Le massaggiatrici

Jun 17, 2009 — Celebrations of the fiftieth anniversary of the French New Wave have been popping up all over, and now New York is also about to ride the crest. The Museum of Arts and Design and the Museum of the Moving Image...

May 14, 2009 — Here’s a definite must-read: in its latest issue, Bright Lights Film Journal features André Bazin’s essay “Fifteen Years of French Cinema,” in its first-ever English translation (by Bert Cardullo). Originally delivered as a lecture in 1957, and later published in...

May 3, 2009 — Though primarily a celebration of the best of today’s world cinema, the Cannes Film Festival has for some time now also been making room for the past, with its sidebar Cannes Classics. A program of restored and rediscovered films, Cannes...

Apr 26, 2009 — The British film magazine Sight & Sound dedicates its May issue to the fiftieth anniversary of the French New Wave, which it dates to the first screening of François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (on May 4, 1959, at the Cannes...

Apr 21, 2009 — “Just takes a few months to get to be a hundred. If you’re in the right place at the right time.” I first saw Henri-Georges Clouzot’s masterpiece The Wages of Fear when the restored version was released in the U.S.,...

Mar 23, 2009 — The most crowd-pleasing film of François Truffaut’s latter career is also one of his most personal, drawing from his memories of the German occupation of France, his schoolboy years and his lifelong infatuation with the creative arts.

Feb 24, 2009 — On January 12, French cinema lost one of its truest enablers. Claude Berri was as well-known for his support of cinema, both financial and critical, as he was for his own filmmaking. The actor turned director-writer-producer made twenty-three films (the...

Nov 19, 2008 — My first trip to Paris took place inside the darkened cafeteria of Warnsdorfer Elementary School in East Brunswick, New Jersey. A few times each year, the entire student body was brought together to watch movies cast from a rickety 16...

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...

Emerging in France during the 1930s, this movement combined working-class milieus with moody, proto-noir art direction to stylishly represent contemporary social conditions.