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Julie (Laure Calamy) is on the move. From the moment her alarm clock disturbs her sleeping breath, she’s in constant state of harried, frantic motion—making breakfast, tinkering with the boiler, dropping her kids off at an elderly neighbor’s house while it’s still dark out, running to catch a train, changing into her hotel maid uniform, smoothing sheets, hosing excrement from the walls, and battling her way back home to do it all over again, all too soon.

“Full Time,” written and directed by Eric Gravel, depicts the never-ending sprint that is Julie’s life as a struggling single mom, rendering this social-realist drama as a gritty, heart-pounding thriller, with breathless, naturalistic handheld cinematography by Victor Seguin and an adrenaline-pounding electronic score by Irène Drésel.

There’s something radical about turning a very bad week in the life of a single mom into an action thriller, and...

Race-against-time social drama “Full Time” (À plein temps), which won the best actress prize for “Call My Agent” star Laure Calamy and the best director award for Eric Gravel in the Horizons section of the Venice Film Festival, has scored multiple territory deals for Brussels-based sales company Be For Films.

The territories sold on the French-language film are Benelux (Athena Films), Switzerland (Xenix Filmdistribution), Italy (I Wonder), Spain (Festival Films), Greece (Cinobo), Norway (Arthaus), Canada (Axia Films), Australia/New Zealand (Palace Entertainment), China (Huanxi), Taiwan (Hooray Films), South Korea (Choix Pictures), and Indonesia (Falcon).

Discussions are ongoing with buyers in the U.S., the U.K., Japan, Israel and Poland.

Haut et Court will release the film in France on March 9.

Pamela Leu, the film’s sales agent at Be For Films, said: “After the premiere on the Lido, I was thrilled to discover with emotion so many people could...

Endowed with the Official Selection label, the films by Marie-Castille Mention-Schaar and Danielle Arbid spearhead a slate that also includes the upcoming Philippe Béziat documentary. With a line-up of nine titles, including two features stamped with the Official Selection label, French international sales agent Pyramide International (headed up by Eric Lagesse) will be springing into action at the Cannes Film Festival’s Marché du Film Online (22-26 June). The first film endowed with the label is A Good Man, the sixth feature by Marie-Castille Mention-Schaar (who turned heads on the Piazza Grande at Locarno in 2016 with Heaven Will Wait as well as with the box-office smash Once in a Lifetime in 2014). The cast includes Noémie Merlant, Soko, Vincent Dedienne, Gabriel Almer, Alysson Paradis, Anne Loiret, Geneviève Mnich and Jonas Ben Ahmed.Written by the director together with Christian Sonderegger (Coby), the story revolves around Aude and Benjamin, who have been.

This is a competition for Séraphine directed by Martin Provost and starring Yolande Moreau, Ulrich Tukur, Anne Bennent, Geneviève Mnich, Nico Rogner, Adélaïde Leroux, Serge Larivière and Françoise Lebrun. 1912, in a little town North of Paris. Séraphine Louis, works as a maid for Madame Duphot, who rents an apartment to a German art critic and dealer, Wilhelm Uhde, an enthusiastic advocate of modern and “primitive” artists. In her spare time, Séraphine paints with everything that comes to hand (wine, mud, fruits & flowers mixture).

Chicago – Her eyes are always looking forward, as if they possess the ability to peer into the parallel dimension next door. She feels most alive in the presence of nature, and feels great joy in recreating images of god’s creation. Her closest acquaintances seem to be of an otherworldly essence, and she acknowledges them every time her twinkly gaze is directed toward the sky.

There’s a great mystery about what goes on in the mind of Séraphine Louis, a middle-aged cleaning lady who harbors a primal compulsion to create art. She takes raw material from her natural surroundings (such as blood and clay), combines them with paint, and produces images of striking power. There’s an intensity about her imagery that frightens her, as mundane objects like fruit and flowers take on an unsettling life of their own. Her work would eventually be categorized as “naïve” because of its simplicity,...

Paranormal Activity (15)

(Oren Peli, 2007, Us) Katie Featherston, Micah Sloat, Mark Fredrichs. 86 mins

This movie's paranormal box-office activity in the Us has raised expectations sky high, but it sets out to do one thing – scare the pants off you – and does that horribly well. Tapping into our primal fear of things going bump in the night, especially while we're asleep, it gives you the shivers with little more than a grainy fixed-camera shot of a bedroom, as a regular guy tries to get to the bottom of his girlfriend's alleged haunting by trying to video their nocturnal disturbances. There's a certain amount of audience investment required. If you go in determined not to be scared, you probably won't be, but if that's the case, why buy a ticket in the first place?

Law Abiding Citizen (18)

(F Gary Gray, 2009, Us) Gerard Butler, Jamie Foxx, Colm Meaney. 109 mins

A revenge thriller that tries so hard to be clever,...

Release Date: June 12

Director: Martin Provost

Writers: Marc Abdelnour and Martin Provost

Cinematographer: Laurent Brunet

Starring: Yolande Moreau, Ulrich Tukur, Anne Bennent, Geneviève Mnich

Studio/Run Time: Music Box Films, 125 mins.

An untrained painter discovered in rural France

Stories about lowly domestic workers who turn out to have secret artistic abilities or who bear an unrecognized burden for the community often rub me the wrong way. It’s inherently joyful to watch a person blossom before skeptical eyes, but something about the attitude of a film that assumes the worst about its characters—both the servant and the people who ignore her until the truth is revealed—feels condescending. The difference between a real examination of inequality and a flattering tug at the heartstrings is often found at a story’s edges, brought out through subtlety and finesse. On the one side is Babette’s Feast (1987), charming and heartwarming for unclear reasons,...