Like a French Film

Nov 17, 2014 — Claudette Colbert and Clark Gable’s effortless banter is pure magic, but Frank Capra’s comedy is rooted in the reality of the times.

Jul 28, 2014 — Jacques Demy’s first full-fledged storybook fantasy challenges and subverts traditional fairy-tale norms.

Mar 6, 2014 — Jean-Luc Godard’s 1960 film Breathless not only launched the French New Wave and made the director’s name forever synonymous with French art cinema—it also made a star out of its leading man, the theretofore unknown Jean-Paul Belmondo. The following excerpt...

Dec 16, 2013 — Here at last comes the time of ecstasy, of trances.Those who refuse to their senses the gift of trances shall wither.Brothers in trances, when will freedom come?They threw me out of my land and country.May my star shine. [. ....

Dec 10, 2013 — Djibril Diop Mambety’s Senegalese masterwork is remarkable for both its technical audacity and its postcolonialist expressionism.

Jun 26, 2013 — On the life and work of the famous Czech author, and the pleasures and challenges of translating him.

Aug 16, 2012 — Every ten years since 1952, the world-renowned film magazine Sight & Sound has polled a wide international selection of film critics and directors on what they consider to be the ten greatest works of cinema ever made, and then compiled the results....

Aug 31, 2011 — A man and a woman are married in a small town. The wedding procession follows them to a canal barge, of which he is the master. His crew, an old salt and a young boy, await them there. The couple...

Jun 21, 2011 — Chains: Bound for Glory Film history is replete with artists embraced by critics but misunderstood by the public. For Italian filmmaker Raffaello Matarazzo, it was the opposite. After working for almost two decades as a midlevel studio director of pictures...

Apr 12, 2011 — A nightmare from which no one awakes, Claire Denis’ White Material (2009) takes place in a nameless African country teetering on the brink of all-out civil war. It is the veteran French director’s toughest work, unsparing with its characters and...