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Best known for his psychosexual expeditions into the abyss of violence, drug addiction, and death, Irréversible director Gaspar Noé would like to make a movie for little kiddies, too. Noé, who shocked the world with his unflinching portrayals of sexual assault and extreme debauchery from society's fringes, told a crowd...

It’s October, which means Criterion’s already thinking about 2025. Their new year auspiciously starts with a 4K Uhd release of Jean Eustache’s magnum opus The Mother and the Whore, featuring a new interview with Françoise Lebrun and a new conversation with filmmaker Jean-Pierre Gorin and writer Rachel Kushner.

Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo and Sanjuro get 4K Uhd upgrades in a two-film set, while Anthony Mann’s Jimmy Stewart-led western Winchester ’73 also gets a 4K Uhd release alongside Stephen Frears’ The Grifters and Richard Pryor’s Jo Jo Dancer, Your Life Is Calling.

Find cover art in the slideshow below and more details at Criterion.

The post The Criterion Collection’s January Lineup Includes The Mother and the Whore, Akira Kurosawa, and Anthony Mann on 4K first appeared on The Film Stage.

For his tenth Cannes feature premiere, Arnaud Desplechin chose to present a docu-fictional love letter to cinema. Two years after Brother and Sister was in Competition, Spectateurs (or Filmlovers!) is one of the festival’s Special Screenings, an effervescent walk down memory lane with a director who has helped shape contemporary French cinema for the better. It’s not hard for a Frenchman to be a cinephile––almost everyone is trained in film knowledge, either formally or informally, as part of their cultural upbringing. But Filmlovers! manages to set itself apart from all the other meta-documentaries or essays about how cinema made their director the person they are today. Instead it is both an honest and highly poetic feature that quite naturally absorbs film and literary references to address the structural role cinema has played for both Desplechin himself and our way of viewing the world.

Filmlovers! is narrated by Paul Dédalus,...

Movies are hot, according to Marshall McLuhan, who wasn’t paying them a compliment but placing them within his theory of hot and cool media. He was referring to the sensory richness that makes movies such a captivating and complete experience that they require little active participation from the audience. Just sit in the dark and let the magic wash over you. Arnaud Desplechin doesn’t disagree about the magic, but he puts a different slant on things in the docufiction Filmlovers! (Spectateurs!), whose focus is the moviegoer as an essential part of the equation.

Abounding in movie love, the director’s first feature since Brother and Sister cites more than 50 films in its eloquent onrush of clips and philosophizing and memory. But, in a departure from most such cinema essays, there’s no auteur namechecking (or onscreen titles ID’ing clips); it’s not those 50 films’ making-of or even their makers that matter here,...

Exclusive: AI firm Flawless, distributor-financier XYZ Films (Mandy), and producer Tea Shop Productions (The Fall) have acquired Michel Gondry’s 2023 Cannes Directors’ Fortnight movie The Book Of Solutions for all English-speaking territories.

Directed and written by Gondry, the French-language comedy is the first film in seven years from the Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and The Science of Sleep filmmaker.

It will be releases simultaneously in the original French language and converted to a director-approved English-language version using Flawless’ TrueSync AI technology, which became known after movies like The Fall. You can read about Flawless’ “visual translation” techniques and acquisitions strategy in our story here.

Pic stars Pierre Niney, Blanche Gardin, Francoise Lebrun and Vincent Elbaz and was produced by George Bermann at Partizan.

In the film, Marc (Niney), a bipolar and paranoid filmmaker, is having trouble with his latest project. With his editor as an accomplice, he manages...

Arnaud Desplechin’s hybrid documentary “Spectateurs!” (“Filmlovers”) debuted a first trailer ahead of the film’s world premiere at Cannes on May 22.

The 88-minute docu is a love letter to cinema, inspired by Desplechin’s own discovery and passion for cinema.

Per the official Cannes description of the film, Desplechin wrote: “What does it mean, to go to the movies? Why have people been going for over one hundred years? I set out to celebrate movie theaters and their manifold magic. So, I walked in the footsteps of young Paul Dédalus, as if in a filmgoer’s coming-of-age story. Memories, fiction and discoveries come together in an irrepressible torrent of pictures.”

“Spectateurs!” weaves documentary and fiction with a cast including Milo Machado Graner, the young breakthrough actor of Justine Triet’s “Anatomy of a Fall,” and well-known French actors Mathieu Amalric (“The Diving Bell and the Butterfly”) and Françoise Lebrun...

The world of Pierre Creton’s “A Prince” is lush and verdant. His protagonist is a gardener’s apprentice whose penchant for taming and nurturing the wilderness around him is only matched by the latent eroticism he finds in various older men he comes to be involved with. Mostly driven by voiceover narration meant to ground and disorient you in equal measure, “A Prince” is a study in the stories we keep from one another and the ones we tell ourselves. Creton’s vision of unruly desires in the French countryside is literate and oblique perhaps to a fault, its erotic sensibility feeling more intellectual than visceral.

The first line in Creton’s film, delivered in voiceover as images of gardening take up the screen, feels like a deferred promise: “The story really began when Kutta arrived,” we’re told by Françoise (who’ll be played by Manon Schaap but...

The film is about the friendship that develops between two women whose husbands are imprisoned together.

Les Films du Losange has acquired Patricia Mazuy’s drama Les Prisonnières, starring Isabelle Huppert and Hafsia Herzi, and has revealed a first-look picture (above) ahead of the Rendez-Vous with French Cinema taking place next week in Paris.

Huppert and Herzi play two women who develop an unlikely friendship when their husbands are inmates in the same prison.

Les Films du Losange will release the film in France later this year. Les Prisonnières reteams Mazuy with Huppert following The King’s Daughters that premiered...

Renowned French auteur Arnaud Desplechin, whose latest film “Brother and Sister” competed at Cannes Film Festival in 2022, is currently wrapping his next directorial effort, “Spectateurs!”

Les Films du Losange, which handles French distribution and international sales rights to the title, has unveiled a first still (above) in the run-up to the Unifrance Rendez-Vous With French Cinema market, where it will introduce the film to buyers.

The hybrid project weaves documentary and fiction with a cast including Milo Machado Graner, the young breakthrough actor of Justine Triet’s “Anatomy of a Fall,” and well-known French actors Mathieu Amalric (“The Diving Bell and the Butterfly”) and Françoise Lebrun (“The Book of Solutions”).

Now in post, the docufiction is described by Les Films du Losange as “a love letter to cinema, freely inspired by the director’s own discovery and passion for cinema.”

A Croisette regular, Desplechin previously directed “Deception,” an adaptation of...

Oscar-winning filmmaker Michel Gondry presented “The Book of Solutions” at Lucca Comics & Games this week, and took the opportunity to explore his ideas about creativity, and to urge aspiring directors to fight against perfectionism and embrace risk. He was accompanied by his editor, Élise Fievet.

Gondry explained that the self-help guide from which the film gets its name features a series of guiding principles for creativity, such as kicking off a project without hesitation, learning by doing, and not listening to others.

“These are principles that stayed with me during a period of my life that has been very hard, and they’re still with me. I think they’re still valid,” he said. With his latest effort, the helmer aimed to “revive that harsh period of his life, but with a touch of humor.”

“The Book of Solutions”

“The Book of Solutions” follows Marc (Pierre Niney), a director who...

Returning with his first film in nearly a decade, The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind director Michel Gondry debuted The Book of Solutions at Cannes Film Festival earlier this year. While the meta film, following a director (Pierre Niney) in a creative rut while in post-production on a new feature, is still seeking U.S. distribution it’ll arrive in France this fall and now the first trailer and poster have arrived.

Savina Petkova said in her Cannes review, “Gondry has retained the playful tone and occasional despair found in his equally whimsical Mood Indigo and The Science of Sleep, even as his newest is, by comparison, more rooted in the realities of film production and mental illness. Niney plays a typified neurotic male auteur––a stand-in for Gondry himself, and this personal touch pays off in the sympathy audiences cannot help feeling for Marc. The film is also...

Gondry is back!! The Jokers distribution in France has debuted the first official trailer for Michel Gondry's latest film titled The Book of Solutions, originally titled Le Livre des Solutions in French. This premiered at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival a few months ago, playing in the Directors' Fortnight sidebar fest, and was one of our Top 10 fest highlights. The quirky, upbeat comedy is a very personal, meta story for Gondry about a filmmaker trying to make a film his way and all the challenges he runs into in the process. Pierre Niney stars as Marc, who escapes the city for a small town where he lives with his aunt and a small crew as they try to finish the film without all the producers chasing them. The cast includes Blanche Gardin, Françoise Lebrun, Vincent Elbaz, Frankie Wallach, Camille Rutherford, and Mourad Boudaoud. This is Gondry's best in years, it's...

Filming begins today on Spectateurs – a docu-fiction film that will see Cannes darling Arnaud Desplechin‘s complete his Paul Dédalus films which began with 1996’s My Sex Life… or How I Got into an Argument and was continued with 2016’s My Golden Days. Naturally we find Desplechin’s muse Mathieu Amalric return as Paul and we also have Françoise Lebrun toplining. Look for more casting news other the next couple of weeks as production takes over the Hauts de France region. CG Cinéma’s Charles Gillibert produces the film which will be likely invited to Cannes next May. This centers on a movie theatre from the 1960s to the present day.…...

The title of Jean Eustache’s The Mother and the Whore refers to Marie (Bernadette Lafont), whose status as a 30-year-old marks her as effectively middle aged to her modestly younger peers, and Veronika (Françoise Lebrun), a hospital nurse who copes with the tedium of her experience with casual sex. These reductive, misogynistic archetypes of female behavior aren’t reflective of the film’s own views, but those of Alexandre (Jean-Pierre Léaud), a disaffected young intellectual who lives with Marie and is increasingly drawn to Veronika.

Alexandre airs his misogyny from the start as he meets up with his ex-girlfriend (Isabelle Weingarten). Speeding past any attempt at reconciliation, Alexandre proposes marriage, then proceeds to rant about her new relationship. Asking if she does the same things with her new beau as they did together, Alexandre maintains an outward veneer of calm but cannot keep the venom out of his voice.

It used to be two options: live in a major city that busts out the one awful print or download the VHS rip from a dark-web torrent site. No wonder it was only hosannas upon learning the complete corpus of Jean Eustache would get its decades-overdue restoration––on basis of The Mother and the Whore alone it marks a moment in film history.

Janus Films (by extension Criterion) acquired the catalog from Les Films du Losange and begin their series, “The Dirty Stories of Jean Eustache,” this month at Lincoln Center before a larger rollout in weeks, months to come, and with it a trailer for Mother‘s 4K restoration is here. Just the first shot of Jean-Pierre Léaud––who, I feel compelled to note, is enduring hard times and seeking help via friends––completely rewires sense of a movie I’ve loved for a decade. But it’s all in tip-top shape: deep blacks,...

If you’ve ever wondered when it was that Michel Gondry, the gifted French director of “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” became the world’s most annoying filmmaker, you might say the answer is, “He always was.” Yet no one, including me, quite thinks of him that way. That’s because the few works of his that have come to prominence possess a special combination of facility and charm. I adore “Eternal Sunshine,” a virtuoso movie that bends your brain and breaks your heart at the same time. You might simply choose to characterize it as the masterpiece of screenwriter Charlie Kaufman, but the truth is that Gondry directed it ­— the leaps in time, the emotionally convulsive performances of Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet — with a masterful sense of play and gravitational control.

I’ve always heard that the script Kaufman originally turned in was twice as complicated, and...

It’s been a long time since the last Michel Gondry movie (and perhaps even longer since the last time you actually saw one), but at least the “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” director’s semi-autobiographical new comedy offers a fun — if also fraught and occasionally worrying — explanation for why it took him eight years to follow up “Microbe & Gasoline.”

In “The Book of Solutions,” Pierre Niney plays Marc, an obvious Gondry stand-in who’s deep in post-production on a $5 million film that looks an awful lot like Gondry’s own “Mood Indigo.” And much like Gondry did with that surreal 2013 romance, which was maligned for its messy overabundance of rich ideas, Marc is struggling to find a coherent shape for his would-be opus.

“Anyone, Everyone” already sounds worryingly open-ended and ambitious based on its title alone, and it doesn’t exactly instill confidence in Marc’s financiers...

In the second prize announcement by a Directors’ Fortnight partner, “A Prince,” the fifth feature from singular French auteur Pierre Creton, has won the Sacd Prize, awarded by France’s Writers’ Guild for the best French-language movie in the section.

Written by Mathilde Girard, Cyril Neyrat and Vincent Barré, and directed by Creton, who combines his film career with work as an agricultural labourer, “A Prince” has weighed in at this year’s Directors Fortnight as one of the most singular of titles, whose central narrative turns on a horticultural student, Pierre-Joseph. His mentors, botany teacher Alberto and plant nursery owner Adrien, soon become his lovers.

A left-of-field ode to nature and horticulture, sporting narrative voice-overs by celebrated actors – Mathieu Amalric, Françoise Lebrun and Grégory Gadebois – the film is shot in 16:9 ratio, featuring scenes of nudity, and a spirited soundtrack – part Baroque, part instrumental – by Dutch composer Jozef van Wissem...

When the film you’ve always wanted to make gets shut down by unconvinced producers, you have two choices: you still try to make it, or you make it. This is the case for Marc (Pierre Niney), an impressionable thirtysomething filmmaker, in Michel Gondry’sThe Book of Solutions. In an attempt to get his bearings, the bipolar Marc decides to get off his meds and take all the footage (plus his small crew) to his aunt’s house in the beautiful French countryside in the hope of finishing the film on his terms. The creative juices are flowing, but the work is arduous: how can one keep a seemingly doomed project together when everything is falling apart?

Gondry has retained the playful tone and occasional despair found in his equally whimsical Mood Indigo and The Science of Sleep, even as his newest is, by comparison, more rooted in the realities...

The filmmaker at the center of Michel Gondry’s new feature is in a love-hate relationship with his latest project. To protect the work in progress from the studio executives who have just fired him, he absconds to the country with the four-hour cut, his faithful editor and assistant in tow. And then he can’t bear to look at the footage, and gets busy with one tangential undertaking after another. The depiction of procrastination as an essential part of the creative process is one of the delights of The Book of Solutions (Le Livre des solutions), but on the way to its mildly satisfying final punchline, this uneven comedy loses its thread.

Drawing loosely upon Gondry’s postproduction escape from producers when he was making Mood Indigo, his first movie since the 2015 charmer Microbe & Gasoline is a portrait of the director as a gifted man-child. Central character Marc Becker is inspired,...

Dominik Moll’s The Night of The 12th has won best film at the 28th edition of France’s Lumière Awards in Paris on Monday evening.

The investigative drama, which was nominated in six categories, also won Best Screenplay.

The film, which debuted in the Cannes Film Festival’s non-competitive Cannes Première section, stars Bastien Bouillon as a police detective who becomes obsessed with a case involving a complex female murder victim.

Best director went to Albert Serra for French Polynesia-set drama Pacification. The feature also clinched two other prizes: Best Actor for Benoît Magimal and Best Cinematography for Artur Tort.

Virginie Efira won Best Actress for her performance in Rebecca Zlotowski’s Other People’s Children about the challenge of navigating the stepmother role.

Nadia Tereszkiewicz won Best Female Revelation for her performance in Forever Young and Dimitri Doré, Best Male Revelation for Bruno Reidal.

Alice Diop clinched best documentary category for We,...

Le Livre des solutions

More than seven years after the release of Microbe & Gasoline, Michel Gondry returns to features (he produced a lot of shorts in between) with a formidable cast comprised of Pierre Niney, Blanche Gardin, Camille Rutherford, Vincent Elbaz, Frankie Wallach and Françoise Lebrun. Production took place in June of last year in a Paris. Partizan Films’ Georges Bermann produced Le Livre des solutions.

Gist: This revolves around a director seeking to vanquish his demons which are stifling his creativity.

Release Date/Prediction: Berlinale might be a good first pit stop for the film.

…...

’Saint Omer’, ‘Other People’s Children’ and ’Pacifiction’ also receive multiple nods.

Dominik Moll’s police procedural The Night Of The 12th tops the nominations for the 28th annual Lumière Awards.

France’s version of The Golden Globes, the Lumière Awards are voted on by international correspondents from 36 countries.

The Night Of The 12th leads with six nominations, just ahead of Albert Serra’s political thriller Pacifiction with five. Rebecca Zlotowski’s Other People’s Children and Alice Diop’s Saint Omer tie on four nods each. The films will vie for the Best Film prize alongside Alice Winocour’s Paris Memories.

Dominik Moll’s The Night of The 12th, which world premiered in Cannes in May, has topped the nominations for the 28th edition of France’s Lumière Awards.

The awards are voted on by members of the international press corp hailing from 36 countries based in France.

The Night Of The 12th was nominated in six categories including best film, director and screenplay. The film debuted in the Cannes Film Festival’s non competitive Cannes Première section.

The investigative drama is Moll’s seventh feature. It stars Bastien Bouillon, with support from Bouli Lanners, as a police detective who becomes obsessed with a case involving a complex female murder victim.

Other multi-nominated titles include Albert Serra’s French Polynesia-set drama Pacification five nominations.

Four films received four nominations each: Alice Diop’s Saint-Omer; Rebecca Zlotowski’s Other People’s Children; Louis Garrel’s The Innocent and Gaspar Noé’s Vortex.

Diop,...

Italy’s theatrical box office is finally showing some encouraging signs after long lagging behind other European countries in terms of post-pandemic returns.

“Don’t Worry Darling,” segueing from its Venice launch, opened better in Italy than in France and Germany last weekend when the Harry Styles and Florence Pugh-starrer scored €965,000 from Italian screens in the frame ending September 25, landing in the number two spot.

The “Avatar” re-release weighed in at number one in Italian theaters with €1.65 million (1.61 million), a better opening than Germany.

The same frame saw three Italian films – all Venice launches – among the top ten. Most notable of these is Gianni Amelio’s “Lord of the Ants,” a biopic of Italian poet and playwright Aldo Braibanti, who was jailed in 1968 due to a Fascist-era anti-gay law. “Ants” has now scored a decent more than €1.4 million (1.36 million) since bowing on Sept. 8 and briefly reaching the numero uno slot.

Pathé’s 4K restoration of No Fear No Die is a highlight of the Revivals program Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze

Film at Lincoln Center has announced the Revivals selections of the 60th New York Film Festival. Highlights include Pedro Costa’s O Sangue (Blood); Jean Eustache’s The Mother and the Whore, starring Jean-Pierre Léaud, Bernadette Lafont, and Françoise Lebrun; Jacques Tourneur’s Canyon Passage starring Brian Donlevy (with Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg consulting on this restoration); Claire Denis’s No Fear No Die with Isaach De Bankole, Alex Descas, and Jean-Claude Brialy; Mikko Niskanen’s Eight Deadly Shots; Manoel de Oliveira’s The Day Of Despair on the life of Camilo Castelo Branco, played by Mario Barroso; Edward Yang’s A Confucian Confusion starring Ni Shujun, and Balufu Bakupu-Kanyinda’s Le Damier, screening with Radu Jude’s short The Potemkinists (in the Currents program).

The 60th New York Film...

Film at Lincoln Center has announced the cinephile-favorite Revivals section for the 60th New York Film Festival, coming to NYC September 30 through October 16. The program showcases new restorations and preservations of important works from canonical filmmakers.

This year’s selection includes the hard-to-find “The Mother and the Whore” — which cameoed in the form of a poster featured in 2005’s “The Squid and the Whale” and brought the scandalous Jean Eustache some renewed attention. Starring Jean-Pierre Léaud, Bernadette Lafont, and Françoise Lebrun, the philosophical love triangle set against the sexual revolution divided Cannes audiences in 1973. Earlier this year, the Les Films du Losange restoration opened the Cannes Classics section. It makes its North American premiere at NYFF.

Many of the significant works featured in the lineup include the world premiere restoration of Claire Denis’ “No Fear No Die”; a new 4K restoration of Glauber Rocha’s incendiary, audience-provoking “Black God, White Devil...

Gaspar Noé’s latest feature Vortex (2021) - a distressing immersion into the emotional vortex of dying elderly couple - has surprisingly naturalistic and metaphysical, eerie quality. As with Enter the Void (2009) Noé takes a cinematic monograph of death, observing the last days of an ex-psychiatrist (Françoise Lebrun), who is suffering from dementia and a film scholar (Dario Argento) with a history of heart failure. Vortex is full of intellectual passages and references to classical films however the cinematic approach is fresh. It’s the most restrained and yet audacious, unadorned and still intelligent picture the Argentinian auteur has made.

Most of the critics and the audience have suggested Vortex is a change in Noé’s direction of interest as it revolves around a different peer group than his previous work. However, the social and cultural atrocities, abnormal drug addiction and socially alienated people are still in the plot while the son of.

We tapped out of Michel Gondry cinema back when Be Kind Rewind was released, and suddenly the filmmaker is now at the dozen film mark with what feels like an alluring project due to the collection of players he has assembled for Le Livre des solutions. During Cannes we learned that Pierre Niney would topline the project. Lensing began this week with Blanche Gardin (out off the Critics’ Week debut of the funny-bone Portugal project Everybody Loves Jeanne), Camille Rutherford (recently seen in Cannes Premiere selected The Night of the 12th), Vincent Elbaz, Frankie Wallach and veteran thesp Françoise Lebrun (most recently seen in Vortex).…...

Gaspar Noé is an entertaining interview — no matter what other adjectives you would use to describe his career or his approach as a filmmaker, you have to give him this. And with his latest film, “Vortex,” receiving a limited theatrical release this month, fans of, ah, candid Hollywood interviews are about to get more than they handle.

“Vortex” is a film about the ravages of old age, where an elderly couple – played by Françoise Lebrun and Italian director Dario Argento – must grapple with their diminishing independence.

Continue reading For Gaspar Noé, One Of The Best Parts Of Almost Dying Was Watching “Gravity” at The Playlist.

Notebook is covering the Cannes Film Festival with an on going correspondence between critics Leonardo Goi and Lawrence Garcia, and editor Daniel Kasman.One Fine Morning.Dear Danny and Leo,It is indeed very good to be back at Cannes—not just because it means seeing an entire slate of anticipated titles, but also because it means endless opportunities to talk about them, both in these correspondences and in person, which I'd missed more than I'd realized. Indeed, there’s so much to discuss that I’ll just dispense with the throat-clearing and get to the movies. Like you, Leo, I found both God’s Creatures and Scarlet productive to consider in relation to each other, what with their shared folktale affinities and archetypal approach to character. The most impressive aspect of God’s Creatures was how Saela Davis and Anna Rose Holmer managed, for a time, to balance the film's appealing behavioral ambiance,...

Late French post-New Wave director’s filmography was recently acquired and restored by Les Films du Losange.

Paris-based Les Films du Losange has posted a raft of fresh deals on the restored 4K catalogue of late French filmmaker Jean Eustache, whose cult drama The Mother And The Whore opens Cannes Classics on Tuesday.

It has sold to Spain (Filmin), Japan (Mermaid Films), Portugal (Leopardo), Switzerland (Cinémathèque Suisse) and Italy (I Wonder).

New York-based distributor Janus Films, a sister company to classic film label The Criterion Collection, announced earlier this month it had acquired the catalogue for North America as...

For years—I’m talking years—the films of Jean Eustache, post-New Wave genius and forefather of more than you’d ever realize, were basically impossible to find in high quality and through means we could strictly speaking call “legal.” The how and why are plenty complicated, but fear not: Les Films du Losange acquired and are overseeing 4K restorations of his complete catalogue, and Janus soon thereafter took up U.S. rights. What will hopefully prove a big rollout begins this month—Eustache’s most iconic film The Mother and the Whore is coming to Cannes Classics, and now we have a trailer foretelling a major upgrade.

“A major upgrade” speaking as one who saw Mother on a dusty 35mm print with several other freaks in 2013, at which time the movie left an indelible impression for its unsentimental depiction of post-68 Parisians—an image made more powerful for including Jean-Pierre Léaud,...

A retired psychiatrist suffers a stroke, while her film-maker husband potters about their Paris apartment in denial in this brutally insightful film

Gaspar Noé brings his cauterisingly fierce gaze to the spectacle of old age: the world of those about to enter the void. He brings to it a particular structural insight which I don’t think I have ever seen represented so clearly. Dying is bifurcated: a real-time split-screen experience divided between the carer and the cared-for. An old married couple, people who have had a lifetime to wonder which of them will die first and which of them will have to take up the burden of care, find that it is not so clear during the terrible endgame itself.

Veteran director Dario Argento and actor, screenwriter and director Françoise Lebrun play a couple who live together in a small, chaotic Parisian apartment covered in an amiable clutter of books and papers.

Even such enfant terribles as Gaspar Noé have to confront the fact that life (and death) is catching up with them. Noé in such films as Climax, Irreversible, Enter The Void and Stand Alone has always pushed audiences and subjects to extremes - and not always to good or lasting effect.

Here in his sixth feature we are offered another facet to Noé as he examines old age, and the perils of Alzheimer’s all stemming, we are given to understand, from personal motifs.

He is wonderfully served by his two main actors Dario Argento (the Italian horror master) and French actress Françoise Lebrun whose younger self is about to be seen all over again in the restored version of Jean Eustache’s The Mother and the Whore in Cannes Classics.

The ageing couple who are nameless, live in a sprawling Parisian apartment surrounded by memorabilia of other times including film posters and books.

Director Gaspar Noé’s twin idols: Dario Argento and Françoise Lebrun in Vortex Photo: Wild Bunch For someone who has been associated with a string of the most subversive films of the last couple of decades renegade director Gaspar Noé in person seems to be remarkable gentle and sensitive.

I remember when his first sensation Irreversible seared its way into my brain after its premiere in Cannes in 2002 with an extended rape scene that was unbearable and scarcely watchable. I recall diving for cover at the ejaculation scene in the 3D Climax and being totally disorientated by Enter The Void. Hardly surprisingly he was totally exhausted after six years of working on the latter that perhaps he decided on a less confrontational subject for his latest foray Vortex.

It could also have had something to do with a close encounter with his own mortality when, just before the pandemic hit in earnest,...

"Did you cry?"

It's not a question typically asked by a filmmaker during an interview. Then again, Gaspar Noé isn't like most filmmakers. The question is more than apt for his latest picture, "Vortex." Mother (played by Françoise Lebrun) is living with dementia, while The Father (Dargio Argento) experiences declining health as well, and The Son (Alex Lutz) copes. As expected from Noé, he doesn't pull any punches. And unlike a lot of dramas about serious illnesses, he never offers up moments of catharsis or comfort about a terrible disease.

From beginning to end, this is a brutal story. As it should be. 

"Vortex" isn't the only new Noé...

The post Vortex Director Gaspar Noé on Crying, Death, and Drugs [Interview] appeared first on /Film.

Love triangle: Jean-Pierre Léaud, Françoise Lebrun and the late Bernadette Lafont in The Mother and the Whore Photo: Les Films du Losange The Cannes Classic section will showcase a restored copy of Jean Eustache’s groundbreaking The Mother And The Whore in the presence of actors Françoise Lebrun and Jean-Pierre Léaud.

Also in attendance on 17 May in the Debussy Theatre will be the director’s son Boris Eustache who was born in 1960 and worked on his father’s second feature and appears as an actor in Eustache’s short film Les photos d’Alix. He supervised the restoration.

The film which will be re-released in French cinemas after the Festival, is considered one of the key works of post-Nouvelle Vague French cinema. Eustache tragically shot himself in his Paris apartment just a few weeks before his 43rd birthday, leaving a legacy of two features and numerous shorts. The director...

As exciting as the new films premiering at Cannes Film Festival is its Classics section, featuring new restorations as well as documentaries spotlighting film history. They’ve now unveiled their 2022 lineup which most notably includes the new, much-anticipated restoration of Jean Eustache’s masterpiece The Mother and the Whore, which it looks like Janus Films has picked up for a U.S. run later this year.

The lineup also includes new restorations of films by Satyajit Ray, Vittorio de Sica, Aravindan Govindan, Orson Welles, Martin Scorsese, Glauber Rocha, Vera Chytilová, and more, alongside new documentaries on Romy Schneider, Jane Campion, Souleymane Cissé, and beyond. Check out the full list below.

The Mother and the Whore back in the theater!

La Maman et la putain (The Mother and the Whore)

Jean Eustache

1972, 3h40, France

4K digital restoration of The Mother and the Whore was done in 2022 by Les Films du Losange,...

This year’s line-up will also celebrate classics such as Singin’ In The Rain and Indian director Satyajit Ray’s 1970 work The Adversary.

Late French filmmaker Jean Eustache’s recently restored cult 1973 drama The Mother And The Whore will open Cannes Classics this year, the line-up for which was announced on Monday (May 2).

Other highlights include two episodes of the series The Last Movie Stars directed by Ethan Hawke about Joanne Woodward and Paul Newman; a screening of Singin’ In The Rain to coincide with the 70th anniversary of its release and a restored 4K version of Vittorio de Sica’s 1946 work Sciuscià.

Studio brass wowed theater owners this week with Maverick: Top Gun, Avatar: The Way of Water and Spider-Man: Across The Spider-Verse among other tentpoles. But they were also clear at the just-wrapped CinemaCon that a reviving box office requires a wide breadth of content.

“If we narrow what we bring to theaters, our audience will get smaller,” said Jim Orr, head of domestic theatrical distribution for Universal Pictures. “We need an industry that creates and impacts culture every single weekend [with] personal stories, original ideas,” he said — a sentiment that echoed across the four-day confab in Las Vegas.

Universal, short on superheroes, got plenty of traction with Jurassic World Dominion, Minions: The Rise of Gru and Halloween Ends and films like She Said and Nope. Its specialty distributor, Focus Features, promised to win back elusive older demos with Downton Abbey: A New Era, and showcased a slate including Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris,...

Gaspar Noé’s new film opens with a split-screen sequence, incorporating an aspect-ratio switch. Such experimental format tweaking has a long history, so why is it all the rage again?

Michael Bay once described his bombastic film-making style as “fucking the frame”, but if any director fornicates with the frame it must surely be Gaspar Noé, who blitzes us with flashing neon, 360-degree camera movements and intercourse closeups. So it’s a surprise when his new film, Vortex, begins with an elderly married couple (played by Françoise Lebrun and Italian horror maestro Dario Argento) sitting serenely on their Paris balcony.

When the soundtrack plays a lovely Françoise Hardy song, you wonder if Noé has mellowed. But wait! If he doesn’t actually shag the frame here, he fiddles with it in two ways. First, the square-ish Academy ratio (1.37:1) of the serene prologue expands into a letterbox shape. Second, that...

Remember how you learned in school about “man’s inhumanity to man”? If the director Gaspar Noé has a theme, it’s “the humanity of inhumanity.” Noé’s shock psychodramas confront subjects like murder, sexual assault, and what happens when a roomful of flex dancers go out of their gourds on LSD. As a filmmaker, he’s drawn to extremes — to the sensational and the depraved, the sordid and the evil. His quest is to hold that darkness up to the light, to flip the cruelty on its head until we see an echo of ourselves. Noé takes off from the wide-eyed impulses of an exploitation filmmaker, but he possesses a technical bravura — and a devious sobriety of purpose — that has made him his own genre. Call it transgressive transcendence.

Yet as a Noé watcher from way back, I can’t deny that the only two films of his that...

Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI.NEWSAbove: Fatal Attraction (1987)The next season of Karina Longsworth's podcast You Must Remember This will focus on the thorny and sumptuous erotic films of the 1980s and 1990s, including films by Adrian Lyne, Brian De Palma, and Stanley Kubrick. The two-part season will start on April 5. Ahead of its theatrical release, the long-delayed Top Gun: Maverick will play at a special screening in Cannes for the 75th edition of the festival in May. This year's Cannes Film Festival also has a new official partner: TikTok. The partnership will include exclusive festival-related content for users and an in-app competition called #TikTokShortFilm. James Morosini's I Love My Dad and Rosa Ruth Boesten's documentary Master of Light lead this year's SXSW Film Festival awards. Actor William Hurt has died at the age of 71. Hurt was known...

Vortex Trailer — Gaspar Noé‘s Vortex (2021) movie trailer has been released by Utopia. The Vortex trailer stars Dario Argento, Françoise Lebrun, and Alex Lutz. Crew Gaspar Noé wrote the screenplay for Vortex. Denis Bedlow conducted the film editing on the film. Benoît Debie crafted the cinematography for the film. Plot Synopsis Vortex‘s plot synopsis: “Presented in split screen, [...]

Continue reading: Vortex (2021) Movie Trailer: An Aging Couple & Their Son Deal with Dementia in Gaspar Noé’s Split-screen Film...

"Life's a dream, isn't it?" "Yes. A dream within a dream." Utopia has revealed an official US trailer for the latest film made by controversial Argentinian filmmaker Gaspar Noé, known for his films Irreversible, Enter the Void, Love 3D, Climax, and Lux Æterna. His latest isn't as wild as his previous films - focusing on an elderly couple descending into dementia. The film is presented in split screen - following the two around their Paris apartment. This first premiered at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival at midnight, and also played at Karlovy Vary, NYFF, Beyond Fest, and the Vienna Film Festival. Reviews from the festivals state: "With its uncommonly human touch and restless, unflinching visual aesthetic, Vortex might well be Noe’s finest and most thoughtful work." Vortex stars Dario Argento (yep!!) and Françoise Lebrun in the two lead roles, along with Alex Lutz as their son. The split screen style looks a bit jarring,...

After exploring sex and drugs with Love and Climax, respectively, Gaspar Noé is here devastate you with a look about the one thing we are all guaranteed to face: getting old and the inevitability of death. Vortex, which premiered at Cannes Film Festival last fall, follows a couple (Françoise Lebrun and Dario Argento) as the former deals with dementia. With a split-screen approach, the first trailer has now arrived ahead of a release later next month via Utopia.

Rory O’Connor said in his review, “It is a devastating and uncharacteristically sincere accomplishment for Noé, an Argentinian filmmaker and enfant terrible who made his name with a great string of provocative works about the younger, stickier parts of life—nominally, parties (Climax), drugs (Enter The Void), and sex (Love), though usually all at the same time. Vortex‘s stars are of a much earlier vintage: LeBrun rose to prominence playing Veronika...

Very few filmmakers instantly pique your interest quite like Gaspar Noé and his latest, Vortex, is remarkable, often hard to watch, yet sweet in parts.

The Argentine-born director and writer unleashes Vortex on these shores at the Glasgow Film Festival for its UK premiere. You may be unfamiliar with the name but will have no doubt have heard quiet murmurs about his work, more specifically 2002’s Irreversible starring Vincent Cassel.

Front and centre is the one fate we all share, death. We follow the lives of elderly couple of Lui (Dario Argento) and Elle (Françoise Lebrun) where initially all seems well as they follow a standard, well-synchronised, morning routine. It quickly becomes obvious this is not the case as we witness the ravages of dementia as it takes its hold over Elle and we see the struggle play out in split screen.

It is a topic that is no stranger...

Influential filmmaker’s best-known film is 1973 Cannes grand jury winner ’The Mother And The Whore’.

French film company Les Films du Losange has acquired the entire catalogue of influential post-New Wave director Jean Eustache, comprising five feature-length works and six short films.

The deal with the late filmmaker’s son Boris Eustache is a coup for Les Films du Losange’s new co-heads Charles Gillibert and Alexis Dantec who recently took over the company, which was established in 1962 by New Wave directors Eric Rohmer and Barbet Schroeder.

It brings an end to a dispute blocking the exploitation of the filmography for several decades,...

Argentine helmer Gaspar Noé’s latest feature “Vortex” world premiered in Cannes, where it was greeted with a standing ovation and critical acclaim. Variety spoke to the director at the Unifrance Rendez-vous in Paris this week about the film.

“Vortex,” lensed during the 2020 lockdown, follows an elderly couple in a Paris apartment. Shot entirely in split-screen, it marks a new departure for Noé, with a more meditative realistic ambience, combined with a transcendental undercurrent.

The elderly man is a retired film critic, played by Italian filmmaker Dario Argento (“Suspiria”), who is trying to finish a book about cinema and dreams, while looking after his wife, played by Françoise Lebrun (“The Mother and the Whore”), who is suffering from advanced dementia.

The more subdued, somber tone was influenced by the death of several of Noé’s close friends and family, his own near-fatal cerebral hemorrhage and the fact that both his...