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No one makes movies quite like French husband-and-wife team Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani. The directing duo first made a splash in 2009 with “Amer,” a postmodern homage to Italian giallo films that was followed up by another giallo homage, 2013’s “The Strange Color of Your Body’s Tears.” Both films are filled with a stunning blend of eye-popping and provocative visuals, a kaleidoscope of colors that evokes Dario Argento’s sumptuous technicolor nightmares, woven together with scores lifted from giallos from yesteryear. With this intoxicating cinematic formula, Cattet and Forzani quickly became must-watch genre filmmakers.

Rather than sticking with this successful formula, they branched out with their latest film, “Let the Corpses Tan,” putting their own spin on the western. “Let the Corpses Tan” takes place on a sun-soaked, isolated island hideaway, where a grizzled thug named Rhino (Stéphane Ferrara) and his gang plan to hide away with an eccentric artist,...

Director of witty French comedy-thrillers

Since the dawn of cinema, France has simultaneously and uninterruptedly produced good mainstream movies and arthouse films. Georges Lautner, who has died aged 87, unabashedly claimed that the almost 50 films he directed from 1958 to 1992 belong to the former category. Lautner's mainly cops-and-robbers movies were among the most popular films ever made in France.

"I didn't want glory or to make masterpieces but popular films that would please the greatest number," he once explained. "International recognition didn't interest me. I was passionate at what I did with my faithful team. We made the films we wanted as quickly as possible. But with time, my commercial films appear almost intellectual."

Lautner's underestimated films were never invited to Cannes until, in 2012, the festival put together a belated "Homage to Georges Lautner". His death prompted President François Hollande to declare that his films had "become part of the cinematic heritage...