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Robert Zemeckis clearly has a thing for time — past, present and Back to the Future. With a filmography that also includes films like The Polar Express and especially his Oscar-winning Best Picture Forrest Gump, the director loves mixing the newest filmmaking technologies with relatable stories that play with our perceptions of life as time goes by. He really dives into this theme in a big way in his ambitious adaptation of Richard McGuire’s 2014 graphic novel Here, which does not send its century-plus cast of characters back in time, but rather lets time come to them on a single piece of land, later a home, over the course of the entire 20th century, a bit before that and a bit after. The great French director Claude LeLouch did a similar thing in 1974’s splendid romance And Now My Love, in which a couple’s chance meeting at first sight is...

Perfect Match, The Woman King and Outer Banks: Season 3 are some of the much-anticipated projects hitting Netflix this month.

New dating show Perfect Match features alums from Netflix’s unscripted series looking for love and competing against their fellow singles in a tropical paradise. In the Nick Lachey-hosted series, contestants will pair up to form potential matches with the most compatible couples able to play matchmaker, breaking up couples and connecting them with new singles. The first season will start streaming on Valentine’s Day, with new episodes dropping each week.

Shortly after Valentine’s Day, Netflix will air two projects celebrating African royalty.

The Jada Pinkett Smith-executive-produced and -narrated docuseries African Queens: Njinga, dropping Feb. 15, explores the life of the 17th century warrior leader of Ndongo and Matamba, in modern-day Angola.

The next day, Netflix will start streaming Gina Prince-Bythewood’s acclaimed The Woman King, starring Viola Davis,...

‘Toni Erdmann’ (Courtesy: Tiff)

By: Carson Blackwelder

Managing Editor

It’s not too often that foreign-language films get recognized for anything at the Oscars beyond the best foreign-language film category — but it does happen. And, believe it or not, it happens more for best original screenplay and best adapted screenplay than many other categories. A prime example of that is Toni Erdmann, Germany’s submission this year that is proving to be a cross-category threat, which could score a nomination — or a win — for its writing.

The story of Toni Erdmann — which has a solid Rotten Tomatoes score of 91% — follows a father who is trying to reconnect with his adult daughter after the death of his dog. It sounds simple enough but, of course, the two couldn’t be more unalike. The film premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 2016 and where it won the Fipresci Prize. Since then, it...

'Sleepless in Seattle': Meg Ryan 'Sleepless in Seattle' review: Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks in an affair to forget In Krzysztof Kieslowski's Three Colors: Red, the last installment of his "Three Colors" trilogy, the word "magic" is never bandied about. No need to. Magic is just about everywhere in that lyrical tale about love and fate. On the other hand, the word "magic" seems to crop up every other minute in writer-director Nora Ephron's Sleepless in Seattle. Ephron and fellow Oscar-nominated screenwriters Jeff Arch and David S. Ward (plus an uncredited Delia Ephron) were apparently trying to create screen magic through the power of suggestion. If you repeat it often enough... Following in the footsteps of Claude Lelouch's 1974 hit And Now My Love, with added touches borrowed from Leo McCarey's 1957 romance classic An Affair to Remember (itself a remake of McCarey's own 1939 Love Affair), Nora Ephron...

Since March 14, the French film Delicacy, starring Audrey Tautou, has been slowly been rolling out across the United States in limited release. The film, which is based on the best-selling novel by David Foenkinos, who wrote and co-directed the film with his brother Stephane, stars Tautou as Nathalie, a French woman who has buried herself in work since losing her husband of three years. But, seemingly out of the blue and from a completely unexpected source, her spirits are lifted when she begins dating her office subordinate, Markus (Francois Damiens). The film, as its title implies, is rich and enjoyable and one of my favorites so far this year. It is the kind of romantic film the French do so well. The kind of films that American audiences always claim they want to see instead of the typical Hollywood rom-com. A film that makes you want to rush off to Paris and fall in live.

Veteran actress Marthe Keller, among whose credits are Claude Lelouch's And Now My Love and John Schlesinger's Marathon Man, will be inducted as a chevalier ("knight") in the French Legion of Honor, a civilian distinction that has been around since the early 1800s. Born in Basel, Switzerland, Keller will turn 67 next Jan. 28. In the last 45 years, she has appeared in more than 40 films, whether in leading or supporting roles. Apart from the aforementioned — ludicrous but financially successful — Marathon Man, in which she was featured opposite Dustin Hoffman and Laurence Olivier, Keller wasn't very lucky in her several Hollywood try-outs in the late '70s. She was a terrorist in John Frankenheimer's thriller Black Sunday (1977); romanced Al Pacino in Sydney Pollack's expensive autoracing flop Bobby Deerfield (1977); and was a mysterious Greta Garbo-like former actress pursued by William Holden in Billy Wilder's bomb Fedora (1978). Keller's last...

City of Lights, City of Angels Film Festival

Claude Lelouch is a populist filmmaker no longer popular with audiences either in his native France or among the large international following he created once upon a time with such hits as A Man and a Woman and And Now My Love.

Men and Women, which opened this week's annual French film festival in Los Angeles, finds Lelouch struggling to rediscover the formula of Gallic charm and star-crossed lovers that made him such a boxoffice favorite. The film has strong moments where he does reclaim the old magic. But the picture wears out its welcome long before the final reel and fails to make the necessary tonal changes to include episodes of depression, murder and suicide in an otherwise lighthearted ode to the glories of romantic love.

The film's theatrical outlook is problematic. It actually is a cannibalization of the first two films in an apparently now-abandoned trilogy called Genre humain, or Human Kind. The first film, Les Parisiens, disappeared within a month of release, so Lelouch scrambled to save the project by pulling together footage from the two films to create the version that debuted here. Without having seen Les Parisiens, it is hard to say whether he has helped or harmed his cause. But Men and Women definitely jumps around among too many characters and subplots to diminishing audience involvement.

What emerges as the central romance or romantic triangle of the piece belongs a pair of street singers and the barmaid who falls for the male. Shaa (Maiwenn) is a vagabond and petty thief who spots Massimo (Italian pop singer/actor Massimo Ranieri) singing on the street one day. She seduces him into turning his act into a duo. In the best tradition of old Hollywood musicals, the two swiftly find success in a nightclub, where Anne (Mathilde Seigner) can't take her eyes off Massimo between serving cocktails.

A music impresario soon takes Shaa aside and offers her -- but not them -- a contract. Without a moment's thought, she dumps Massimo for a chance at stardom. Massimo goes into an emotional tailspin (while at the same time writing a great song about lost love), threatens suicide or a return to Italy before Anne rescues him and -- voila! -- he becomes a star and Shaa turns into such a flop that she is able to pen a mea culpa memoir that becomes -- yes, it does -- a best seller.

And that's only one of the stories in "Men and Women!"

Anne's identical twin (also Seigner, of course) works for a pizza-parlor magnate (Michel Leeb), an uneducated, self-made man who on whim marries a beautiful stage actress and sophisticated aristocrat (Arielle Dombasle). His wife eventually takes up a clandestine affair with the chauffeur (Yannick Soulier), who is really a thief. There's a police detective who dies of cancer early in the movie, so his wife can marry her lover, who works as a singer at the same nightclub where Anne works. Later, a movie director (Lelouch himself) shows up to buy rights to Shaa's memoir to turn it into a film starring Shaa and Massimo, and the movie threatens to start all over again.

So a million things are going on with different levels of reality, but weary viewers can be excused for no longer caring. If the characters would simply sit down with a glass of wine and talk to each other, half their problems would get solved. The exuberant, new wave style of early Lelouch, where the camera pirouettes all over the set, is, thankfully, gone. In its place, though, is this mad hopping among subplots so that the focus never stays on anything for too long.

As a pop stylist, Lelouch must confront the fact that for French moviegoers he has been eclipsed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Jean-Paul Salome (whose exotic Arsene Lupin plays in the festival). At one point in this move, Anne tells Massimo that most of his songs are "too old." One wonders whether Lelouch, when he wrote that line, winced a little.

MEN AND WOMEN

Les Films 13 in association with Canal Plus

Credits:

Director: Claude Lelouch

Writers: Claude Lelouch, Pierre Uytterhoeven

Producers: Jean-Paul De Vidas, Claude Lelouch

Director of photography: Gerard de Battista

Production designer: Francois Chauvaud

Music: Francis Lai

Costumes: Karine Serrano

Editor: Stephane Mazalaigue

Cast:

Massimo: Massimo Ranieri

Shaa: Maiwenn

Clementine/Anne: Mathilde Seigner

Sabine Duchemin: Arielle Dombasle

Michael Gorkini: Michel Leeb

No MPAA rating

Running time -- 128 minutes...