La ley de deseo

The actor and writer shares her love of the literary qualities of Eric Rohmer’s cinema, recalls the thrill of watching Bruno Dumont’s La vie de Jésus, and selects films by auteurs she has worked with, including Jean-Luc Godard and John...

Nov 2, 2008 — To see the gorgeous Fanfan la Tulipe is to go back in time twice over: to the film’s eighteenth-century French setting and to the international cinema world of more than fifty years ago, when this genial action farce was initially...

Jun 18, 2019 — Bruno Dumont’s remarkable first feature examines the intermingling of the sacred and the profane in the French provinces.

Jan 28, 2014 — Among the delights of Aki Kaurismäki’s La vie de bohème are the guest appearances by François Truffaut alter ego Jean-Pierre Léaud and the two-fisted American auteur Samuel Fuller. The former plays an eccentric collector who takes an interest in the...

Jun 21, 2019 — The French iconoclast explains how his background in industrial filmmaking helped him bring life to abstract ideas about the human condition.

Jun 20, 2019 — When French auteur Bruno Dumont emerged on the film-festival circuit at the end of the 1990s with his debut feature, La vie de Jésus, and his Cannes-award-winning international breakthrough L’humanité, he immediately polarized audiences with his pitiless vision of human...

Jan 23, 2018 — Made during the German occupation of France, these beguiling films showcase Claude Autant-Lara at the height of his powers.

May 8, 2012 — To start on a personal note: I wrote a book about La haine that came out in November 2005, just as the Paris suburbs (banlieues) erupted in an unprecedented wave of violence. Every night, as in the Bob Marley song we...

Mar 26, 2024 — In her first fiction film, director Alice Diop brings the skills of observation she has learned from her documentary work to a thought-provoking exploration of race, power, and motherhood.

Jan 3, 2024 — The new year will bring us new work from Leos Carax, Bong Joon Ho, Francis Ford Coppola, Mike Leigh, David Cronenberg, Celine Song . . .