and her life in an institution. A rarity in art history, Claudel found success during her lifetime and was often exhibited alongside male contemporaries.

Sometimes, it is more fascinating to watch the struggle a film has in trying to balance dual aims than it is to watch the movie itself. Case in point: Renoir, a feature showcase at this year’s Phoenix Film Festival. In essence, Renoir tells us of how an alluring young woman came into the lives of the impressionist painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir and his son Jean, and how she changed all of their lives.

The Day I Saw Your Heart Written and directed by Jennifer Devoldère France, 2011 In Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise, Julie Delpy prophetically describes what it means to be French. Delpy’s Celine, while philosophizing with Ethan Hawke’s Jesse, says, “Each time I wear black, or like, lose my temper, or say anything about anything, you know, …