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François Truffaut’s ode to Hitchcock and Cornell Woolrich is an ice-cold femme revenge tale. Jeanne Moreau exacts retribution from five men who made her a widow on her wedding day. Truffaut winds it as tightly as a mousetrap, leaving Ms. Moreau’s psychology a mystery — feminists can debate whether the film is misogynistic. Raoul Coutard’s color cinematography is deceptively warm and inviting; the film’s biggest boost comes from Bernard Herrmann’s powerful music score.

The Bride Wore Black

Blu-ray

Kl Studio Classics

1968 / Color / 1:66 widescreen / 107 min. / Street Date February 14, 2023 / La mariée était en noir / available through Kino Lorber / 24.95

Starring: Jeanne Moreau, Michel Bouquet, Jean-Claude Brialy, Charles Denner, Claude Rich, Michael Lonsdale, Daniel Boulanger, Alexandra Stewart, Sylvine Delannoy, Luce Fabiole, Michèle Montfort.

Cinematography: Raoul Coutard

Production Designer: Pierre Guffroy

Film Editor: Claudine Bouché

Original Music: Bernard Herrmann

Written by François Truffaut, Jean-Louis Richard from the novel by William Irish...

Jean-Pierre Marielle played in more than 100 films Photo: Unifrance

The death of veteran French cinema and theatre actor Jean-Pierre Marielle, at the age of 87, leaves another gap in the group who became known as “the band of the Conservatoire” whose ranks included his late life-long friend Jean Rochefort, as well as Claude Rich and Jean-Paul Belmondo.

He played in more than 100 films, both comic and tragic, with such directors as Michel Audiard, Bértrand Blier, Claude Sautet, Bértrand Tavernier, Claude Miller and Alain Corneau for whom memorably he created the role of Monsieur de Sainte-Colombe (opposite Gérard Depardieu) as the musician Marin Marais in All The Mornings Of The World (Tous Les Matins Du Monde) in 1991.

With his warmly distinctive deep vocal timbre, imposing stature and pepper and salt beard and moustache, Marielle – who was born in Paris on 12 April, 1932 and died yesterday (24 April) in hospital after a long illness –started his career.

Terry Gilliam’s second big-star ‘retrench’ movie benefits from his fertile imagination, and his handling of an overly complicated sci-fi script. Did happy audiences respond to the film’s second-hand time travel complexities, or did they just like seeing Brad Pitt in a new mode, playing a weird motormouthed eccentric?

Twelve Monkeys

Blu-ray

Arrow Video USA

1995 / Color / 1:85 widescreen / 129 min. / Street Date October 30, 2018 / 39.95

Starring: Bruce Willis, Madeleine Stowe, Brad Pitt, Jon Seda, Frank Gorshin, David Morse, Christopher Plummer.

Cinematography: Roger Pratt

Film Editor: Mick Audsley

Original Music: Paul Buckmaster

Written by David Webb Peoples, Janet Peoples from the film La jetée by Chris Marker

Produced by Charles Roven

Directed by Terry Gilliam

Nowadays nobody seems capable of making a Sci-fi thriller, not even one for children, that doesn’t have a dauntingly complex storyline filled with ironic contradictions. The Fate of the World is always at stake, and our saviors...

Other leading contenders include See You You There, Barbara and Bloody Milk.

Source: Cannes

‘Bpm (Beats Per Minute)’

Robin Campillo’s Aids activism drama Bpm (Beats Per Minute) leads nominations in France’s 2018 César awards which were announced in Paris on Wednesday morning (Jan 31).

Scroll down for the key nominations

The feature drama took 13 nominations including best film, best director and best screenplay and best male newcomer for its co-stars Nahuel Pérez Biscayart and Arnaud Valois.

France’s Academy of Cinema Arts and Sciences unveiled the nominations at its traditional news conference at the Le Fouquet’s restaurant on the Champs-Elysées.

The popularity of Campillo’s film among the academy’s members came as little surprise. Although ignored by Oscar and Golden Globe, the Cannes Grand Prix winner has been a critical and box office success in France where the film has drawn more than 800,000 spectators for Memento Distribution.

It also leads the nominations in the upcoming...

French stage and screen actor whose 1963 role in the comedy-thriller Les Tontons Flingueurs made him a star

Claude Rich, who has died aged 88, was a familiar face in French cinema and theatre for almost seven decades. The much-loved actor alternated between stage and screen, considering the latter as recreation, the former a passion. In fact, he had few really challenging roles on screen, despite having made films for the New Wave directors Alain Resnais, François Truffaut and Claude Chabrol. His reputation among French audiences derived from a string of mainstream comedies, especially in the 1960s, in which they cherished his ever-youthful, naive persona, his lilting voice and consistent smile, either charming or mischievous.

The film that made him a star was Les Tontons Flingueurs (1963), rendered variously in English as Monsieur Gangster or Crooks in Clover (literally, The Killer Uncles). Scripted by Michel Audiard, a master of witty and biting French argot,...

Yet another European art film director tries his hand at cerebral Sci-fi. Alain Resnais' openly experimental movie uses a generic time travel framework to, what else, explore the phenomenon of memory. Suicidal melancholic Claude Rich is projected back exactly one year, for exactly one minute. What could go wrong? Je t'aime, je t'aime Blu-ray Kino Classics 1968 / Color /1:66 widescreen / 94 min. / Street Date November 10, 2015 / available through Kino Lorber / 29.95 Starring Claude Rich, Olga Georges-Picot, Anouk Ferjac. Cinematography Jean Boffety Film Editors Albert Jurgenson, Colette Leloup Original Music Krzysztof Penderecki Written by Jacques Sternberg, Alain Resnais Produced by Mag Bodard Directed by Alain Resnais

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

My very first UCLA film class in the Fall of 1970 dispatched us to the Vagabond Theater to see a double bill of two 'art' movies that play fast and loose with narrative conventions: Luis Buñuel's Ensayo de un Crimen and Alain Resnais' Je t'aime,...

Nearly two decades into a career that has since spanned nearly seven, Jeanne Moreau had already worked under the direction of Godard, Malle, Welles, Antonioni, Demy, Ophüls, Frankenheimer and Buñuel, among others, by the time she collaborated again with François Truffaut, who had previously helped make her a star with Jules and Jim. Their third collaboration (the first being 400 Blows), The Bride Wore Black, a psycho-thriller inspired by the work of his hero Alfred Hitchcock again put her in the spotlight, this time as a vengeful seductress to which Quentin Tarantino and Uma Thurman’s Bride of Kill Bill is much indebted to (though the homage crazed auteur claims to have never seen the film). With incredible bipolar turns, Moreau plays Julie Kohler, a widow on a mission to take revenge on the five men (including Claude Rich, Michel Bouquet, Michael Lonsdale, Daniel Boulanger and Charles Denner) responsible for the death of her husband.

Sean Penn: Honorary César goes Hollywood – again (photo: Sean Penn in '21 Grams') Sean Penn, 54, will receive the 2015 Honorary César (César d'Honneur), the French Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Crafts has announced. That means the French Academy's powers-that-be are once again trying to make the Prix César ceremony relevant to the American media. Their tactic is to hand out the career award to a widely known and relatively young – i.e., media friendly – Hollywood celebrity. (Scroll down for more such examples.) In the words of the French Academy, Honorary César 2015 recipient Sean Penn is a "living legend" and "a stand-alone icon in American cinema." It has also hailed the two-time Best Actor Oscar winner as a "mythical actor, a politically active personality and an exceptional director." Penn will be honored at the César Awards ceremony on Feb. 20, 2015. Sean Penn movies Sean Penn movies range from the teen comedy...

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...

The Classic French Film Festival celebrates St. Louis’ Gallic heritage and France’s cinematic legacy. The featured films span the decades from the 1920s through the 1980s (with a particular focus on filmmakers from the New Wave), offering a comprehensive overview of French cinema. Je T’Aime, Je T’Aime will screen as part of the festival at 6pm Saturday, June 28th at Webster University’s Moore Auditorium.

Recovering after a suicide attempt, Claude Ritter (Claude Rich) is obviously the perfect guinea pig for an anonymous corporation’s tentative attempts at time travel. What could go wrong? After all, the mouse came out Ok. And maybe, when he goes back a year, he can re-live one particular minute. Resnais’ switch into science fiction continues his theme of time (“Hiroshima Mon Amour,” “Last Year at Marienbad”) as Claude’s memories – thanks to the obligatory unaccounted-for glitch – flip back and forth in...

Whether grappling with the horrific realities and scars left over from World War II or the capricious mental states of a lovelorn Parisian bourgeoisie, Alain Resnais had always been far more concerned with the act of remembering as an absurd imposition on the present as he ever was with any didactic cautioning about the dangers of forgetting. In many ways, Resnais was always the most playful and alive of any of the Left Bank (or even New Wave) filmmakers to emerge in the early 1960s, this despite the fact that his most notorious work involved gazing intently at a concentration camp, or the aftermath of the bombing of Hiroshima, or suggesting the traumatic rape of a beautiful woman.

His fifth feature, 1968′s Je t’aime, je t’aime–screening at Toronto’s Tiff Bell Lightbox on a gorgeous 35mm print Thursday, May 15 at 6:30pm–is often seen as the...

For many years I’ve been aware of this poster—a classic by René Ferracci, the appointed affichiste of the nouvelle vague—without knowing anything about Je t’aime, je t’aime, a film which has been almost impossible to see for decades. Today, as a Valentine’s Day gift to New York cinephiles, Film Desk and Bleeding Light Film Group are bringing it back to Film Forum in a new 35mm print.

Ferracci, master of the photo-collage, captures the fragmented whirlpool of Alain Resnais’ time-traveling love story in an unforgettable image that would maybe be better known, as would the film itself, if its protagonists had been bigger names. Je t’aime, je t’aime, made in 1968, was only Resnais’ fifth feature film, twenty-two years into his filmmaking career. (Just this week, at the age of 91, he premiered his latest, Life of Riley, at the Berlin Film Festival.) An...

It is a tragedy of human existence to be helplessly aware of time's passing, and to lose time during the act of longing for it. Something in this is also funny. For over 60 years Alain Resnais has made sharp and sweet tragicomedies about our relationship to time, including his new Life of Riley and 1968's long-unavailable Je t'aime je t'aime, which screens at Film Forum in a new 35mm print.

The older film centers on Claude Ridder (played lithely by Claude Rich), a war veteran and recent near-suicide inducted by scientists to participate in an experiment that will transport him back to relive one minute of his life. What happens instead is that Claude, hooked up inside a large, weirdly shaped bulb, returns to several moments from throughout his previous 17 years, s...

‘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...

Pascal Bonitzer's good-looking family drama may be conventional but it's extremely well acted

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In this attractive family drama, Pascal Bonitzer, a former critic for Cahiers du Cinéma, is surprisingly close to the traditional, neatly turned middle-class cinéma de papa that Truffaut and other new wave directors scorned. Both of them exuding characteristic intelligence, Jean-Pierre Bacri and Kristin Scott Thomas play a well-off Parisian couple with an adolescent son. He's a professor of Chinese culture teaching a class for business executives preparing to work in China, she's an avant-garde theatre director, their marriage is approaching the rocks, and he can't bring himself to tell her that he hasn't managed to get his pompous father, a senior judge, to obtain a visa extension for a Serbian relative of hers. It's like a Haneke plot turned into a comforting boulevard play, but it's...

★★★☆☆ Pascal Bonitzer's domestic dramedy Looking for Hortense (2012), starring Kristin Scott Thomas, Jean-Pierre Bacri and Isabelle Carré, has a topical slant that lifts the film out of mediocrity. Iva (Scott Thomas), a successful theatre director, asks her partner Damien (Bacri), a lecturer in Chinese Studies, to try and prevent the deportation of her sister's friend Zorica (Carré), an illegal immigrant he has never met. Damien's aloof father (Claude Rich) is a senior member of the French Council of State and knows all the right people in high places. Unwillingly, out of a sense of duty to Iva, Damien makes an appointment to see him.

Pressed for time, they meet in a Japanese restaurant where Damien is visibly shocked to see his elderly father flirting with a young male waiter. Distracted, he vacillates and fails to raise Zorica's case. Meanwhile, Iva starts an affair with her leading actor and Damien demands...

Some of the most enjoyable movies to have come out of Europe in the past couple of years have been French romantic comedies (From-coms), with the likes of Delicacy, Populaire and Heartbreaker illuminating our screens, with their effortless charm and whimsicality. Now we can add another to our collection, as director Pascal Bonitzer reunites with British actress Kristin Scott Thomas in his latest picture Looking for Hortense.

We delve into the troubling life of Damien (Jean-Pierre Bacri), who is a professor of Japanese civilisation by day, and a long suffering husband of Iva (Scott Thomas) by night. As the latter’s romantic affair causes rifts between their marriage and they start arguing incessantly in front of their young son, Damien has his head turned by the beautiful illegal immigrant Aurore (Isabelle Carré). With expulsion from France looming, Damien has the power to keep his new friend in the country, as...

Pascal Bonitzer’s Looking for Hortense (Cherchez Hortense, in the original French) is finally set to arrive on our shores this summer, having debuted at Venice last year to positive early reviews.

The film earned two nominations at the César Awards earlier in the year, the French equivalent of the Oscars. And with its August UK release date just a few weeks away, we’ve got the new UK quad poster to exclusively share.

Looking For Hortense is a bittersweet ‘comedie de moeurs’ that is French in spirit but universal in appeal. Damien (Jean-Pierre Bacri), a Chinese civilization professor, lives with his partner, Iva (Kristin Scott Thomas), a stage director, and their son Noé. The couple’s relationship has drifted into routine that has drained it of love. Damien finds himself trapped one day by Iva, who orders him to ask his father, a senior member of the French Council of State,...

DVD Release Date: March 19, 2013

Price: DVD $29.95

Studio: Kino Lorber

Geraldine Chaplin (l.) and Jane Fonda set out to living communally in All Together.

Five aging friends decide to ditch assisted living and move in with each other in the 2012 French comedy All Together.

When elderly lothario Claude (Claude Rich, The Bride Wore Black) is put into an old folks home, his friends bust him out and start a cranky commune together, thinking they can care for each other better than anyone else. The hell with reduced autonomy, loss of memory, illness and, worset of all, separation from each other! The group is joined by a young graduate student (Daniel Brühl) who films their experiment for his research project, while also acting as a de facto caretaker. Everyone seems to enjoy communal living…at least until old jealousies and the infirmities of age begin to pull the group apart.

Written and directed by Stephane Robelin,...

The nominations for the César Awards aka the French Oscars were announced. "Farewell, My Queen," "Amour," "Camille Redouble," "In the House," "Rust & Bone," "Holy Motors," and "What's My Name" are competing for the Best Picture category. We'll find out the winners on February 22nd.

Here's the full list of nominees of the 2013 César Awards:

Best Picture

Farewell, My Queen

Amour

Camille Redouble

In The House

Rust & Bone

Holy Motors

What.s In A Name

Best Director

Benoît Jacquot, Farewell, My Queen

Michael Haneke, Amour

Noémie Lvovsky, Camille Redouble

François Ozon, In The House

Jacques Audiard, Rust & Bone

Leos Carax, Holy Motors

Stéphane Brizé, Quelques Heures De Printemps

Best Actress

Catherine Frot, Les Sauveurs Du Palais

Marion Cotillard, Rust & Bone

Noémie Lvovsky, Camille Redouble

Corinne Masiero, Louise Wimmer

Emmanuelle Riva, Amour

Léa Seydoux, Farewell, My Queen

Hélène Vincent, Quelques Heures De Printemps

Best Actor

Jean-Pierre Bacri, Cherchez Hortense

Patrick Bruel, What...

Friends With Money: Aging Europeans a Case Study in Robelin’s Sophomore Feature

Inevitably, Stephane Robelin’s latest feature, All Together (a mutated English translation of the original French title, which literally means If We All Lived Together? ) will be compared to this year’s contrived but hugely successful geriatric adventure, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, since this seems tailor made for that demographic. But this French feature, while not an overtly successful feature, manages to avoid feeling strained with false melodrama and hammy end-of-the-road wisdoms. Instead, this subdued venture gathers some legendary and some undervalued thespians for a pleasant, if inconsequential look at getting older.

Five friends that have regularly gotten together for the past forty years are all beginning to discover that they need to start planning soon for the inevitable. Anne (Geraldine Chaplin) and Jean (Guy Bedos) own a large home not fully utilized since their...

Title: All Together (Et si on vivait tous ensemble?) Kino Lorber/ Tribeca Film Director: Stéphane Robelin Screenwriter: Stéphane Robelin Cast: Jane Fonda, Pierre Richard, Claude Rich, Geraldine Chaplin, Guy Bedos, Daniel Brühl, Gwendoline Hamon, Bernard Malaka Screened at: Review 2, NYC, 10/4/14 Opens: October 19, 2012 How do people want to live when they get on in years, particularly if they are not able to care for themselves? Some will insist on remaining in their own homes despite the dangers they may face if nobody is around during moments of crisis. Others will move in with their children, not the favored solution in America but more likely in Europe. Some  [ Read More ]

The post All Together Movie Review appeared first on Shockya.com.

If you love Downton Abbey but loathe the hiatus, IFC might have you covered. According to Variety, the independent distributor have snatched up Donald Rice‘s Cheerful Weather for the Wedding, a film about rich people acting British and romantic in a period setting.

It’s good, though. I saw the film at Tribeca this past April, finding it to be a well-tuned mixture of comedy and aching longing that you don’t get quite enough of in theaters nowadays. (Our review reflects my own thoughts pretty well.) The cast is pretty impressive one, by the way, with Felicity Jones and Luke Treadaway (Attack the Block) proving capable as two former lovers who, perhaps, against all reason, want to get back together. (The likes of Elizabeth McGovern and Mackenzie Crook add to the background.) It’s very mannered and detailed, the sort of thing you’d expect from this kind of story.

It was announced today that Stéphane Robelin's 2012 comedy "All Together," featuring Jane Fonda, Pierre Richard and Geraldine Chaplin, was jointly acquired by Kino Lorber Inc and Tribeca Film. This marks Fonda's first French-language film since 1972's "Tout Va Bien." The film is planning for an October 19 theatrical release in New York. It will also be made available on VOD. An official synopsis of the film follows: Stéphane Robelin's delectable film focuses on five aging friends who opt out of retiring at a senior home to try a youthful experiment of moving in together into a spacious house, owned by their friends Annie (Geraldine Chaplin) and Jean (Guy Bedos). Joining them is the borderline womanizer Claude (Claude Rich) as well as the bon vivant Albert (Pierre Richard) and his wife Jeanne (Jane Fonda), a philosophy professor. Although life-long friends, Claude, Annie, Jean, Albert and Jeanne quickly...

New York, NY – August 20, 2012 – Kino Lorber, Inc. and Tribeca Film are proud to announce the acquisition of all Us rights to Stéphane Robelin’s crowd-pleasing comedy All Together (Et si on vivait tous ensemble?), starring Jane Fonda (in her first French-language film since Godard’s 1972′s Tout Va Bien), Geraldine Chaplin, Daniel Brühl, Pierre Richard, Guy Bedos, and Claude Rich. A theatrical and VOD day and date release is planned for All Together beginning in New York on October 19 and on-demand platforms, where it will be available in 40+ million homes through a variety of video-on-demand offerings, as well as iTunes, Amazon Watch Instantly and Vudu. Stéphane Robelin’s delectable film focuses on five aging friends who opt out of retiring at a senior home to try a youthful experiment of moving in together into a spacious house, owned by their friends Annie (Geraldine Chaplin) and Jean (Guy Bedos). Joining them...

Kino Lorber, Inc. and Tribeca Film are proud to announce the acquisition of the U.S. rights to Stephane Robelin's crowd-pleasing comedy, All Together (Et si on vivait tous ensemble?). The film received the honor of premiering on the closing night of the 2011 Locarno International Film Festival, and both companies look forward to making the film available to audiences across the country. Starring Jane Fonda, Geraldine Chaplin, Daniel Brühl, and Pierre Richard, Stephane Robelin's delectable film focuses on five aging friends who opt out of retiring at a senior home to try a youthful experiment of moving in together into a spacious house, owned by Annie (Chaplin) and Jean (Guy Bedos). Joining them is the borderline womanizer Claude (Claude Rich), as well as the bon vivant Albert (Richard) and his wife Jeanne (Fonda). These life-long friends quickly learn the challenges of communal living and decide to hire the easy-going Dirk...

He was one of the few directors of war movies with first-hand experience of conflict

Pierre Schoendoerffer, who has died aged 83, was one of the few directors of war films who had actually lived out the adventures of his soldier heroes. The American film-makers William Wellman, Sam Fuller and Oliver Stone did so, but no other director explored the same subject as single-mindedly and doggedly as Schoendoerffer.

His experiences of combat as a military cameraman and as a prisoner of war during the conflict in Indochina marked his output, most directly La 317ème Section (The 317th Platoon, 1965), about a doomed French unit; Le Crabe-Tambour (The Drummer Crab, 1977), about French officers involved in the fall of the French empire after the second world war; his Oscar-winning television documentary La Section Anderson (The Anderson Platoon, 1967), which followed the lives of Us soldiers in Vietnam; and Diên Biên Phú (1992), about a Us war...

Pierre Schoendoerffer, who won an Oscar for the 1967 Vietnam War documentary The Anderson Platoon, died following an operation at a hospital outside Paris. The exact cause of death remains unclear. He was 83. While still in his 20s, Schoendoerffer served as a cameraman with the French army in the 1950s. As a result, he was present when the crucial fortress of Dien Bien Phu fell to the Vietnamese guerrilla army in May 1954, thus signaling the end of French rule in Indochina. Following his capture, Schoendoerffer spent four months in a Pow camp before being sent back to France. From the late '50s on, Schoendoerffer directed ten films, both narrative and documentary features, most of them related to his war experiences. As quoted in the New York Times, in 1994 Schoendoerffer explained that “the earth of Indochina still clings to my soul, just like the mud of the trenches used to stick to my boots.

We are here to continue with news from Cannes. We just learned that The Festival de Cannes will welcome Jean-Paul Belmondo on Tuesday 17 May with a special evening held in his honour. That definitely sounds great, and if anybody deserves to have a special night at this year’s Cannes, it’s Mr. Belmondo, I hope you all agree.

Since the late 1950s, Jean-Paul Belmondo has encapsulated the very best of popular cinema (Philippe de Broca, Henri Verneuil, Gérard Oury, Georges Lautner, Jacques Deray), ably blending this with the glorious art-house cinema of the ‘60s and ‘70s. (Jean-Luc Godard, Jean-Pierre Melville, François Truffaut, Claude Lelouch and Alain Resnais, not to mention Vittorio Sica and Alberto Lattuada).

That Man from Rio, Breathless, Pierrot le Fou, Léon Morin,Priest, Mississippi Mermaid, Le Magnifique, Stavisky and Borsalino are just a few examples of his extraordinary range.

Or, as Gilles Jacob and Thierry Frémaux...

The Festival de Cannes will welcome Jean-Paul Belmondo on Tuesday 17 May with a special evening held in his honour. “We are delighted that he has agreed to attend this gala evening in celebration of his talent and career. His range and personal charisma, the precision of his acting, his cocky wit, the ease with which he carries himself have made him, along with Jean Gabin and Michel Simon, one of the greatest French actors of all time, a fact to which many films bear ample witness. No doubt the entire panoply of French actors, headed by his Conservatory friends Jean Rochefort, Claude Rich, Pierre Vernier and Jean-Pierre Marielle, will want to walk up that Cannes staircase to celebrate ‘Bébel’ to the sound of the rapturous applause of his diehard fans,” say Gilles Jacob and Thierry Frémaux. The time has certainly come to celebrate this extraordinarily talented French actor. Since the late 1950s,...

Sabine Azema, Anne Cosigny, Lambert Wilson, Claude Rich Also On Board Clint Eastwood may have hit 80 this year, but he's positively youthful compared to veteran French director Alain Resnais, who'll turn 89 next June. With a directorial career stretching back to 1936, and taking in stone-cold classics like "Hiroshima Mon Amour" and "Last Year in Marienbad," it's a feat that he's still up and about, let alone prepping another directorial feature. But that's exactly what Resnais is doing, with "Vous N'avez Encore Rien Vu," his follow up to last year's "Wild Grass," which will start shooting in January. Ion…...

Note: this is not some casting news headline from a couple of years back. Wild Grass featured ensemble of André Dussollier, Sabine Azéma, Mathieu Amalric and Anne Consigny are joining Alain Resnais' next feature, which will begin lensing in January of next year. Also joining the cast of Vous N'avez Encore Rien Vu, we have Jean-Pierre Bacri, Isabelle Nanty and trio Pierre Arditi, Lambert Wilson and Claude Rich who all appeared in Resnais' 2006 film Private Fears in Public Places. Filming begins in January and will last for. Gist: Co-written by Resnais and Laurent Herbiet, this is adapted from Jean Anouilh’s stage play Eurydice, where a violinist Orphée and touring actress Eurydice leave everything behind to fulfill their love. But jealousy takes hold of Orphée. Worth Noting: For a French filmmaker who has made very little amount of films, he sure if cranking them out in the late stages of his career.

Idiosyncratic French film director and Cannes prizewinner

At the Cannes film festival in 1958, the jury prize was awarded to Goha, the first Tunisian film (albeit a co-production with France) to be nominated for the Palme d'Or. There were other important firsts connected with the film. Goha was the first feature directed by Jacques Baratier, who has died aged 91. It featured the 20-year-old Tunisian-born beauty Claudia Cardinale in her screen debut and starred a handsome 25-year-old Egyptian actor billed as Omar Chérif (later Sharif), in the role that launched his international career and eventually caught the attention of the producers of Lawrence of Arabia. The film's screenplay was the only one written by the celebrated Egyptian-born playwright and poet Georges Schehadé, and it featured the first screen score by the Moroccan-born composer Maurice Ohana.

Goha, based on an Arab folktale, told of a clever young man (Sharif) who, under the guise of stupidity,...

• A biopic about an unknown painter cleaned up the 34th edition of the Cesar awards (France's equivalent to the Oscars). You would have thought that it was an homage to Sean Penn (the actor was in attendance, first row ticket) and the dearly departed Claude Berri, but this was Martin Provost's night upsetting favorites Jean-François Richet and Mesrine (who won for Best Director and Best Actor) and the Palme d'Or winner The Class from Laurent Cantet winner went home with only the Best Adapted Film. Séraphine won a total of seven awards.  Kristin Scott Thomas didn't claim the top prize for Best Actress for I've Loved You So Long (the prize went to Yolande Moreau in Séraphine) but Philippe Claudel won for Best First Film and a very emotional Elsa Zylberstein grabbed the Best Supporting Actress nod. Finally, a little bit of redemption here for Best Foreign Picture,

...

A day following the announcement of the 81st Academy Awards' nominees, the French Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences have uncovered their official selections for the 34th Cesar Awards. On Friday, January 23, gangster movie "Mesrine" has been given ten nominations for the France's top awards, including Best Picture and Best Director for Jean-Francois Richet.

Apart from the two mentioned gongs, "Mesrine", which is the third highest grossing French film in 2008, also garnered a Best Actor nod for leading actor Vincent Cassel. It also collected two more counts in the category of Adapted Screenplay for Abdel Raouf Dafri and Jean-Francois Richet, and of Cinematography for Robert Gantz.

In the foreign film nominations, Sean Penn's "Into the Wild" and Paul Thomas Anderson's "There Will Be Blood" were put in competition with Bouli Lanners' "Eldorado", Matteo Garrone's "Gomorra", Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne's "Lorna's Silence", James Gray...