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A breezy five-episode compilation movie about swindles plays out in five film capitals, under the eye of five different directors including Claude Chabrol and Jean-Luc Godard. But Roman Polanski’s Amsterdam segment couldn’t be included, which is a shame. It’s in B&W ‘scope, and everybody gets to bring their favorite cameraman and composer along.

The Eighth Annual Robert Classic French Film Festival — co-produced by Cinema St. Louis and the Webster University Film Series — celebrates St. Louis’ Gallic heritage and France’s cinematic legacy. The featured films span the decades from the 1920s through the early 1990s, offering a comprehensive overview of French cinema.

Danièle Delorme and Jean Gabin in 'Deadlier Than the Male.' Danièle Delorme movies (See previous post: “Danièle Delorme: 'Gigi' 1949 Actress Became Rare Woman Director's Muse.”) “Every actor would like to make a movie with Charles Chaplin or René Clair,” Danièle Delorme explains in the filmed interview (ca. 1960) embedded further below, adding that oftentimes it wasn't up to them to decide with whom they would get to work. Yet, although frequently beyond her control, Delorme managed to collaborate with a number of major (mostly French) filmmakers throughout her six-decade movie career. Aside from her Jacqueline Audry films discussed in the previous Danièle Delorme article, below are a few of her most notable efforts – usually playing naive-looking young women of modest means and deceptively inconspicuous sexuality, whose inner character may or may not match their external appearance. Ouvert pour cause d'inventaire (“Open for Inventory Causes,” 1946), an unreleased, no-budget comedy notable

From April 20 to April 28, 2015, filmgoers will celebrate the 19th edition of Colcoa French Film Festival, "9 Days of Film Premieres in Hollywood." The festival has recently unveiled the Focus on a Filmmaker program as well as an exclusive line up of French Classics of predominantly digitally restored films, presented as World, International or North American Premieres. All screenings will take place at the Directors Guild of America. For the first time, the Colcoa Classics Series from Tuesday to Saturday will be free with no reservation, on a first come, first served, basis.

Colcoa will honor Academy Award-winning writer-director Michel Hazanavicius on Thursday, April 23 with a special encore presentation of "Oss 117 Cairo Nest of Spies" (2006) (Colcoa Classics), as well as the Los Angeles Premiere of his new film , three years after the triumph of multi-Academy Award- winner, "The Artist." The cast of "The Search" includes Academy Award Nominee Bérénice Bejo and Academy Award nominee AAnnette Bening . "The Search" had its World Premiere at the Cannes Film Festival last year. Hazanavicius joins writer-directors Cedric Klapisch, Bertrand Blier, Costa Gavras, Florent Siri, Julie Delpy and Alain Resnais, whose key body of work has been cited in past festivals. This will be his third film presented at the festival, following "Oss 117 Cairo Nest of Spies" and the International Premiere of "Oss 117, Lost in Rio." Michel Hazanavicius will meet the audience for a Happy Hour Talk panel dedicated to his work. (Colcoa Classics + Panel + Premiere of "The Search.")

Colcoa will present the digitally restored version of "La Chienne" (1931), the second talking movie co-written and directed by Jean Renoir. It stars Michel Simon, Janie Marèse and Georges Flamant. This exclusive new presentation in the U.S. is made possible thanks to the Franco-American Cultural Fund (Facf), Janus Films La Cinémathèque Française and Les Films du Jeudi. (Colcoa Classics)

A classic film noir written and directed by José Giovanni, starring Alain Delon and Jean Gabin, "Two Men in Town"(1973) will be presented for the first time on the big screen in a digitally restored version. The Cohen Media group will release the film later this year (Colcoa Classics). North American Premiere of Digitally Restored "The Last Metro"

Following last year's homage to the universally renowned François Truffaut, Colcoa is proud to offer the North American Premiere of the digitally restored "The Last Metro" (1980), presented in association with the Franco-American Cultural Fund, La Cinématheque Française, MK2 and Janus Films. This masterpiece was also Truffaut's most successful box office success. It stars Catherine Deneuve and Gerard Depardieu. (Colcoa Classics

Paris — The L.A.-based French film festival Colcoa (City of Light, City of Angels) is set to fete Michel Hazanavicious, the Oscar-winning helmer of “The Artist,” during its upcoming 19th edition.

As part of Colcoa’s Focus on Filmmakers’ series, Hazanavicius – who currently has a couple projects in the U.S. — will present his latest film, the Cannes-competition player “The Search,” as well as his 2006 hit comedy “Oss 117, Cairo Nest of Spies” starring Jean Dujardin. “The Search” starred Berenice Bejo as a Ngo worker who forms a special bond with a young boy in war-torn Chechnya.

Headed by Francois Truffart, Colcoa will also screen the restored version of Wim Wenders’s “Paris Texas,” which celebrates this year its 30th anniversary. The Palme d’Or winning movie will be presented in association with Argos Films and Janus Films.

Luis Buñuel movies on TCM tonight (photo: Catherine Deneuve in 'Belle de Jour') The city of Paris and iconoclastic writer-director Luis Buñuel are Turner Classic Movies' themes today and later this evening. TCM's focus on Luis Buñuel is particularly welcome, as he remains one of the most daring and most challenging filmmakers since the invention of film. Luis Buñuel is so remarkable, in fact, that you won't find any Hollywood hipster paying homage to him in his/her movies. Nor will you hear his name mentioned at the Academy Awards – no matter the Academy in question. And rest assured that most film critics working today have never even heard of him, let alone seen any of his movies. So, nowadays Luis Buñuel is un-hip, un-cool, and unfashionable. He's also unquestionably brilliant. These days everyone is worried about freedom of expression. The clash of civilizations. The West vs. The Other.

Marie Dubois, actress in French New Wave films, dead at 77 (image: Marie Dubois in the mammoth blockbuster 'La Grande Vadrouille') Actress Marie Dubois, a popular French New Wave personality of the '60s and the leading lady in one of France's biggest box-office hits in history, died Wednesday, October 15, 2014, at a nursing home in Lescar, a suburb of the southwestern French town of Pau, not far from the Spanish border. Dubois, who had been living in the Pau area since 2010, was 77. For decades she had been battling multiple sclerosis, which later in life had her confined to a wheelchair. Born Claudine Huzé (Claudine Lucie Pauline Huzé according to some online sources) on January 12, 1937, in Paris, the blue-eyed, blonde Marie Dubois began her show business career on stage, being featured in plays such as Molière's The Misanthrope and Arthur Miller's The Crucible. François Truffaut discovery: 'Shoot the

I first encountered Lionel Jeffries’ 1973 melodrama Baxter! during the summer of 1978 on what I believe to be its one and only British television airing by the BBC. Its conspicuous absence on video in the UK – and, until 2014, DVD – meant that, for me, some 36 years elapsed between viewings. A small, and in many respects not particularly memorable film, it nevertheless stayed with me over the intervening years for, I think, two reasons. The first was its unexpectedly dark nature, which completely caught me off guard given the family friendly nature of the director’s previous films, The Railway Children and The Amazing Mr Blunden; best remembered for his myriad of on-screen performances, Baxter! was in fact the third of only five projects which positioned Jeffries on the other side of the camera.

Is it a horror film? Many of Ken Russell’s films could be argued as such, but there’s enough in Altered States that makes it less horror and more science fiction/psychological thriller. Based on the novel by Paddy Chayefsky, Altered States introduced the world to William Hurt (and also featured the film debut of Drew Barrymore). Edward Jessup (Hurt) is studying schizophrenia, but branches out into sensory deprivation experimentation with a floating tank. Eventually, he travels to Mexico to visit a tribe that provides him with an extract which he begins to take before his trips into the flotation tank, resulting in bizarre imagery and eventual physical devolution, once to a primitive man and to a near primordial blob. Side effects start to occur, causing Edward to suffer from episodes of partial regression even without the hallucinogenic drug. Russell’s direction shifts

‘La Cage aux Folles’ director Edouard Molinaro, who collaborated with Catherine Deneuve, Jeanne Moreau, Orson Welles, dead at 85 Edouard Molinaro, best known internationally for the late ’70s box office comedy hit La Cage aux Folles, which earned him a Best Director Academy Award nomination, died of lung failure on December 7, 2013, at a Paris hospital. Molinaro was 85. Born on May 31, 1928, in Bordeaux, in southwestern France, to a middle-class family, Molinaro began his six-decade-long film and television career in the mid-’40s, directing narrative and industrial shorts such as Evasion (1946), the Death parable Un monsieur très chic ("A Very Elegant Gentleman," 1948), and Le verbe en chair / The Word in the Flesh (1950), in which a poet realizes that greed is everywhere — including his own heart. At the time, Molinaro also worked as an assistant director, collaborating with, among others, Robert Vernay (the 1954 version of The Count of Monte Cristo, starring Jean Marais) and

But Carriè﻿re has also carried on a modest career as an actor, playing small roles in many of the films based on his scenarios. 1971's L'alliance, directed by Christian de Chalonge, seems to be his one real attempt at becoming a movie star.

In a rather Buñuel﻿ian scenario, Carriè﻿re's Hugues presents himself at a dating agency and announces that he's looking to find a wife with a spacious apartment. It turns out that he's a vet and needs somewhere to both live and practice. He's

Of all the cinéma de papa﻿ stylists so despised by the nouvelle vague, René﻿ Clair stands alone as the sole member of the old guard to stand down in the face of critical opposition. Or so it seems: Les fêtes galantes (1965) was his last film.

While Carné﻿ and the rest struggled on, defiantly filming when they could, Clair apparently had no stomach for the fight: if people thought he was old-fashioned, maybe he should stop.

One doesn't have to hate Clair with the ferocity that Truffaut could muster in order to see some sad wisdom in this retirement: for some time, Clair's films had been a little stiff. His early days among the surrealists, when he could make a kinetic exercise in visual absurdity like Entr'acte (1924), were long gone, and the vein of absurdist fantasy that enlivened his earliest narrative movies had its last expression in 1952's Les belles de nuit,

Luis Buñuel's brilliant hothouse flower of a film benefits from a little distance from the bourgeois conventions in question

Luis Buñuel's surreal masterpiece from 1972, co-written with Jean-Claude Carrière, is stranger and more sensual than ever. The weirdness under the conventions throbs even more insistently and indiscreetly, now that those conventions themselves are historically distant. We can see with hindsight how Buñuel's subversion absorbed the various modish forms of agitprop and radical chic, and subverted those as well. The action revolves around some half-a-dozen well-to-do metropolitan sophisticates who are forever attempting to meet up for dinner parties and elegant soirees only to find the event ruined by an absent host, or some mysterious misunderstanding, or bizarre turn of events, and then one will awake to find it all to be a dream, yet the distinction between dream and waking does not become any clearer. The surrealist and anthropologist

When Bernard Natan, head of Pathé﻿, had his French nationality taken away during the French Occupation (after which he perished in Auschwitz), his brother Emile, also a film producer, was similarly denaturalized. But Emile escaped the country, enlisted abroad, and was able to return to France as a conquering hero at the end of the war. His citizenship was restored and he resumed his producing career, notably with Yves Allegret's Maneges (1950).

When Natan died, his company was taken over by his daughter Monique. Now it was the Sixties, and a whole new generation of filmmakers were at work, with a whole new style. But Monique rejected all offers from the nouvelle vague—the only two filmmakers she took a real interest in were Jean Rollin, with whom she produced and co-wrote Le frisson des Vampires (softcore erotic vampire S&M horror), and Alain Jessua.

It has been a year since Sidney Lumet passed away on April 9, 2011. Here is our retrospective on the legendary filmmaker to honor his memory. Originally published April 15, 2011.

Almost a week after the fact, we, like everyone that loves film, are still mourning the passing of the great American master Sidney Lumet, one of the true titans of cinema.

Lumet was never fancy. He never needed to be, as a master of blocking, economic camera movements and framing that empowered the emotion and or exact punctuation of a particular scene. First and foremost, as you’ve likely heard ad nauseum -- but hell, it’s true -- Lumet was a storyteller, and one that preferred his beloved New York to soundstages (though let's not romanticize it too much, he did his fair share of work on studio film sets too as most TV journeyman and early studio filmmakers did).

The actor, trained ballet dancer, and husband of Monica Bellucci is a man of hidden depths. In his latest role, he plays an anarchic disciple of Sigmund Freud. So, asks Elizabeth Day, did he get to the bottom of why he's drawn to the dark side?

Vincent Cassel is very charming. He knows it. I know it. Everyone in the room – the photographer, her assistant, the make-up artist, the fashion team – knows it, too. When he speaks, his every witticism is greeted with a tinkling outburst of communal laughter. When he moves his leg ever so slightly to alter his pose, the photographer becomes breathless with admiration: "Perfect. That's perfect." It's only a matter of time until we all break into a round of applause and throw long-stemmed roses at his feet.

Once the photos are done, we take a seat in an adjoining room in what is quite possibly the hippest hotel in Paris,

When this thriller premiered at Tribeca this past spring, Alison Willmore wrote, "the second film from writer/director Josh Sternfeld ("Winter Solstice") has ambitions reaching beyond being a straightforward police procedural," though critics, including her, were mixed about the end result. Nick Stahl and Rachel Nichols star as small-town sleuths who investigate a botched home invasion case that claims the life of a young child in an affluent community and enflames class divisions when the main suspects are from the poorer community nearby. Grace Gummer, Meryl Streep's second daughter to go into the family profession, makes her film debut.

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