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When Netflix premiered the first season of Lupin last January, 70 million sheltered-in-place households ravenously binged it, making the series the most-watched non-English show for its premiere month on the streamer so far. Lupin steals a page from French literature. The hero of Lupin, Assane Diop (Omar Sy) is inspired by France’s iconic ‘Gentleman Thief’ Arsène Lupin, a fictional figure created by French writer Maurice Leblanc in 1905.

Lupin was the subject of some two dozen books by Leblanc, who continued adding into his literary franchise until well into the 1930s. Akin to Robin Hood, Lupin stole from the rich, and often did good deeds despite his thieving capers. He was a master of deception and disguise, a lady killer who always operated with a classy panache. With a legacy spanning more than a century, there have been plenty of live-action depictions in film and TV.

The First Lupin Films are...

To mark the release of Le Crime de Monsieur Lange on 27th August, we’ve been given 1 copy to give away on Blu-ray.

Monsieur Lange (René Lefèvre) is a publishing house clerk who writes cheap Western novels in his spare time. When his untrustworthy, salacious boss, Batala avoids his debt collectors by pretending to be dead, Lange and his co-workers take over the business themselves and thrive on the popularity of Lange’s pulp stories. That is until Batala returns to demand his share of the profits. Meanwhile Lange falls deeply in love with his neighbour Valentine, portrayed gloriously by the mesmerising Florelle.

Directed and co-written by Renoir, Le Crime De Monsieur Lange’s story is adapted by another great of French cinema, Jacques Prévert (Quai des Brumes, Le Jour se Léve), and boasts a nuanced leading performance by Lefèvre.

Please note: This competition is open to UK residents only...

Close-Up is a feature that spotlights films now playing on Mubi. Jean Renoir's The Crime of Monsieur Lange (1936) is playing August 31 - September 30, 2017 in the United States as part of the series Jean Renoir.From the beginning, Jean Renoir embraced dualities. One wants to say he played with them, and that’s often true, but he also took them seriously. When these two things are happening at the same time, his work is imbued with a magic that still casts a spell, just as it did over French New Wave filmmakers of the 1960s who rightly took him as a father figure. A striking example of contrasting impulses, his first film on his own, La fille de l’eau (Whirlpool of Fate, 1925) is one of his open-air works—a heroine’s journey out in the world—but at its heart is a dream sequence and very theatrical. That set Renoir’s aesthetic course.

It’s a given that their Main Slate — the fresh, the recently buzzed-about, the mysterious, the anticipated — will be the New York Film Festival’s primary point of attraction for both media coverage and ticket sales. But while a rather fine lineup is, to these eyes, deserving of such treatment, the festival’s latest Revivals section — i.e. “important works from renowned filmmakers that have been digitally remastered, restored, and preserved with the assistance of generous partners,” per their press release — is in a whole other class, one titanic name after another granted a representation that these particular works have so long lacked.

The list speaks for itself, even (or especially) if you’re more likely to recognize a director than title. Included therein are films by Andrei Tarkovsky (The Sacrifice), Hou Hsiao-hsien (Daughter of the Nile, a personal favorite), Pedro Costa (Casa de Lava; trailer here), Jean-Luc Godard (the rarely seen,...

Marc Allégret: From André Gide lover to Simone Simon mentor (photo: Marc Allégret) (See previous post: "Simone Simon Remembered: Sex Kitten and Femme Fatale.") Simone Simon became a film star following the international critical and financial success of the 1934 romantic drama Lac aux Dames, directed by her self-appointed mentor – and alleged lover – Marc Allégret.[1] The son of an evangelical missionary, Marc Allégret (born on December 22, 1900, in Basel, Switzerland) was to have become a lawyer. At age 16, his life took a different path as a result of his romantic involvement – and elopement to London – with his mentor and later "adoptive uncle" André Gide (1947 Nobel Prize winner in Literature), more than 30 years his senior and married to Madeleine Rondeaux for more than two decades. In various forms – including a threesome with painter Théo Van Rysselberghe's daughter Elisabeth – the Allégret-Gide relationship remained steady until the late '20s and their trip to...

Simone Simon: Remembering the 'Cat People' and 'La Bête Humaine' star (photo: Simone Simon 'Cat People' publicity) Pert, pretty, pouty, and fiery-tempered Simone Simon – who died at age 94 ten years ago, on Feb. 22, 2005 – is best known for her starring role in Jacques Tourneur's cult horror movie classic Cat People (1942). Those aware of the existence of film industries outside Hollywood will also remember Simon for her button-nosed femme fatale in Jean Renoir's French film noir La Bête Humaine (1938).[1] In fact, long before Brigitte Bardot, Annette Stroyberg, Mamie Van Doren, Tuesday Weld, Ann-Margret, and Barbarella's Jane Fonda became known as cinema's Sex Kittens, Simone Simon exuded feline charm – with a tad of puppy dog wistfulness – in a film career that spanned two continents and a quarter of a century. From the early '30s to the mid-'50s, she seduced men young and old on both...

Simone Simon in 'La Bête Humaine' 1938: Jean Renoir's film noir (photo: Jean Gabin and Simone Simon in 'La Bête Humaine') (See previous post: "'Cat People' 1942 Actress Simone Simon Remembered.") In the late 1930s, with her Hollywood career stalled while facing competition at 20th Century-Fox from another French import, Annabella (later Tyrone Power's wife), Simone Simon returned to France. Once there, she reestablished herself as an actress to be reckoned with in Jean Renoir's La Bête Humaine. An updated version of Émile Zola's 1890 novel, La Bête Humaine is enveloped in a dark, brooding atmosphere not uncommon in pre-World War II French films. Known for their "poetic realism," examples from that era include Renoir's own The Lower Depths (1936), Julien Duvivier's La Belle Équipe (1936) and Pépé le Moko (1937), and particularly Marcel Carné's Port of Shadows (1938) and Daybreak (1939).[11] This thematic and...

Marcel Carné and screenwriter Jacques Prévert's Le jour se lève (1939) "tracks the inevitable unraveling of factory worker François (Jean Gabin) after he kills the absurd vaudeville entertainer Valentin (Jules Berry), his romantic rival for the affections of Françoise (Jacqueline Laurent) and Clara (Arletty)," writes Anna King for Time Out. The Guardian's Peter Bradshaw finds it "bristling with energy and shaped with incomparable artistry and flair." We're collecting reviews and the trailer for the new restoration opening at New York's Film Forum. » - David Hudson...

Marcel Carné and screenwriter Jacques Prévert's Le jour se lève (1939) "tracks the inevitable unraveling of factory worker François (Jean Gabin) after he kills the absurd vaudeville entertainer Valentin (Jules Berry), his romantic rival for the affections of Françoise (Jacqueline Laurent) and Clara (Arletty)," writes Anna King for Time Out. The Guardian's Peter Bradshaw finds it "bristling with energy and shaped with incomparable artistry and flair." We're collecting reviews and the trailer for the new restoration opening at New York's Film Forum. » - David Hudson...

Serious film fans will appreciate the 4K restoration of this 1939 French melodrama, which has been all but unseen for 75 years. I’m “biast” (pro): nothing

I’m “biast” (con): nothing

(what is this about? see my critic’s minifesto)

I don’t think I’d ever seen a French film from the 1930s before this one, and to say that I was shocked would be an understatement. While the Hays Code was newly censoring American films at that time, here we have nudity; implied extramarital sex (including one scene in which the couple lies together in bed talking; they’re fully clothed, but this is still nothing like what a Hollywood movie at the time could have gotten away with); and frank — not explicit but not at all coded or merely suggestive — talk about sex and, even more notably, about women’s desires.

The nudity was cut, as were some other bits,...

Curtis Bernhardt followed the route of his fellow directors Fritz Lang and Robert Siodmak: Germany, France, America, but unlike them he never went back to film in Germany at the end of his career. I looked at his Marlene Dietrich vehicle here. Now let's consider one from his French period.

Carrefour (Crossroads) is an amnesia thriller. Je t'aime amnesia thrillers. They're particularly interesting since the kind of movie amnesia where you forget who you are appears not to exist in real life: if you lost your identity, you would have lost so many other brain functions it's doubtful you would be abe to talk about it. The device remains popular not just because it's so useful for crazy plots, but because questions of identity fascinate us.

(Speaking of crazy plots: French novelist Sebastien Japrisot, whose name itself was an anagram, wrote one of the best, the twice-filmed A Trap For Cinderella.

Known for creating some of the most important films in French history, and during Nazi Occupation, no less, Criterion issues two of Marcel Carne’s most widely acclaimed masterpieces, his crowning achievement, Children of Paradise (1945), which, if you haven’t seen, you need to, and a noteworthy work that directly precedes it, Les Visiteurs du Soir (1942), which has long since been popularly interpreted as an allegory of the hostile occupation. While this interpretation is hardly surprising and seems rather fitting, Carne’s film is much more universal than that, instead conveying the unbreakable spirit of pure love. Presented like the dark, harsh fairy tale it is, Carne managed to create a sumptuously poetic, luxurious film about how love does not indeed conquer all, but can perhaps endure.

Pages flipped by a dark gloved hand inform us that our tale is set in the Middle Ages, May of 1485. Two of the devil’s envoys,...

Among the most fruitful collaborations between director and screenwriter in the history of cinema is the one between Marcel Carne and Jacques Prevert. Prevert’s supremely literate approach to screenwriting was summarized by critic John Simon in this way: let the camera do what it will but the literature will remain. The finest of the films in which the two collaborated may have been The Children of Paradise (1945) – which was reviewed in this column – but Le Jour Se Leve (1939) or Daybreak comes a close second. Between them, Carne and Prevert were responsible for much of the poetic realism in the French cinema of the period – films largely about the working class but giving their working-class heroes a rounded presence generally lacking in later European cinema, notably from Italy. The actor Jean Gabin contributed strongly to many of these films through his presence and the highpoint of his working-class performances is...