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Alfred Hitchcock’s “Vertigo” is a meta ghost story, according to legendary author Rachel Kushner.

The California writer, whose latest novel “Creation Lake” will be released in September, appeared on the Criterion Channel’s “Adventures in Moviegoing” series to share her favorite San Francisco-set films. Of course, “Vertigo” was on the top of her list, both due to her personal connections to the locations captured by Hitchcock onscreen and just how much the 1958 film still haunts the city itself 70 years later.

The beloved thriller stars James Stewart as a former police detective who becomes obsessed with a woman (Kim Novak) he is hired to investigate. (Read our list of Alfred Hitchcock’s best movies here.)

“I find ‘Vertigo’ to be an exquisite movie,” Kushner said. “There’s this sense of holographic ghosts hovering in San Francisco and come to think of it, the holograph is an imagery that is actually...

Beim Lumière Festival, das im Oktober in Lyon zum 16. Mal stattfindet, wird Isabelle Huppert mit dem Prix Lumière geehrt.

Isabelle Huppert wird am 18. Oktober mit dem Prix Lumière ausgezeichnet (Credit: G.Ferrandis – Sbs Productions – Twenty Twenty Vision Filmproduktion – Entre Chien et Loup – France 2 Cinéma / Dr)

Im Rahmen der 16. Ausgabe des Lumière Festival, das von 12. bis 20. Oktober in Lyon zum 16. Mal stattfindet, wird die französische Schauspielerin Isabelle Huppert mit dem Prix Lumière ausgezeichnet. Mit diesem Preis würdigt das 2009 vom Leiter des Institut Lumière und künstlerischem Leiter des Festival de Cannes, Thierry Frémaux, ins Leben gerufene Festival eine Persönlichkeit für ihr Lebenswerk und ihre Verbindung mit der Filmgeschichte.

„Sie hat mit Filmemachern aus allen Teilen der Welt zusammengearbeitet, von herausragenden französischen Filmemachern bis hin zu den führenden Figuren des europäischen Kinos, von asiatischen New-Wave-Künstlern bis hin zu amerikanischen Independent-Regisseuren. Sie ist in der Lage, sich von einer raffinierten Komödie zu einem anspruchsvollen Autorenfilm zu bewegen,...

Isabelle Huppert has been announced as this year’s recipient of the Lumière Award at the 16th edition of the classic film-focused Lumière Festival in Lyon this fall.

“Her career encompasses an immense part of the history of contemporary cinema,” the Institut Lumière, which oversees the festival, declared of the French actress.

The institute cited some of the top directors she has worked with across her more than 155 acting credits including French directors Claude Chabrol, with whom she made seven features early on in her, as well as Jean-Luc Godard, Claire Denis, Bertrand Tavernier, Diane Kurys, Maurice Pialat, Catherine Breillat, Michel Deville, François Ozon and André Téchiné.

Internationally, Huppert has also collaborated with Joseph Losey, Marco Ferreri and Michael Haneke, Michael Cimino’s Brillante Mendoza, Hong Sang-soo and Paul Verhoeven, with whom she clinched a Best Actress Oscar nomination for her performance in his 2017 thriller Elle.

The actress has also...

Beloved French actor Isabelle Huppert will receive the Lumière Award in the city of Lyon in October.

Created by Cannes chief Thierry Frémaux, the Lumière Film Festival celebrates classic and contemporary cinema each fall. The Lumière Award honors a leading figure in the world of cinema and their entire body of work.

Huppert succeeds German director Wim Wenders who was awarded the prize in 2023. Former recipients include Tim Burton, Jane Campion, Martin Scorsese, Quentin Tarantino, Clint Eastwood, Francis Ford Coppola, Ken Loach, Catherine Deneuve, Jane Fonda, Pedro Almodóvar, Miloš Forman, the Dardenne brothers and Wong Kar-wai, among others.

“It’s a great honor for me to receive the Lumière Award. It’s a magnificent prize, and so is its festival. It’s an award that bears the name of the inventors of cinema! Receiving it fills me with joy and pride,” said Huppert.

A prolific actor who shoots an average...

Isabelle Huppert will receive the 16th annual Lumiere Award at Lyon’s classic film-focused Lumiere Festival set to run October 12-20.

The prolific French actress will be honoured for her career during the week-long celebration of heritage film complete with a parallel classic film market run by Cannes’ Thierry Fremaux that typically draws a host of acclaimed talent from across the globe.

Huppert has earned two best actress prizes at Cannes for Michael Haneke’s The Piano Teacher and Claude Chabrol’s Violette, plus 16 Cesar nominations and two wins. She earned an Academy Award nomination and won the Golden Globe...

French producer Sylvie Pialat will replace Spanish director Rogrigo Sorogoyen as Cannes Critics’ Week president.

“Due to personal circumstances, and much to our regret, Rodrigo Sorogoyen has had to step down as president of the jury for the 63rd Semaine de la Critique,” Critics’ Week said on Saturday (May 11).

The 11th-hour changeover will also see French filmmaker Iris Kaltenback join the jury alongside previously announced members Rwandan actress Eliane Umuhire, Belgian director of photography Virginie Surdej, and Canadian journalist and film critic Ben Croll.

Pialat was originally on the jury, and will now act as the group’s president.

Pialat...

Cannes Critics’ Week has appointed French producer Sylvie Pialat as president of the jury for its upcoming edition after Spanish director Rodrigo Sorogoyen, who was originally announced for the role, was forced to cancel for personal reasons.

French director Iris Kaltenbäck has also been been named as a new jury member. Her first film The Rapture premiered to acclaim in Critics’ Week last year. The drama, starring Hafsia Herzi as a midwife who passes off her best friend’s newborn child as her own, won the Prix Sacd.

Previously announced members of the jury include Rwandan actress Eliane Umuhire (Augure by Baloji, My New Friends, Haven of Grace), Belgian cinematographer Virginie Surdej (The Blue Caftan, Our Mothers, Casablanca Beats), and Canadian film critic and journalist Ben Croll.

Producer Pialat spent the first part of her cinema career collaborating with her husband Maurice Pialat, co-writing the screenplays for a number of...

On the indie side of filmmaking life, Sean Price Williams has seen it all. He’s worked with the Safdies, Alex Ross Perry, Nathan Silver, Robert Green, and Athina Rachel Tsangari, and often more than once. He’s the premier chronicler of New York City independent movies behind the camera, typically shooting on celluloid, and bringing surreal, gritty poetry to character-driven stories that feel on the ground like portraits of versions of ourselves.

One of the most unabashedly movie-loving cinematographers working today, Williams last year moved to directing for the sprawling, scratchy-edged tale of East Coast youth, “The Sweet East,” which remains in theaters and features stars like Jacob Elordi, Simon Rex, Jeremy O. Harris, and Ayo Edebiri.

But even more recently than that directorial debut, he released a “1000 Movies” book via Metrograph Editions, a simple, unadorned paperback that offers, rather than commentary, pages listing his favorite essential films and...

Anatomy of a Fall French producer Marie-Ange Luciani put in a flying appearance at the Berlinale this week with Claire Burger’s coming-of-age drama Langue Étrangère which received a warm reception in competition.

With the Berlin premiere taking place the day after the Baftas in London (where Anatomy of a Fall won Best Screenplay) and eight days before the January 27 voting deadline for this year’s Academy Awards, Luciani was also in the thick of the awards campaign.

She co-produced the Oscar hopeful with David Thion at Les Films Pelléas under the banner of her Paris-based banner Les Films de Pierre, the company created by Yves Saint Laurent’s long-time business and life partner Pierre Bergé which she acquired on his death in 2018.

New production Langue Étrangère is a bittersweet coming-of-age tale starring Lilith Grasmug as French teenager Fanny who travels to Germany on language exchange trip. Her German counterpart...

[Editor’s Note: The following story contains spoilers for “Passages.”]

Franz Rogowski’s intense and offbeat appeal gets its purest expression in the despairing polycule at the center of Ira Sachs’ “Passages.” In the Euro-chic romantic drama that recalls Mike Nichols’ “Closer” through the unsentimental lens of a Maurice Pialat film, the German dancer-turned-actor plays solipsistic, emotionally arrested filmmaker Tomas Freibur. On the eve of wrapping his latest film, he strays from his taciturn husband Martin (Ben Whishaw) and into the arms of Agathe (Adèle Exarchopoulos), who, when Tomas later tells her he’s in love with her, replies, “You must say that a lot.”

Rogowski is a physically striking performer, here in great shape in this film after withering as a gay prisoner post-World War II for his European Film Award-nominated turn in 2021’s “Great Freedom.” His filmography has acquainted him closely with the world’s great filmmakers, from Michael Haneke to Terrence Malick (“A Hidden Life”) and Christian Petzold...

Having recently shifted away from their one-film-a-day approach, Mubi has now unveiled their October lineup, which is headlined by Ira Sachs’ stellar drama Passages following its theatrical run this summer. The slate also features handpicked selections by Sachs, with work by Maurice Pialat, Luchino Visconti, Jack Hazan, Shirley Clarke, and Tsai Ming-liang.

Also arriving in October is “Watch If You Dare: Horror Halloween,” a series featuring a trio of giallo classics, with The Fifth Cord, The Possessed, and Forbidden Photos of a Lady Above Suspicion, alongside Guillermo del Toro’s The Devil’s Backbone and more. The service will also spotlight the work of underseen Japanese director Yasuzô Masumura, including his aching melodrama Red Angel, his biting workplace satire Giants and Toys, his thrilling noir Black Test Car, and more.

Check out the lineup below and get 30 days free here.

October 1

The Infiltrators, directed by Alex Rivera, Cristina Ibarra | National Hispanic Heritage Month

The Vanished Elephant,...

Tomas (Franz Rogowski) seems to have it all: a career as a director, marriage to Martin (Ben Whishaw), and the freedom to pursue his desires as he wishes. In Passages’ first scene, he works on his latest film. But he’s alienated Martin, and their marriage is on its last legs. He pursues his desires in a willful, selfish manner; although he’s queer and rather androgynous, his behavior reflects the worst aspects of masculine pretense. His philandering has led to a new relationship with Agathe (Adèle Exarchopoulos), a teacher, but the fact that he barges in on her while she’s working epitomizes his flaws.

Director Ira Sachs’ second film for the French Sbs Productions company is set in a Paris familiar from Maurice Pialat and Philippe Garrel films, but the director brings an outsider’s perspective. Sachs’ style brings an uncomfortable intimacy to Tomas’ relationships, breaking conventional rules...

It is my experience that one gets a far richer, stranger cinema education in pursuing the careers of actors, that group defined first by (assuming luck shines upon them) two or three era-defining films and then so much that dictates their industry—pet projects, contractual obligations, called-in favors alimony payments, auteur one-offs, and on and on. Few embody that deluge of circumstance better than Michelle Yeoh and Isabelle Huppert, both of whom are receiving spotlights in March. The former’s is a who’s-who of Hong Kong talent, new favorites (The Heroic Trio), items we can at least say are of interest (Trio‘s not-great sequel Executioners), etc.

Huppert’s series runs longer, and notwithstanding certain standards that have long sat on the channel it adds some heavy hitters: Hong’s In Another Country, Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate, Breillat’s Abuse of Weakness, Hansen-Løve’s Things to Come. And, of course,...

With “Passages,” American indie darling Ira Sachs (“Love Is Strange”) makes his first film in France, a brutally honest portrait of a train-wreck relationship, in which an openly gay director sabotages his marriage — and maybe his life — by falling for a woman. Affairs happen, that’s nothing new. But this one proves unusually destructive, giving three stellar international actors — German actor Franz Rogowski (“Great Freedom”), Ben Whishaw (“The Lobster”) and Adèle Exarchopoulos (“Blue Is the Warmest Color”) — a chance to tear one another’s hearts to shreds. Domestic interest will be limited, as it always is with Sachs’ shoestring heart-tuggers, but having his last movie, “Frankie,” selected for Cannes should give “Passages” a certain entrée in Europe.

Like a less-tyrannical, latter-day Fassbinder, queer auteur Tomas (Rogowski) is used to calling the shots. On set, the cast and crew put up with his tantrums. At home, longtime partner Martin (Whishaw) humors his needy husband’s caprices.

The team from This is My Crime by François Ozon at the world premiere last night at the Balzac Cinema in Paris Photo: Richard Mowe Director François Ozon has an enviable track record in enticing audiences to le cinéma français (Photo Richard Mowe) Photo: Richard Mowe The 25th Rendez-vous with French Cinema has started in Paris under a good sign: a full house last night for François Ozon’s mystery drama/pastiche The Crime is Mine (Mon Crime) followed by a standing ovation by the attendees including film buyers from all over Europe and beyond.

Serge Toubiana, Unifrance’s president, underlined the pleasure of all those present to be back in a cinema setting after two years of the pandemic and the financial crisis. He paid tribute to the founder of the Rendezvous, Daniel Toscan du Plantier, who died suddenly at the Berlin Film Festival some 20 years ago next month,...

The Berlin Film Festival has revealed a raft of titles across strands and also 33 film projects vying for coin at the coproduction market.

Selections for the topical Perspektive Deutsches Kino strand from emerging German talent include “Seven Winters in Tehran” by Steffi Niederzoll, “Elaha” by Milena Aboyan, “Ararat” by Engin Kundag, “The Kidnapping of the Bride” by Sophia Mocorrea, Fabian Stumm’s “Bones and Names,” “Long Long Kiss” by Lukas Röder, Tanja Egen’s “On Mothers and Daughters,” “Ash Wednesday,” by João Pedro Prado and Bárbara Santos, “Nuclear Nomads” by Kilian Armando Friedrich and Tizian Stromp Zargari and “Lonely Oaks” by Fabiana Fragale, Kilian Kuhlendahl and Jens Mühlhoff.

All the selected films in the strand will compete for the Heiner Carow Prize and the Compass-Perspektive-Award, both of which are endowed with €5,000.

A 4K restoration of David Cronenberg’s “Naked Lunch” will open the Berlinale Classics section, which also includes Oliver Schmitz’ “Mapantsula,...

Running Jan. 13-Feb. 13, this year’s MyFrenchFilmFestival, an online fest organized by France’s film-tv promotional body Unifrance, will mark its 13th edition with an emphasis on debut features and dynamic new voices.

Showcasing star power, animated auteur fare and award-winning documentaries – all subtitled in 15 languages – the 12 features and 17 shorts of this year’s selection will reach home viewers via 70 partner platforms as well on MyFrenchFilmFestival.com, where all the shorts will be available to screen free of charge.

In an effort to cast as wide a net as possible, this year’s competition will feature projects that run the gamut from Alice Diop’s breakthrough documentary “We” – which finds connections in the lives of immigrants, lovesick teens and retirees all connected by a commuter rail line north of Paris – to Jean-Christophe Meurisse’s satirical sketch comedy “Bloody Oranges,” which shreds polite society with anarchic glee.

In between are everything...

Gone Girl.There is a mania to the way we talk about female characters and their complexity. Born out of the necessary work of adding depth to flat, underwritten protagonists, the "complex female character" has now become a trope of its own, epitomized in the last decade by Gone Girl's Amy Dunne (Rosamund Pike). After faking her death, framing her husband for her murder, and adopting a new identity, Amy delivers the now infamous “cool girl” monologue, soliloquizing about the traps of making yourself in the image of a man's desire. "I drank canned beer watching Adam Sandler movies," she says. "I ate cold pizza and remained a size two." Her admission of effort culminates in an articulation of the scope of her wrath: "You think I'd let him destroy me and end up happier than ever? No fucking way."Amy's storyline—from spoiled rich New Yorker to bored...

It’s almost midnight in Tokyo, where Isabelle Huppert is playing faded southern belle Amanda in a New National Theatre production of Tennesee Williams’ “The Glass Menagerie.” We’re on Zoom to discuss a new retrospective of her career opening at Film Forum this Friday. Her career needs no introduction, but it’s one so bursting with iconic, complicated, often gnarly characters — she has two Césars, five Lumières, a BAFTA, three Cannes honors, a Golden Globe, and an Oscar nomination — that to distill it all into 20 minutes of conversation with the French actress would be a fool’s effort. But one can try.

Instead of trying to parse what’s long made her so alluring to directors like Claude Chabrol (“La Ceremonie”), Jean-Luc Godard (“Every Man for Himself”), Michael Cimino (“Heaven’s Gate”), Maurice Pialat (“Loulou”), Ira Sachs (“Frankie”), Olivier Assayas (“Sentimental Destinies”), Paul Verhoeven (“Elle”), Claire Denis (“White Material”), and...

Mubi has announced its lineup of streaming offerings for next month and amongst the highlights are Martine Syms’ The African Desperate, Julie Ha and Eugene Yi’s Free Chol Soo Lee, Lucile Hadzihalilovic’s Earwig, plus films from George A. Romero, Dario Argento, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Thomas Vinterberg, Nanni Moretti, and more.

Check out the lineup below and get 30 days free here.

October 1 – Goodnight Mommy, directed by Severin Fiala, Veronika Franz | Thrills, Chills and Exquisite Horrors

October 2 – Van Gogh, directed by Maurice Pialat | I Don’t Like You Either: A Maurice Pialat Retrospective

October 3 – The Great Buster: A Celebration, directed by Peter Bogdanovich | Portrait of the Artist

October 4 – Invisible Demons, directed by Rahul Jain | Viewfinders

October 5 – Pulse, directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa | Thrills, Chills and Exquisite Horrors

October 6 – Diary of the Dead, directed by George A. Romero | George A. Romero: Double of the Dead

October 7 – Free Chol Soo Lee, directed by Eugene Yi,...

Above: French grande for Love in the Afternoon (aka Chloé in the Afternoon) which was the opening night film of the 10th New York Film Festival. Designer tbd.In the catalogue for the 10th New York Film Festival in 1972, festival director Richard Roud looked back on the first decade of the NYFF, musing on the changes in cinema of the previous 10 years: “a greater freedom of subject matter,” “an accompanying new freedom of form,” the obsolescence of “the tightly plotted film,” the rise of personal filmmaking and the inroads of political cinema and documentary techniques into narrative film. He also muses on international movements: the snuffing out of the Czech Renaissance (there were no Czech films in the 1972 festival), the rise of New Hollywood and American independent cinema, and the ebbing of the movement that had in many ways defined the festival to that point, the French New Wave:Some of...

Mubi has announced its lineup of streaming offerings for next month and amongst the highlights are a Ricky D’Ambrose double bill, including his new film The Cathedral, as well as a trio of films by Maurice Pialat, Gaspar Noé’s Vortex, David Osit’s Mayor, Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master, an expansion of their Tilda Swinton series, and more.

Also including films by Tsai Ming-liang, Sky Hopinka, Nacho Vigalondo, Anton Corbijn, and more check out the lineup below and get 30 days free here.

September 1 – Classical Period, directed by Ted Fendt | Ted Fendt Focus

September 2 – 2 Days in New York, directed by Julie Delpy

September 3 – Timecrimes, directed by Nacho Vigalondo

September 4 – Małni – Towards the Ocean, Towards the Shore, directed by Sky Hopinka

September 6 – Mayor, directed by David Osit

September 7 – Friendship’s Death, directed by Peter Wollen | The One and Only: Tilda Swinton

September 8 – Hideous, directed by Yann Gonzalez | Brief Encounters

September 9 – The Cathedral,...

Astrakhan fur is unique: dark, beautiful, and stripped exclusively from newborn lambs, even ones killed in their mother’s womb. (Stella McCarthy once said it’s like wearing a fetus.) That ruthlessness—a sense of lost innocence; blood sacrifice—runs deep in Astrakan, a new film from France and one of the better in Locarno this year; and if that title isn’t enough to give pause, plenty else in the opening exchanges will. The first act is a procession of flags, both red and false: at the opening the protagonist, Samuel, lightly goads a snake in the reptile house of a zoo; moments later a rabbit is hung and skinned in his kitchen with all the ceremony of a boiled kettle; queasiest of all, an older lad is seen walking toward the house cradling berries in his shirt, just enough that the lip of his underwear and his midriff are left strikingly visible.

L’amour a la mer (1964). Courtesy of Lobster Films.There is a strange paradox in the popular consciousness of the French New Wave. On the one hand, the nouvelle vague is renowned as an explosion of new filmmaking talent in France. From the late 1950s to the mid-1960s, as so many histories of cinema tell us, masses of young directors debuted their work on the screens of France and then the world. After a decade and a half of sclerosis in the film industry, with rigid hierarchies and guild rules that prevented the emergence of directors who had not slowly made their way through the career rungs of the studios, a new generation burst onto the scene, upending the rules of filmmaking and forming a template for so many future new waves in the rest of the world. In many accounts, it is presented as something of a mass movement.

Judith (Virginie Efira) with little Ninon (Loïse Benguerel) in Antoine Barraud’s mysterious Madeleine Collins

Antoine Barraud’s Madeleine Collins, written in collaboration with Héléna Klotz, starring Virginie Efira, Quim Gutiérrez, Bruno Salomone with Jacqueline Bisset, François Rostain, Loïse Benguerel, Thomas Gioria, Théo Deroo, Nadav Lapid, Nathalie Boutefeu, Mona Walravens, Frank Onana, and Valérie Donzelli is a highlight of Rendez-Vous with French Cinema and the Glasgow Film Festival.

Antoine Barraud with Anne-Katrin Titze on Maurice Pialat filming his son for Le garçu: “He said when you direct a child, it’s actually the child directing you.”

Before Antoine arrived in New York, we discussed casting Bertrand Bonello and Barbet Schroeder, the long tradition of having women’s names as film titles, novels and plays to name just a few. In Antoine Barraud’s Portrait Of The Artist, Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo loomed large and we explore the unconscious mind of...

Not only did Ryusuke Hamaguchi craft two of the greatest films of last year with Drive My Car and Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy, but the rising Japanese master has also been able to share his process on a wider scale thanks to such newfound acclaim. Following his two-hour chat with Bong Joon Ho, Hamaguchi and the legendary Isabelle Huppert gathered at the Tokyo International Film Festival for a 75-minute conversation, which is now available to watch in its entirety.

Huppert, who has seen and adored his last four features, touches on Hamaguchi’s mastery of exploring the space between “expression and silence.” The duo go on to discuss the language of cinema and finding truth in acting, references ranging from Paul Verhoeven, Maurice Pialat, Claude Chabrol, Jean-Luc Godard, Hong Sangsoo, Jean Renoir, Barbara Loden, and many more. When asked if Huppert may appear in any of Hamaguchi’s films,...

Full Bloom is a series, written by Patrick Holzapfel and illustrated by Ivana Miloš, that reconsiders plants in cinema. Directors have given certain flowers, trees or herbs special attention for many different reasons. It’s time to give them the credit they deserve and highlight their contributions to cinema, in full bloom.Ivana Miloš, Quince Alight (2021), monotype and gouache on paper, 33 x 24 cmAGAINST The Weight Of The WORLDFor see, my friend goes shaking and white;He eyes me as the basilisk:i have turned, it appears, his day to night,Eclipsing his sun's disk—Robert Browning, “A Light Woman”Brown rotten quinces. They used to be lushly golden. Now they are decaying on the ground. The camera’s gaze rested on them like a basilisk’s deadly eyes. It asked too much of the quince tree. It would have happened anyway but it catalyzed its death. Like time, cinema always catalyzes death.

Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI.NEWSAbove: Dean Stockwell in David Lynch's Blue Velvet (1986)The actor Dean Stockwell, remembered for his performances in films like The Boy with the Green Hair (1948), Paris, Texas (1984), Blue Velvet (1986), and many more, has died at the age of 85. As Sheila O'Malley mentions in her tribute, Stockwell's career was marked by numerous disappearances. He didn't always love acting, but "he lived long enough to be able to not just appreciate but feel the love that people had for him, the way audiences fell in love with him for 70 years." A newly discovered memoir by Paul Newman will be published next year by Knopf. Based on Newman's conversations with screenwriter Stewart Stern, the book aims to tell the legendary actor's story in his own words. Following the exit of Robert Pattinson and Taron Egerton, Joe Alwyn...

Achieving a rare double this year – selection for both the Mar del Plata Festival and Ventana Sur’s pix-in-post competitions – Malena Solarz’s “Album for the Youth” marks the first solo feature of a director who tackles one of the most common of debut themes – a coming of age tale – but begs to differ on its structure.

Coming-of-age features “usually have big dramatic arcs as the characters discover something very important about their identity, their sexuality, etc. Here the characters do not have big revelations. I was mainly interested in working on a much smaller, millimetric scale almost,” Solarz explained to Variety.

So “Album for the Youth” gently charts the halting and initial maturing of two teens who both could have a first relationship and show creative yearnings – Sol (Irina Rausch) in music and Pedro as a writer (Santiago Canepari) – which may feed into careers later in life.

Both plots weave,...

Mubi's series Éric Rohmer: Comedies and Proverbs is now showing in many countries around the world.A devout Catholic and staunch cine-moralist, a director of marvelous consistency and constant reinvention, a miser whose unfashionably talky films turned a consistent profit well into his old age, a committed environmentalist and covert neo-royalist: Éric Rohmer developed, over the course of his storied career, a variety of reputations—often distorted, always encouraged. But if one feels that the great French director’s apparent contradictions and personal moral codes cannot so easily be summed up, this is only apropos, for his cinema conveys a sense of the world as too mysterious and variegated and unpredictable to accommodate our attempts at comprehending it—even, or especially, through fiction. Indeed, Rohmer’s deceptively spare cinematic practice constitutes a veritable confrontation with the multifarious materials of daily life, grounding its philosophical insight and sense of...

Forced to revamp in the wake of Germany’s second coronavirus lockdown in November, the International Filmfest Mannheim-Heidelberg is taking place online this year as Iffmh Expanded with two-thirds of its original lineup accessible to virtual festgoers.

The 69th edition of the festival, which marks the debut of a new team headed by director Sascha Keilholz, includes new and revised sections, among them On the Rise, the international competition that showcases first to third works by outstanding directors.

Curated by head of program Frédéric Jaeger, this year’s On the Rise competition includes such pics as “Una Promessa,” Gianluca and Massimiliano De Serio’s tale of nightmarish exploitation in southern Italy (pictured); Saskia Walker and Ralf Walker’s German free love drama “Come Closer,” in which the directing duo co-star with Devid Striesow (“I’m Off Then”); Igor Polevichko’s Russian thriller “Get it Right”; Sabrina Doyle’s U.S. relationship drama “Lorelei,...

Suzanne Lindon, the 20-year old star and filmmaker of “Spring Blossom,” was born into French cinema royalty, being the daughter of famed French actors Vincent Lindon and Sandrine Kiberlain; but the spirited young woman was determined early on to plow her own path towards acting. While Lindon initially wrote “Spring Blossom” as a vehicle to make her first foray into acting with an ideally-crafted leading part, the film has now established her as a promising young director.

“Spring Blossom” is handled in international markets by Luxbox and will be released theatrically in France by Paname Distribution on Dec. 9. The coming-of-age tale was part of Cannes 2020’s Official Selection, played at San Sebastian, Toronto and New York film festivals, and screens at El Gouna Film Festival on Saturday.

Lindon spoke to Variety about the genesis of “Spring Blossom,” as well as the making of the movie, its singularity and the unlikely...

Courtesy of Enormous, the filmmaker joins the ranks of previous auteurs rewarded for originality, while Arnaud and Jean-Marie Larrieu scoop an Honorary Jean Vigo. Intended to pay tribute to filmmakers’ independence of mind, originality and the quality of their work, the 68th Jean Vigo Prize has been awarded to Sophie Letourneur for her film Enormous (unveiled early this year in Rotterdam), "for the unapologetic way in which it overturns clichés, inverts genres and allows comedy to rub shoulders with the documentary form; for its everyday tenderness and its refreshing rawness." The director notably joins the ranks of Jean-Luc Godard, Maurice Pialat, Alain Resnais, Claude Chabrol, Philippe Garrel, Olivier Assayas, Bruno Dumont, Laurent Cantet, Xavier Beauvois, Alain Guiraudie, Mathieu Amalric and last year’s victor Stéphane Batut. It’s the 6th time a woman has won the Jean Vigo Prize, following in the footsteps of Anne Fontaine, Noémie Lvovsky, Patricia Mazuy,...

Cannes 2020 label film recently played at Toronto and San Sebastian.

Suzanne Lindon, at just 20 years old, was the youngest filmmaker to make it into Cannes’s special 2020 Official Selection this year with her debut feature Spring Blossom.

She both directed and stars in the gentle coming-of-age tale about a Parisian teenager who enters into a platonic love affair with an actor in his 30s.

In the absence of a physical Cannes, the film premiered in Toronto’s Discovery section in early September, before heading to San Sebastian’s New Directors line-up. It is now touring festivals worldwide, stopping off this...

It takes great maturity and confidence to make a film about the emergence of a young woman’s sexuality that also dares to ask complex, provocative questions while understanding there are no simple answers. Suzanne Lindon is such a filmmaker, and her brisk, entertaining debut Spring Blossom is such a film. Lindon directed, wrote, and stars in this remarkably assured story of a 16-year-old Parisian who falls for an older man. Though Blossom is a bit slight at just 73 minutes and sometimes prone to posing too many questions, this TIFF entry heralds the arrival of a major international talent.

Lindon is just 20 years old. Blossoms is not only her debut a writer-director, but also as an actor. As she explains in the film’s press notes, “I was 15 and it was the summer before starting high school and even though I was happy at school, with my friends or my family,...

The Notebook Primer introduces readers to some of the most important figures, films, genres, and movements in film history.Since the early 1970s, Isabelle Huppert has amassed a staggering body of work. Relentlessly prolific and uncompromisingly daring, she has embodied an eclectic range of characters, often delving into the enigmatic recesses of individuals who are by turns destructive, tormented, and obsessed, and yet can be audaciously empowered, sexually complex, and passionately reflective. Huppert “surprises and unsettles us,” notes David Parkinson, writing for the British Film Institute, doing so by “relaxing her tightly coiled control and channeling her strength and energy into doing something shockingly impulsive.” But that control and impulsiveness was not instantaneous, nor was it effortless. Huppert’s abilities have been steadily honed over the course of more than 140 appearances in film and television. And if there is a darkness lingering over some of her more disturbing characterizations, there...

With a seemingly endless amount of streaming options—not only the titles at our disposal, but services themselves–each week we highlight the noteworthy titles that have recently hit platforms. Check out this week’s selections below and an archive of past round-ups here.

Alice (Josephine Mackerras)

It makes no sense. The night before saw Alice Ferrand’s (Emilie Piponnier) husband François (Martin Swabey) going out of his way to passionately make-out with her in front of their friends at a dinner party and now he won’t answer her calls. Despite his running out of the house earlier than usual without any explanation, however, there’s nothing to make her think something is wrong until a trip to the drugstore exposes a freeze on their finances. One credit card won’t work. Then another. The Atm won’t accept her sign-in and François still isn’t picking up his phone.

by Cláudio Alves

Films being booed at Cannes has stopped being newsworthy. Over the years, countless pictures were received by a chorus of boos when they bowed at the Croisette, either because of their daring qualities or the transgressive nature of their subject matters. Rare is the true mediocrity that earns boos. For those unhappy films, indifference is a more common laurel than a crown of controversy. One of the most famous examples of a film being publicly reviled at Canne was in the 1987 edition when Maurice Pialat's Under the Sun of Satan was unanimously voted as the Palme d'Or winner only to be lambasted on the spot by a furious audience.

Accepting his award amid the vitriolic chaos, the first French director to win that honor since 1966, spoke with his usual combativeness...

Kicking off the month, The Criterion Channel celebrates the great Mifune Toshiro, who was born on April 1, 1920. (Note: now updated with new trailer for the occasion.) In their collection "Toshiro Mifune Turns 100," the streaming service features 26 narrative films in which Mifune starred, including classic titles directed by Kurosawa Akira, plus a documentary, and, oh yes, an introduction by critic Imogen Sara Smith. Of course, that's not all the channel has programmed for this month. Other highlights, per their official verbiage, are "a celebration of 1970s style; a second installment of our Columbia Noir series; spotlights on Jean Arthur, Gary Cooper, and Maurice Pialat; and audacious works by contemporary auteurs Yorgos Lanthimos, Jafar Panahi, Rungano Nyoni, and Alain Guiraudie." Details on the...

[Read the whole post on screenanarchy.com...]...

Isabelle Huppert as Frankie: "“The great thing about Huppert is that when you work with her you feel as if she had never made a film before … and that she will never make another film.” Photo: UniFrance

For someone who has chronicled the lives, loves, tragedies and triumphs of New Yorkers in such films as Love Is Strange and Little Men, Ira Sachs decided to depart from the familiar and head to the Portuguese mountainside town of Sintra, just outside Lisbon, for a narrative about a film star dying from terminal cancer who gathers her family around her for a final farewell.

Sachs grew up with French cinema and lived in Paris in the mid-Eighties when he overdosed in the Left Bank’s warren of screening rooms. “I didn’t speak the language very well, and I didn’t now that many people. As a result I ended up going to the movies.

Ira Sachs overflows with knowledge about all the great filmmakers known and forgotten — Maurice Pialat, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Eric Rohmer. Sachs’ own kind of slow, patient-to-dissolve cinema belongs exactly in his forebears’ camp, where actors and performance come before style.

But that filmmaking comes with its own challenges, and his latest hasn’t been the easiest ride. Nevertheless, in an interview in Los Angeles last week, Sachs said that with his new film “Frankie,” the film’s tepid reception at the 2019 Cannes Film Festival actually benefited the movie as he came to grips with his specific profile as a filmmaker.

Screen icon Isabelle Huppert shines in the lead role, a woman with terminal cancer who has chosen to spend her final hours assembling friends and family, estranged or not, at a Portuguese villa in the doomed hopes of resolving their individual life crises.

Directed in a static-camera, theatrical style heavy...

When a filmmaker is well-known for reiterating certain narratives or themes, perhaps even having a specific character reappear to embody such ideas, unfamiliar territory can be noteworthy. Such is the case with the typically self-reflexive Arnaud Desplechin and his unusual new film, Oh Mercy!, a rather uniquely French take on the police procedural–historically, something of a storytelling sandbox for the country’s prevailing auteurs, e.g. Henri-Georges Clouzot (Le Corbeau) or Maurice Pialat (Police). Well-defined characteristics leave plenty of appeal in straying from convention in order to craft salient stories that examine France’s law enforcement institutions within a tried-and-true framework. Unfortunately, Desplechin’s psychoanalytic interpretation of the procedural format is unbearably ponderous, an attempt at a formal deconstruction neither convincing nor consistently engaging.

In the French city of Roubaix, one of the country’s poorest communes and home to Desplechin himself, life is difficult and residents frequently struggle...

Close-Up is a feature that spotlights films now playing on Mubi. Jean-Claude Brisseau's Céline (1992) is showing July 20 - August 18, 2019 in the United States.Early in his career, once his ambitious, feature-length debut made on Super 8 had been discovered by Éric Rohmer and Maurice Pialat, Jean-Claude Brisseau (1944-2019) attracted the tag of being a social realist, a “poet of suburbia.” From Life the Way It Is (1978) to Sound and Fury (1988), the jagged, often violent plots reflected his life experience as a committed teacher to troubled, working-class kids. But other, less-heralded aspects of these films, as well as of A Brutal Game (1983) and White Wedding (1989), were already pointing in a different, more holistic direction: dreams and visions, intimating the presence of some broadly defined “other world.” Brisseau declared in 2002: “My films are all about the problem of our relation to reality—whatever that reality may be. I’ve always...

The first person we meet in “Ray & Liz” is elderly Ray (Patrick Romer). Alone in a tiny room, abandoned by his wife Liz (Deirdre Kelly), he has taken to his bed seemingly permanently, waking only long enough to drink as much as it takes to keep himself drunk. He keeps a photo of himself as a young man with his bride stuck to a mirror next to a religious pamphlet that delivers the only foreshadowing this film feels like giving: a Bible verse instructing children to “obey [their] parents in everything.”

“Ray & Liz,” Richard Billingham’s debut feature, punctuates its main action with visits to this room, with the rest of the quietly downcast story taking place during the 1980s, as Ray and Liz descend into poverty, despair, and alcoholism in a council flat outside of Birmingham, England. Their children — Richard and his younger brother Jason — are along for the ride,...

A beautifully made minor-key tone poem about love, loss and death, Burning Ghost (Vif-Argent) marks a promising second turn at the helm for French casting director Stéphane Batut, who has worked on such movies as Stranger by the Lake, Let the Sunshine In, Le petit lieutenant, Tip Top and Paul Verhoeven’s upcoming Benedetta.

Winner of the prestigious Prix Jean-Vigo (past recipients include Godard's Breathless, Maurice Pialat's L'Enfance nue and Bruno Dumont's La Vie de Jésus), the film premiered in Cannes' Acid sidebar and will be released in France in late August. Festivals and a few niche distributors could take notice of ...

A beautifully made minor-key tone poem about love, loss and death, Burning Ghost (Vif-Argent) marks a promising second turn at the helm for French casting director Stéphane Batut, who has worked on such movies as Stranger by the Lake, Let the Sunshine In, Le petit lieutenant, Tip Top and Paul Verhoeven’s upcoming Benedetta.

Winner of the prestigious Prix Jean-Vigo (past recipients include Godard's Breathless, Maurice Pialat's L'Enfance nue and Bruno Dumont's La Vie de Jésus), the film premiered in Cannes' Acid sidebar and will be released in France in late August. Festivals and a few niche distributors could take notice of ...

Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI.NEWSBarry Jenkins by Liz Seabrook for Little White LiesBarry Jenkins is set to direct a film about the life of the late Alvin Ailey, the choreographer considered one of the most important of the twentieth century. Recommended Viewinga wonderfully lush and eerie trailer for the 4K restoration of Nicolas Roeg's Don't Look Now, which opens in theaters on July 5. The BFI and the Royal Astronomical Society have uncovered the very first film of a solar eclipse, captured by British magician Nevil Maskelyne in 1900. One century after the solar eclipse was first captured on film, arrives the first trailer for James Gray's Ad Astra, which stars Brad Pitt as an astronaut searching for his missing father—who was involved in a government project on extraterrestrial life—in space. The official trailer for Carlos Reygadas's Our Time,...

Wim Wenders did not win the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1987 for Wings of Desire. Nor did he have the most famous quote to emerge that year from the festival. Those honors went to Maurice Pialat, who won the top prize for the French film Sous le Soleil de Satan (Under the Sun of Satan). When the director was given the award by Catherine Deneuve, the crowd booed. "If you can say you don’t like me," responded Pialat, "then I can say that I don’t like you either." (Why the film was so unpopular is ...

Wim Wenders did not win the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1987 for Wings of Desire. Nor did he have the most famous quote to emerge that year from the festival. Those honors went to Maurice Pialat, who won the top prize for the French film Sous le Soleil de Satan (Under the Sun of Satan). When the director was given the award by Catherine Deneuve, the crowd booed. "If you can say you don’t like me," responded Pialat, "then I can say that I don’t like you either." (Why the film was so unpopular is ...

Charles S. Cohen doesn’t just love French cinema: he puts his money where his mouth is. And with a net worth estimated at $3.3 billion by Forbes Magazine, the owner of producer/distributor Cohen Media Group — the largest American distributor of French films in the U.S. — is showing his love in a multitude of ways.

“I am finalizing plans with the French government for the renovation and expansion of La Pagode Cinema, the only theater

in the 7th arrondissement [of Paris],” the real estate magnate says.

It’s only one of his many recent efforts involving French cinema, which include licensing the film libraries of Maurice Pialat, Jacques Rivette, Claude Chabrol and others, restoring and releasing them on home video through his Cohen Film Collection.

He’s also chairman of the Alliance Française, and his efforts in promoting French cinema and art earned him France’s National Order of Merit in...