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Au Revoir Les Enfants (1987) More at IMDbPro »Au revoir les enfants (original title)

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3 items from 2012

18 May 2012 4:06 PM, PDT | The Guardian - Film News | See recent The Guardian - Film News news »

A Prophet star Tahar Rahim joins the latest resistance movie

For French film-makers, the German occupation of their country between 1940 and 1944 has been, for nearly 70 years now, fertile if painful territory, offering an ocean of stories, a multiplicity of perspectives. The latest entry in the field of the occupation movie is Free Men, which examines the hitherto overlooked story of Muslims from France's north African colonial possessions, involved in the Paris black market and the selling of forged documents, who came to transcend the enmity between Muslims and Jews in order to better aid the latter. It stars Tahar Rahim (A Prophet), as an illiterate Algerian immigrant, blackmailed by the Germans into surveilling his local mosque, who ends up shooting Nazis and collaborators in the streets – all in a war that isn't really his (and yet … as one politically clued-up Muslim co-conspirator advises him: "Today this, tomorrow Algeria"). The film »

- John Patterson

9 March 2012 11:46 AM, PST | The Playlist | See recent The Playlist news »

You won't see Mathieu Almaric in his new film, "The Screen Illusion" -- which is part of the Rendez-vous with French Cinema Film Festival -- because this time, he's the director.

In fact, Almaric -- best-known to American audiences through his roles in "Munich, "Le Scaphandre et le Papillion" ("The Diving Bell and the Butterfly"), and "Quantum of Solace," has been a director longer than he's been an actor. As a teenager, he took a job as a trainee Ad on Louis Malle's "Au Revoir les Enfants" and he won Best Director at Cannes in 2010 for "Tournee." He has also worked with some of France's best directors, of course -- among them Arnaud Desplechin and Alain Resnais -- and he'll next be seen in David Cronenberg's forthcoming "Cosmopolis," playing a "pastry assassin" who creams Robert Pattinson in the face as part of his mission to sabotage power and wealth worldwide. »

- Jen Vineyard

2 January 2012 6:07 PM, PST | Dark Horizons | See recent Dark Horizons news »

Best Contemporary Titles

Winner: "The Tree of Life"

Runner-up: "Black Swan"

Love it or hate it, Terrence Malick's "The Tree of Life" is visually the most luscious film of the year and Blu-ray transfer recreates this in perfect detail. No digital artifacts or enhancements are done here, there is a bit of grain but that's expected with the photography on offer, while the IMAX 65mm sequences are true visual wonders.

Coming in second is my favourite film of last year, Darren Aronofsky's psychological thriller "Black Swan". Here is a challenge of a different sort, a film shot on both 16mm film and off the shelf Dslr video cameras. The result is a deliberately soft and grainy handheld-style image which lends a realistic documentary feel to proceedings and could look terrible if the Blu-ray transfer was handled poorly. Full kudos to Fox for a high quality presentation lacking in »

- Garth Franklin

3 items from 2012