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South Korean writer Han Kang, whose international breakthrough novel The Vegetarian was made into a film, has won the Nobel Prize in Literature 2024.

The Swedish Academy unveiled the honoree Thursday, lauding “her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life.”

Han’s 2007 novel The Vegetarian, her first novel to be translated into English, won the International Booker Prize in 2015. The story of Yeong-hye, a part-time graphic artist and homemaker, whose decision to stop eating meat leads to mental health struggles and problems in her familial life, was adapted as a feature film by Woo-Seong Lim and screened at Sundance in 2010.

The honor is one of the five Nobel Prizes established by the will of Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, in 1895. The others are prizes in chemistry, physics and medicine, as well as the Nobel Peace Prize.

Han Kang is the first South Korean to win the literature Nobel.

Last week, a surprising cluster of 1950s European cars occupied some prime parking spots on Lexington Avenue and 75th Street in New York City. A low-slung and curvaceous Jaguar XK120 and a cherry red Allard K2, both six-figure specimens, were separated by a periwinkle Citroen H-Type work van. Across the avenue, these outliers were echoed by a trio of Citroen Traction Avant sedans. Beyond these cars was the venerable French bistro Orsay, its mahogany-stained front capped by a cloth awning featuring Parisian Metro-esque Art Nouveau lettering. Between the curb and façade, a familiar sidewalk scuttle defined the scene as an NYC film shoot. Craft services tables were piled with soda cans and snack bags, PAs with clipboards attempted to reroute recalcitrant pedestrians, techs held aloft parachute-sized plane reflectors to capture the light.

Here, Josh Safdie — one half of the acclaimed New York sibling duo responsible for the tense Adam Sandler...

A monument of independent filmmaking is coming to a cinema near you. Brady Corbet’s 3.5-hour-long, seven-years-in-the-making historical epic The Brutalist finally secured a U.S. distribution deal over the weekend. The movie, which won Corbet the Venice Film Festival’s best director prize Saturday, will be released by indie tastemaker A24 sometime later this year with a major awards season campaign expected to follow.

The buzz around The Brutalist has been building into a roar ever since its first press screening in Italy a little over a week ago. First came the curious talk surrounding the 10-minute intermission that bisects the movie — a commercially challenging choice that nonetheless feels integral to its construction. Then there were excited comparisons to Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood, or favorable references to the works of László Nemes and Jonathan Glazer. Awards season pundits, meanwhile, have already projected the film’s star,...

Dr. Friedrich Ritter (Jude Law) is loathe to repeat anyone else, so when his writer’s block finds him spitting out quotes from bigger, better, far more well-known philosophers, he knows things are going badly. Things have, in fact, been going badly for a very long time, as is prone to happen when someone moves to an uninhabited island and attempts to carve out a new world order. Still, had Friedrich — a very real person — been a bit more comfortable with the idea of repeating someone else, he likely would have found plenty of comfort in Jean-Paul Sartre’s perpetually prescient observation that “Hell is other people.”

Such is the thrust of Ron Howard’s darkly funny “Eden,” a fact-based story that follows what happened after Friedrich and his partner Dora Strauch (Vanessa Kirby) moved to a Galapagos Island after the end of World War I (and the start of...

A spasmodic love triangle spanning centuries or maybe even a polyamorous tryst acknowledged in silence. How does it feel, as fans of this daringly intense show, to be the only few who’d ever understand what I’ve just said, and how something like that could exist? It’s an odd privilege for us—not for Daniel, mind you—to hear this unreliable tale from the mouths of poetic undead orators. In Interview With the Vampire episode 3, the story has reached the point where Armand’s efforts to make himself appear benign are evident. And I hope Daniel’s paying attention.

Spoiler Alert

How did Armand and Lestat meet?

So, I guess everyone everywhere, at some point in their life, has been in love with Lestat de Lioncourt? From what Armand describes of his 15th-century existence, it seems the real gift of vampirism had eluded him before Lestat walked into Paris.

The cinematic legend died the way he lived – in a blaze of inscrutable, impossible film-making. We meet the team who helped shoot the final scene of his swansong just before his death by assisted suicide

On Friday 9 September 2022, Jean-Luc Godard had one last wish. He needed a quote from Jean-Paul Sartre to complete his film, Scénarios, but the book was missing from the shelf in his Swiss home. Time was pressing: he was up against a hard deadline. The film’s final scene was to be shot on Monday. On Tuesday, the director would die by assisted suicide.

Fabrice Aragno takes up the story. As Godard’s longtime collaborator, Aragno was his eyes and his ears, his trusted technical advisor. Surely he would be able to find the book from somewhere. “So on Friday 5.30pm, I drive very fast to Lausanne, 20 miles away,” he recalls. “I park the car and I’m sweating.

A year ago, the Cannes Film Festival presented the world premiere of what was widely taken to be Jean-Luc Godard’s final film. He had died by assisted suicide eight months before, and the 20-minute-long “Trailer of the Film That Will Never Exist: ‘Phony Wars'” felt, by nature, like the aestheticized version of a last will and testament. It was a collage film, and it was (surprise!) oblique, yet it offered tea leaves to read about Godard’s state of mind as he prepared to leave the world.

As it turns out, “Trailer of the Film…” was not Godard’s final work. The 18-minute-long “Scénarios,” also made in a collage style, but simpler and more direct, was unveiled today at Cannes, along with a 34-minute documentary about the making of the short. “Scénarios” has the feel of a minor but purefied late-period work, like a Matisse paper cutout. What’s...

Among the most-anticipated films premiering at this year’s Cannes Film Festival is the final posthumous work from Jean-Luc Godard, who left this world back in September 2022. Last year, the Cannes Film Festival held the premiere of his short Trailer of the Film That Will Never Exist: ‘Phony Wars,’ and this year the festival will screen the final work from Godard and today brings the first trailer.

Scénarios, running 18 minutes, has the following synopsis: “In French, ‘scénario’ is cinema’s name for how it tells stories. This is the title Jean-Luc Godard chose for his final film, which was literally completed the day before his self-death. This did not mean that it would remain unfinished, but that its very unfinishedness would make it complete. Yet Scénario, which then became Scénarios is twofold: DNA, fundamental elements, and Mri, Odyssey. DNA is a biological signature, which gives a human subject its uniqueness...

It’s now been over 600 days since the world’s most forward-thinking filmmaker, Jean-Luc Godard, left this world, but the icon of the French New Wave and beyond graciously left us with a few works. Last year, the Cannes Film Festival held the premiere of his short Trailer of the Film That Will Never Exist: ‘Phony Wars,’ and this year the festival will screen two final films from Godard and today brings the first images.

First up, running 18 minutes, is Scénarios, for which we have now have an expanded synopsis: “In French, ‘scénario’ is cinema’s name for how it tells stories. This is the title Jean-Luc Godard chose for his final film, which was literally completed the day before his self-death. This did not mean that it would remain unfinished, but that its very unfinishedness would make it complete. Yet Scénario, which then became Scénarios is twofold: DNA, fundamental elements,...

Unless you've been living under a rock recently, you're aware that movie theaters have been in a tough spot for nearly half a decade now, if not longer. Various factors have contributed to this, of course -- everything from the Covid-19 pandemic to the economy itself contributing to higher prices for a night out at the movies (especially for a family). Yet perhaps the biggest point of contention for those not fully inducted into the church of moviegoing is that old chestnut coined by Jean-Paul Sartre: Hell is other people.

Due to being at the tail end of several decades' worth of manufacturers and big box stores pushing home theater technology, the average living room theater setup tends to rival most generic movie theater screens in terms of picture and sound quality, with the convenience of the setup already being in one's home, away from loud talking randos and teens on their bright smartphones,...

Exclusive: Ruaridh Mollica says he had a year to prepare for his “role of a lifetime — so far” in Finnish filmmaker Mikko Makela’s powerful new film Sebastian, which premieres at Sundance on Sunday.

The film follows a culture journalist who goes undercover and leads a double life as a sex worker to research a debut novel. The 24-year-old Mollica, born to a Scottish mother and an Italian father, gives a superlative performance in his first feature film lead role, as he assumes the split personalities of Max, a young wannabe literary sensation, and Sebastian, who hires himself out to desirous older male clients.

The intimate moments, though at times full-on, actually serve the narrative to reflect Max/Sebastian’s state of mind.

Between his initial self-tape, first audition and screen tests, Mollica had 12 months to enter into full character research mode before officially being handed the part, and the...

One of the best reasons to watch "The Twilight Zone" even 60 years later is that you get to see just how much each episode had an effect on pop culture. Half the episodes will make you go, "Oh, so that's what that 'Simpsons' Treehouse of Horror sketch was making fun of," or "Oh, so that's where that 'Black Mirror' episode got that idea from." Although not all of these episodes were original themselves, they still brought the source material they were based on to a national audience. Not only did the show start off with a large viewership, but constant re-runs have helped the series stay relevant for years afterward. The result is that this show constantly turns out to be a source of inspiration for so many of the best speculative TV shows and movies we have today.

Case in point: "The Good Place." The...

Cédric Kahn on The Goldman Case: 'I see the audience as being a kind of jury. I want them to ask where the truth lies. That was the most important thing for me' Photo: Moonshaker Cédric Kahn, who’s also an actor, is back in Cannes with The Goldman Case 22 years after Roberto Succo (the true story of an Italian serial killer) was presented in Competition. This time he is dealing with a complex judicial case revolving around Pierre Goldman, a far left militant, who became a cause celebre in the Seventies.

During his first trial he was sentenced to life in prison for four armed robberies during which two chemists died. He protested his innocence regarding the deaths claiming he was with a friend at the time.

Goldman, recalls Kahn, became an icon for the intellectual left with the prospect at the time, in 1975, of the death penalty if proved guilty.

Elsa Zylberstein (“Simone: Woman of the Century”) will star as the French feminist writer Simone de Beauvoir in a feature film that will be penned by Oscar-winning writer Christopher Hampton and directed by Anne Fontaine.

Zylberstein’s Sonia Films will produce the film with Philippe Carcassone’s banner Cine@ and Master Movie, the production vehicle of Marco and Lola Pacchioni.

Rather than a biopic, the movie will revolve around the passionate transatlantic romance between de Beauvoir and Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Nelson Algren.

Zylberstein has scooped the adaptation rights of de Beauvoir’s “Lettres à Nelson Algren” from Gallimard. Through those letters, the film will chart the pair’s affair, which spanned nearly two decades from 1947, in the aftermath of World War II, to 1964. Two-thirds of the movie will take place in Chicago, and the reminder will unfold in Paris.

Zylberstein said Hampton has penned a treatment and is expected to...

Oscar-winning writer Christopher Hampton is in talks to write a screenplay with French director Anne Fontaine about iconic feminist writer Simone de Beauvoir and Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Nelson Algren’s transatlantic affair.

The playwright and screenwriter, who has won Oscars for The Father (2021) and Dangerous Liaisons (1989) and was also nominated for Atonement (2008), revealed he was in the early stages of the project during a masterclass at the Doha Film Institute’s Qumra event on Monday.

“We had an initial discussion followed by a more detailed discussion a week ago. I really want to do it,” he told Deadline in an interview after the talk.

De Beauvoir and Algren met in Chicago in 1947 and immediately embarked on a passionate affair that endured for more than 20 years in spite of the complications of transatlantic travel and communication at the time.

Paris-based intellectual de Beauvoir was in the midst of completing her seminal...

No doubt there was some rivalry between Zauq and Ghalib, as is between leading practitioners of any craft, but it did not lend itself to such snide behaviour from him as in the serial. His depiction in the film "Mirza Ghalib" is more balanced, where he does not lose his equanimity as audience beating him to complete some of his best known shers, and then, goes on to introduce Ghalib when the latter’s turn comes.

Sheikh Mohammad Ibrahim ‘Zauq’ (1789/90-1854) hailed from modest circumstances, being the son of a mere soldier in what was left of the once-glorious Mughal Army. His elementary education was at the house of a nearby cleric, who also wrote poetry and was consulted by aspiring poets. Their discussions made an impression on young ‘Zauq’.

"As I used to hear them, many verses stuck in my memory. My heart received a sort of spiritual pleasure...

For the past five years in a row, the BAFTA Awards have correctly predicted the Oscar winner for Best Adapted Screenplay, recognizing “Call Me by Your Name,” “BlacKkKlansman,” “Jojo Rabbit,” “The Father” and “Coda.” But that winning streak may have already hit a snag in 2023, as the frontrunner for the Oscar — Sarah Polley’s “Women Talking” — didn’t even earn a nomination on the other side of the Atlantic. In fact, only two of the five Oscar nominees overlap with the BAFTA lineup: “All Quiet on the Western Front” and “Living.” Even though the former is tied as the most nominated film in the British academy’s history with 14 citations, could “Living” and its Nobel laureate screenwriter Kazuo Ishiguro ultimately prevail?

Our collective users certainly think so, although it looks to be a tight race between the two contenders. According to our combined odds, “Living” holds the lead over “All Quiet” by fewer than 200 predictors.

Leonis Productions, the Newen Studios-owned French banner created by Jean-Benoit Gillig, is developing a raft of international shows on the heels of “Liaison,” Apple TV+’s first French original.

The company reached a milestone with “Liaison,” a thriller series created and entirely penned by Virginie Brac (“Spiral”) and directed by Stephen Hopkins. Vincent Cassel and Eva Green lead a cast that includes Peter Mullan, Gérard Lanvin, Daniel Francis, Stanislas Merhar, Irène Jacob, Laëtitia Eïdo, Eriq Ebouaney, Tchéky Karyo, Bukky Bakray and Thierry Fremont.

“It’s a sprawling French-British thriller set against the backdrop of Brexit, and there’s a metaphor between the love tragedy playing as the primary plot and the political tragedy embodied by Brexit unfolding in the background,” said Gillig.

“The starting point of this series was our wish to create a series using Brexit as a canvas, and from there Virginie Brac was able to conceive a...

Mali Elfman’s curious debut feature starts out as a high-concept dystopian sci-fi discussing what lies beyond, but ends up in familiar romantic territory

In Jean-Paul Sartre’s No Exit, three dead strangers find themselves locked in a room for eternity, famously giving us that line about hell being other people. Riffing on the idea, Mali Elfman’s debut feature follows two strangers trapped in a car, alive but with death not far off on the horizon.

Elfman’s film kicks off with an intriguing premise: science has conclusively proven the existence of an afterlife; death is not the end. The brilliant scientist-entrepreneur behind the discovery is Dr Stevenson, played by Karen Gillan channelling Elizabeth Holmes energy, with a surprisingly deep voice and a slash of bright red lipstick. Disappointingly we only see her in a handful of clips: a few slick media appearances and recorded messages for her institute,...

The 38th Santa Barbara International Film Festival, which will take place from Feb. 8 through Feb. 18, has already announced an impressive lineup of screenings and a star-studded roster of actors and actresses who will attend career-retrospective tributes at the fest, including Cate Blanchett (whose evening I will be moderating on Feb. 10), Brendan Fraser, Angela Bassett, Jamie Lee Curtis, Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson.

On Monday, the fest revealed that a vast majority of this year’s Oscar-nominated directors, writers and producers will also be in attendance to participate on special panels.

At the Arlington Theatre on the evening of Feb. 17, three of the five best director nominees — Tár’s Todd Field, Everything Everywhere All at Once’s Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert and The Banshees of Inisherin’s Martin McDonagh — will be on hand to collect the fest’s Outstanding Directors of the Year Award following separate and group conversations, which...

Mylene Demongeot, whose career spanned 70 years of French and British cinema appearances, died today at age 87 in a Paris hospital. No cause of death has been reported.

Demongeot was best known for comedies in France, including two trilogies that appeared a half-century apart, the Fantomas films in the 1960s and Camping in recent years.

Related Story Hollywood & Media Deaths In 2022: Photo Gallery Related Story Body Dumped In The Bronx Identified As 'Green Book' Actor Frank Vallelonga Jr. Related Story David Robinson Dies: Dog The Bounty Hunter Team Member Was 50

She was also known for her role as Milady de Winter in the 1961 version of The Three Musketeers and her appearance alongside David Niven in Otto Preminger’s Bonjour Tristesse in 1958.

One career highlight was being nominated for a BAFTA for best newcomer for her part in 1957’s The Crucible, adapted by Jean-Paul Sartre from the Arthur Miller play.

It took a long, long time for Richard Branson to achieve his goal of blasting off into space, but it finally occurred last year after more than a billion dollars invested through his company Virgin Galactic.

“Nothing could prepare you for the view of Earth from space,” he said upon landing. But in a new interview with Deadline, he says the experience did not imbue him that a transcendent “overview effect,” the sense of awe about our place in universe or the perspective of a planet without natural political boundaries, unlike what other astronauts have reported feeling.

“I don’t think there was like a lightning bolt moment in the space flight,” he tells Deadline. “It was extraordinary. It was everything I’d dreamt it would be… But I’ll let you know when I get the thunderbolt.”

The adventurer, entrepreneur and founder of the Virgin group of companies is...

A veteran of several short and documentary subjects, Anshul Tiwari’s narrative feature “Before Life After Death” has its world premiere in the Panorama strand of the Singapore International Film Festival.

In the film, a rebellious female student and a reticent middle-aged gynecologist, both of Indian origin, strike up an unlikely bond as they each confront a life-altering incident.

“Being a documentary filmmaker in the region gave me unique insight and access into Singapore’s civil society. The writer, Debasmita Dasgupta, created a narrative around the disparity between working and upper-class Singaporeans of Indian origin. She and I spoke a lot about sisterhood and how sometimes a woman’s best friend is another woman despite [her] being a stranger,” Tiwari told Variety. “People often talk about the fault lines where Singapore’s diversity has clear-cut boundaries despite sharing the same space. But we have seen a different side to Singapore where intercultural commingling is so natural,...

(from left) Rahul Kohli and Katie Parker star in Mali Elfman’s Next Exit. Photo: Magnolia Human mortality, and the collective knowledge of our limited time on Earth, informs storytelling (and certainly life) on almost every level. But if an afterlife was scientifically confirmed—even if not in very specific...

One of the great ironies of human existence is that death, the very thing we spend our lives trying to avoid, is the source of much of life’s meaning. That’s one of the points that Jean-Paul Sartre makes in “No Exit,” his landmark play that follows three deceased humans whose eternal punishment consists of being locked in a room and forced to make conversation forever. Our most precious moments are precious because they eventually expire — do anything for long enough and it ultimately becomes drudgery.

As you might expect from its title, “Next Exit” constantly riffs on Sartre’s dramatic existentialism and shares his interest in what happens when humans are confined together. Mali Elfman’s directorial debut is set in a world where scientists have definitively proven that ghosts are real, with indisputable video evidence showing that we can return to haunt the people we love (and hate) after we die.

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French author Annie Ernaux, whose autobiography Happening was adapted for the screen by director Audrey Diwan as the abortion drama under the same name that earned the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival 2021, has won the Nobel Prize in Literature.

The Swedish Academy unveiled the honoree Thursday, lauding her for “the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots and collective restraints of personal memory.” Her other books include The Years and Getting Lost.

Ernaux “was born in 1940 and grew up in the small town of Yvetot in Normandy, where her parents had a combined grocery store and café,” the Swedish Academy noted. “Her path to authorship was long and arduous.”

The honor is one of the five Nobel Prizes established by the will of Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, in 1895. The others are prizes in chemistry, physics and medicine,...

Shinjuku Ryozanpaku Theatre Company is a Tokyo-based ensemble renowned throughout Japan and internationally for its tent-theatre performances, large-scale, elaborate mise-en-scene, acute comedy and unique stylistic brush-strokes. The company was established in 1987 and is led by charismatic director and actor, Kim Su-jin. Their latest work is based on the homonymous play by Jean-Paul Sartre, and despite the fact that the cast is composed of Japanese actors plus Sahel Rosa who is of Iranian descent, takes place in the South of the United States during the 40s.

“The Respectful Prostitute” is screening at InlanDimensions

The play begins with the intrusion of a “foreigner” in Lizzie’s house, who is soon revealed to have been part of an incident involving two of them saving her from the harassment of four “locals”, with one of the four, Thomas, killing the other “foreigner”, and eventually being arrested. The other three, however, start spreading rumors that...

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“FX’s Atlanta is like a box of chocolates,” he wrote, considering the whitest imaginable lede for a review of FX’s Atlanta. “You never know what you’re gonna get.”

Going back to the self-named show from the grossly misbehaving comedian we don’t discuss anymore, the most intriguing part of the FX comedy brand has been half-hour shows with no discernible format and no singular tone. Your average episode of Pamela Adlon’s Better Things could sometimes be three serious vignettes or one cohesive and silly story, could focus on Adlon’s Sam or any of her daughters, could make you laugh or make you cry. Reservation Dogs is currently in the middle of a flawless second season of episodes that have ranged from rollicking road-trip installments to single-set meditations on grief.

None of these FX half-hours have exploited the possibilities...

Jean-Luc Godard, the father of modern cinema whose impish, combative provocations threw down a gauntlet with which all those who came in his wake must contend, died Tuesday. He was 91.

The director died at his home by assisted suicide in Rolle, Switzerland, where that practice is legal, Godard’s longtime legal adviser Patrick Jeanneret told The New York Times.

Jeanneret added that the filmmaker had “multiple disabling pathologies” and “decided with a great lucidity, as he had all his life, to say, ‘Now, it’s enough.’ “

In a career that began with 1960’s groundbreaking Breathless,...

A housekeeper waltzing into Christian Dior and choosing a couture gown may sound like the height of fantasy, but the biggest stretch in Anthony Fabian’s “Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris” may be all the nice French people she meets along the way. Starring the inimitable Lesley Manville, in a role that effectively transitions the frequent Mike Leigh collaborator into the Helen Mirren phase of her career, “Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris” is a charming confection of a middle-aged, middle-class fantasy.

Imbuing the lavish period delights of “Mrs. Maisel” with a lively post-menopausal heroine “Hacks” made trendy, “Mrs. Harris”

The movie begins in 1957 London, where Mrs. Ada Harris (Manville) has finally received word, after years of holding out hope, that her dear Eddie was killed in action some dozen years prior. As she goes about her usual routine, cleaning the flats of the entitled rich who regard her as nothing more than reliably good-natured help,...

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With the release of Emily in Paris: The Official Cookbook, fans of the Netflix hit show can fully immerse their tastebuds in French city living.

Set to be released Aug. 16, the 224-page cookbook (33) lets Francophiles and Emily in Paris fans experience the glamorous lifestyle of Emily Cooper (played by Lily Collins) from the comfort of their very own kitchen with a variety of classic and unique recipes inspired by the show.

Taste your way through a day in Emily’s life in the City of Lights with items like Gabriel’s Omelette and Pierre’s Cracked Crème Brûlées. Fans will also find French staples like ratatouille and pain au chocolat, along with American favorites such as Quiche au Ciment (also known as Chicago deep-dish pizza) and bacon cheeseburgers.

In addition to 75 Emily in Paris-inspired recipes, the hardcover book will feature stills from the show,...

Vladimir and Rosa.“Cinema contains everything. It joins writing, painting, music. It is the most complete art.”—Juliet Berto, Ciné-Bulles, 19861Juliet Berto burst onto the Parisian film scene in the rich late 60s period of experimentation and radicalization, just as the New Wave diverged into competing streams of political and humanist directors. Her biography (what scant details are publicly available) is mythical, and tragically short: Annie Jamet, born and living in southern France, attends a Grenoble film screening where Jean-Luc Godard is present; the director, captivated by 19-year-old Annie, offers her a role in his film 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her. Annie moved to Paris, and by the end 1967, Juliet Berto (as she is credited onscreen) had appeared in three Godard films, a relationship that would deepen over the course of the radical 60s. Berto then worked with Jacques Rivette during the 70s as a key collaborator and...

Turning on the waterworks and ripping open her blouse to cap a performance of Jean-Paul Sartre’s “The Respectful Prostitute,” aspiring actress Stella (Nadia Tereszkiewicz) concludes her audition for France’s most prestigious theatre school with a question from the jury. As he puffs a cigarette and speaks the first lines of dialogue written expressly for this film, an inscrutable juror looks to the ingénue and asks, “Do you think an actress needs to be an exhibitionist?”

In that opening, we find the fulcrum for Valeria Bruni Tedeschi’s “Forever Young.” Asking the same question to the audience and to herself — with the Stella character a clear analogue for the director — Bruni Tedeschi dances around a definitive answer, turning out an autobiographical portrait that somehow leaves you knowing less about the subject at hand, and a study of actors, warts and all, that offers little insight into the artistic process.

Michel Bouquet, an icon of French cinema and theater who had appeared in over 100 films throughout his career and worked with some of France’s great auteurs, has died. He was 96.

The Élysée Palace, the office of the French president, announced Bouquet’s death in a statement Wednesday but gave no other details about his passing.

“For seven decades, Michel Bouquet brought theater and cinema to the highest degree of incandescence and truth, showing man in all his contradictions, with an intensity that burned the boards and burst the screen. A sacred monster has left us,” French president Emmanuel Macron said in a tweet Wednesday.

In 1991, Bouquet won the European Film Award for Best Actor his film “Toto the Hero.” He also won two César Awards for “How I Killed My Father” (2001) and “The Last Mitterrand” (2005). His career on stage dates all the way back to the 1940s, and he...

La Lupe never seemed to second-guess herself onstage. The Afro-Cuban singer — who died 30 years ago this week, on Feb. 29, 1992 — was infinitely watchable, unafraid to kick and howl and twitch, as if the music were sending electric jolts throughout her body. In Cuba, where she headlined nightclubs in the early 1960s, she enthralled novelists like Ernest Hemingway and Guillermo Cabrera, both of whom wrote about the rhapsodic fury that seemed to overtake her when she sang. Her first husband Eulogio Reyes once said that the first time he saw her perform,...

A mountain rest stop in a blizzard. A group of five strangers. A girl tied up in a van. It's a tantalizing premise for "No Exit," the chilly thriller directed by Damien Power, but then again, a premise can only take a movie so far.

Based on the 2017 novel of the same name by Taylor Adams, "No Exit" may immediately call to mind the Jean-Paul Sartre 1994 philosophical play with which it shares a name thanks to the very basic concept of a bunch of strangers being driven to the brink after being trapped together (which I don't think author Taylor Adams even meant...

The post No Exit Review: A Taut Little Thriller That Overplays Its Hand appeared first on /Film.

As the first film from the director of “Amélie” in nearly a decade, “Bigbug” is kind of a big deal. Sadly, it’s also a big disappointment — easily the most obnoxious Netflix original in some time, owing to the company’s trust in a director whose overactive imagination demands some kind of boundaries.

At precisely the moment pandemic-confined audiences want to get out and breathe fresh air, Jean-Pierre Jeunet gives them a suffocating scenario in which a squabbling French family is trapped in their retro-modern home with several android assistants. The result is an aggressively unfunny look at human-robot relations in a garish, cartoonishly rendered future — one in which all the houses look exactly the same on the outside, but are maintained by eccentric AI indoors (where the film spends 98% of its time).

In “No Exit,” Jean-Paul Sartre surmised that “hell is other people.” In this zany sci-fi riff on that idea,...

A warning, to be issued immediately and upfront: You might not want to see The Humans directly before or after a holiday dinner. Should potential viewers still be suffering from Ptsd regarding their Turkey Day get-together, or spend the bulk of their weekly therapy sessions dreading the thought of a Christmas spent in the company of relatives, this movie will be triggering. The filmmakers can not be held liable for any uncontrollable shaking, faintness of breath, numbness in extremities, loss of consciousness and/or bracing moments of clarity and recognition...

“What if the mob, but funny?” is the question asked by “Love Songs for Tough Guys,” and if your answer is “Isn’t that just ‘Analyze This?’” you aren’t alone. Still, this French spin on the thug-with-a-heart-of-gold story distinguishes itself somewhat with a romantic bent that is, at least in fits and starts, genuinely romantic. The rest of the time, co-writer-director Samuel Benchetrit’s lighthearted romp struggles to find a place for itself.

Leading the eponymous group of heavies is Jeff de Claerke (François Damiens), whose low-level thuggery leaves him just enough time to take a poetry class so he can woo a local checkout girl. His wife (Valeria Bruni Tedeschi) isn’t aware of his would-be affair, leading her to believe the poorly written ode she finds discarded in the trash one day is actually for her. His crew isn’t the most intimidating — one is always quoting books on inner peace,...

John Huston plays every narrative card in the deck for the difficult task of expressing the great doctor’s insights into psychoanalysis. His actors personalize the concepts of neurosis, etc., investing us in Sigmund’s search for answers in long-ago Vienna. The fascination has multiple levels: in investigating the nature of ‘hysteria’ Dr. Sigmund Freud finds that he shares to a degree the same mental aberrations, as does his mentor. Actor Montgomery Clift was fighting numerous personal demons at the time, and Huston’s directing methods were described by some as cruel. Superb production values and Jerry Goldsmith’s music score enhance the experience. The scan on view is Huston’s director’s cut, not Universal’s shorter original release version.

Freud

Blu-ray

Kl Studio Classics

1962 / B&w / 2:35 widescreen / 141 min. / Street Date November 20, 2021 / Freud: The Secret Passion / available through Kino Lorber / 24.95

Starring: Montgomery Clift, Susannah York, Larry Parks, Susan Kohner,...

Jean-Paul Belmondo, the French cinema star best known for his performance in Jean-Luc Godard’s “Breathless” in 1959, has died, his lawyer confirmed to the news agency Afp on Monday. He was 88.

A cause of death has not been made public.

Belmondo skyrocketed to international fame after appearing in Godard’s 1959 New Wave French classic “Breathless,” and became one of the country’s biggest stars throughout the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s.

Born in the Paris suburb of Neuilly-sur-Seine, the young Belmondo started out as an amateur boxer and, in fact, had an undefeated record. But after spending years pursuing a career as a fighter, he later recalled, “I stopped when the face I saw in the mirror began to change.”

His spent his later teen years at a private drama school and started to perform comedy sketches in the French provinces. After studying for three years at the Conservatoire of Dramatic Arts,...

Matt Dillon (“The House That Jack Built”) and Charlotte Gainsbourg are attached to star in Fred Garson’s “An Ocean Apart,” a period drama about the romantic affair between French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir and American writer Nelson Algren.

The film is being developed by French producer Olivier Delbosc at Curiosa Films, which is presenting Xavier Giannoli’s Venice competition player “Lost Illusions” and Yvan Attal’s “Les choses humaines,” and Matthew Gledhill at Wheelhouse Prods. Dillon is at Venice with “Land of Dreams,” screening in the Horizons section, and Gainsbourg stars in “Les choses humaines,” unspooling out of competition.

Set during the late 1940s in Paris and Chicago, “An Ocean Apart” was written by Ron Riley in collaboration with Garson and Claire Barré. The film charts the fiery yet mostly letter-based relationship between Beauvoir and Algren that spanned from 1947 to 1964. Algren, who was Jewish, is best known for the...

Ulrike Ottinger’s recollections of life as a budding artist in 1960s Paris challenge the city’s image as a creative utopia

Mostly comprising of a voiceover and archival footage, German auteur Ulrike Ottinger’s new film feels like a stylistic shift from the avant-garde, carnivalesque works of queer radicalism for which she is best known. Underneath the unhurried pace and the exhaustive account of Ottinger’s experience of 1960s Paris as a budding artist, there is a politically conscious playfulness that displays her ability to interweave different art forms and storytelling styles.

True to its title, the film rolls like a calligram, a text format where words are arranged to form a thematically relevant image. Ottinger’s recollections of past encounters with intellectual and artistic luminaries coalesce into a portrait of Paris, as well as herself. Calligrammes is the name of a bookstore owned by Fritz Picard that became...

Watch the Trailer for No Man Of God: "In 1980, Ted Bundy was sentenced to death by electrocution. In the years that followed, he agreed to disclose the details of his crimes, but only to one man. No Man Of God is based on the true story of the strange and complicated relationship that developed between FBI agent Bill Hagmaier and an incarcerated Ted Bundy in the years leading to Bundy's execution."

Starring:

Elijah Wood, Luke Kirby, Aleksa Palladino, Robert Patrick

Directed by:

Amber Sealey

Written by:

Kit Lesser

In Theaters, On Demand and Digital - August 27, 2021

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Stabby Saturdays on Shudder: "On July 10th and July 17th, author Grady Hendrix is celebrating slasher cinema in honor of the launch of his new novel, "The Final Girl Support Group." The two-week event, called Stabby Saturdays, sees the novelist team up with collaborator Ted Geoghegan to screen slasher double features...

Claude Lanzmann: Spectres of the Shoah director Adam Benzine: “It’s really a film about how Shoah was the making of Claude Lanzmann.” Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze

When Claude Lanzmann passed away in Paris on the morning of July 5, 2018, Arnaud Desplechin and Antonin Baudry sent tributes in honour of the man who directed the documentaries Shoah, The Last Of The Unjust, Napalm, Israel, Why, and Shoah: Four Sisters (Les Quatre Soeurs). Adam Benzine’s revealing Oscar-nominated Claude Lanzmann: Spectres of the Shoah shows us the man who was behind the making of one of the most important films in the history of cinema.

Adam Benzine with Anne-Katrin Titze on Claude Lanzmann: “He fought in the resistance as a teenager, he was a lover of Simone de Beauvoir, he was in Algeria with Sartre and Nelson Algren.”

After Adam interviewed Albert Maysles, Robert Drew, Michael Apted, D A Pennebaker for a book on documentarians,...

The biggest challenge of discussing Mike Cahill’s “Bliss” lies in describing its premise without making it sound considerably wilder and more interesting than it actually is. In short, the film stars Owen Wilson as a sad-sack office drone who, after accidentally killing his boss, is rescued by an intense, shamanistic homeless woman played by Salma Hayek, who not only informs him that they are soulmates, but also that they are among the few flesh-and-blood humans inhabiting a complex computer simulation, and by imbibing the right combinations of colorful crystals they can bend the laws of physics, and also travel to a paradisiacal alternate reality where their days consist of lounging on yachts and hobnobbing at parties with Bill Nye and a holographic Slavoj Žižek. See? Sounds intriguing enough, doesn’t it?

Now imagine a strangely dull, lead-footed treatment of that premise, and you’ve got some idea of what...

Written and directed by Ko Myoung-sung, “The 12th Suspect” takes us in a freshly divided Korea. The whodunnit noir is used to look into the concept of nationhood,and patriotism.

“The 12th Suspect” is screening at Florence Korean Film Festival 2020

Seoul, Fall 1953. As the city is mourning the country’s brutal and imposed separation, artists hang out at the ‘Oriental Teahouse’. The bar belongs to gruff Noh Suk-hyun (played by Heo Sung-tae). His wife, Jang Sun-hwa (played by Park Sun-young) serves the clients. The said clients are all ‘intellectual artists’. Oriental Teahouse is pretty much the Korean cousin of French Café de Flore. One of the post-war intellectuals/bar regular, Baek Doo-hwan (Nam Sung-jin), has been murdered. Kim Ki-chae (Kim Sang-kyung) investigates. Tensions come to light and secrets are revealed.

The feature manages to deliver a coherent murder story- not easy when so many characters are introduced- and actually goes beyond the investigation.

From the heyday of Television Without Pity to niche podcasts that cover every small screen angle you can think of, TV show deep dives have always thrived online, and popular platforms like YouTube and Vimeo provide opportunities for talented creators to add a visual angle that can often make a well-edited analysis of your favorite series even more compelling.

YouTube is positively teeming with potential rabbit holes for TV obsessives to fall down. Sometimes at 3 a.m. Sometimes after a few beers. Sometimes when you should be working (couldn’t be us) but whether you’re drawn in by a near-obligatory shocked reaction thumbnail or you accidentally stumble across an interesting take on something you’re passionate about, there’s usually a rabbit hole waiting that feels like it could have been made just for you.

With any luck, falling down one of those rabbit holes ends with you landing...

This The 100 review contains spoilers

The 100 Season 7 Episode 2

“The Garden” flits back and forth through time to introduce us to the world beyond the Anomaly, and by extension, to properly reintroduce us to Hope and the Anomaly itself, now known as the bridge. Quite literally a world apart, it’s a magical hour of television that stands as one of the series’ best episodes.

Drawing on the longstanding, well-earned redemption arcs of Diyoza and Octavia and their extremely close bond, this episode asks the question “what makes a family?” and “what kind of life would be enough?” Like The Magicians’ highly celebrated “A Life in the Day” before it, the time dilation on Sky Ring allows Diyoza and Octavia to spend a decade raising a child together without losing more than a few days back in Sanctum. So much of the wonder of this episode belongs, truly, to Marie Avgeropoulos and Ivana Miličević,...

“Cyrano de Bergerac” sure gets around. Ever since Edmond Rostand’s play about the 17th-century French dramatist became boffo box office in 1897, the story has been adapted countless times in countless ways. Ayn Rand used it as inspiration for the 1945 movie “Love Letters,” which was set in World War II; “Electric Dreams” gave it a 1984 sci-fi spin; Steve Martin’s “Roxanne” transplanted it to a Washington firehouse; “Futurama” and “Bob’s Burgers” both used it as inspiration for animated TV episodes; and Netflix borrowed from the story for “Sierra Burgess Is a Loser,” a teen comedy that aired in September 2018.

Those projects only scratch the surface of Cyrano spinoffs, and there’s still life in the old guy. In fact, Netflix is back on the Bergerac beat with Alice Wu’s “The Half of It,” which premieres on the service on Friday. That’s only two days after the film won...