Slightly French

Dec 6, 2011 — One of the delights of Alfred Hitchcock’s comic thriller is the wit with which it pins down a distinctly British insular mindset.

Nov 15, 2011 — The thematic ideas and inspirations that sparked Three Colors: Blue (1993), though typically ambitious in scope, seem sketchy when compared to the intense experience of watching this exquisite film. We know that Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Three Colors trilogy corresponds to the...

Sep 19, 2011 — Jean-Luc Godard, lover of paradox, once characterized Claude Chabrol’s Les cousins (1959) as “a deeply hollow and therefore profound film,” a pronouncement, like so many of the pithy mots Godard used to reel off in the pages of Cahiers du...

Jun 27, 2011 — Shot in Berlin on the eve of the Great Depression with almost no budget, an equally modest cast of amateur actors, a relatively untested, unknown crew, and no major studio backing, the late silent film People on Sunday (1930) has...

Jun 7, 2011 — Performances Despite bearing his last name and a close resemblance to him—the high cheekbones, the slightly drooping lips and prominent front teeth, the piercing yet empathetic eyes—remarkably, Geraldine Chaplin has never seemed obscured by the shadow of her iconic father,...

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...

Nov 27, 2010 — The New Jersey resort town of Atlantic City provides the backdrop for two distinctive films made at opposite ends of the seventies: Bob Rafelson’s 1972 The King of Marvin Gardens and Louis Malle’s Atlantic City, released in 1981. That decade...

Nov 18, 2010 — In Charles Laughton’s The Night of the Hunter, terror and tenderness grapple with each other as profoundly as the words HATE and LOVE when they’re tattooed, one per hand, across the knuckles of the sadistic preacher Harry Powell (Robert Mitchum)....

Jul 27, 2010 — Americans got The Secret of the Grain. In France, they got La graine et le mulet (The Grain and the Mullet)—basically, “Couscous and Fish.” Depending on whose table you eat dinner at, the French title can seem as elemental as...

Jun 29, 2010 — Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s novel The Leopard had a hard time finding a publisher but was well-known by the time Luchino Visconti began working on his film of the same name. The book appeared in Italy in 1958 and was subsequently...