Like a French Film

May 23, 2023 — In one of her most moving explorations of youth, Céline Sciamma offers the gently radical and reparative chance for a mother and child to share a perspective.

May 13, 2022 — The director of We’re All Going to the World’s Fair reflects on the transformative power of a Sonic Youth needle drop in Olivier Assayas’s 1996 film.

May 8, 2018 — Horror movies are often understood as products of the imagination, but in the case of Caroline Monnet and Daniel Watchorn’s work, the conventions of the genre are grounded in stories of real-life injustice. Set in a Canadian residential school for...

May 1, 2015 — In his first feature, Jean-Pierre Melville found subtly radical ways to adapt Vercors's underground French novel about quiet resistance against the German occupation.

Aug 30, 2011 — “It is much less a film than it is myself,” Jean Cocteau wrote to a friend at the time he was making Orpheus (1950), “a kind of projection of the things that are important to me.” As with many of...

Apr 22, 2009 — Some of you might have seen the news item on our website regarding the Jacques Tati “centennial-plus” and the exhibits around Paris paying homage to the inventive filmmaker. I had the good fortune to be in the City of Lights...

Apr 23, 2007 — Louis Malle’s documentary work adopts certain tenets of cinéma direct—improvisation, minimal crew, the refusal to organize reality—and applies them to a consistently class-conscious, outsider perspective.

Oct 5, 2026 — Andrew Scott and Rami Malek play dying actors determined to give their all to their art in the late 1980s.

May 11, 2026 — We begin with the Marilyn Monroe centenary and move on to thrillers and collections of poetry and critical essays.

Apr 3, 2026 — This week: Mani Haghighi, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Sophy Romvari and Martha Coolidge, and Ken and Flo Jacobs.