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Michel Piccoli, the French screen star known for roles in Luis Buñuel’s “Belle de jour” and Jean-Luc Godard’s “Contempt,” has died. He was 94.

The actor’s family confirmed his death last week to Afp and Le Figaro on Monday.

Piccoli’s vast filmography, which spanned more than 200 films from 1949 to as recently as 2015, included a number of Buñuel’s films, including “Belle de jour,” “The Milky Way” and “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie.”

He also garnered acclaim for Godard’s “Contempt” (also known as “Le Mépris”), Jacques Rivette’s “La Belle Noiseuse,” Louis Malle’s “Milou in May,” Richard Dembo’s “Dangerous Moves” and Peter Del Monte’s “Traveling Companion.”

Most recently, Piccoli starred in Leos Carax’s “Holy Motors” (2012) and Nanni Moretti’s “We Have a Pope” (2011), for which he won the David di Donatello prize for Best Actor. He also provided the narration for Bertrand Mandico...

Volker Schlöndorff with agronomist Tony Rinaudo in the République de Niger: "He was in Africa after the big famine in 1984. You know, the Bob Geldof [and Midge Ure organised] Live Aid concerts." Photo: Volker Schlöndorff

Volker Schlöndorff is in New York and he presented the rarely seen director's cut of his Cannes Film Festival Palme d'Or (tied with Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now in 1979) and Oscar-winning film The Tin Drum (Die Blechtrommel), starring David Bennent, based on Günter Grass's novel, and the 1981 Circle Of Deceit (Die Fälschung), with Bruno Ganz and Hanna Schygulla, during the retrospective for screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière at the Museum of Modern Art. Jean-Claude Carrière also introduced Louis Malle's Milou En Mai (May Fools), Philip Kaufman's The Unbearable Lightness Of Being, Luis Buñuel's La Voie Lactée (The Milky Way), and together with Julian Schnabel, At Eternity’s Gate.

Volker Schlöndorff with Anne-Katrin Titze: "This...

The Paris-based Pyramide co-founder, producer and distributor worked closely with Aki Kaurismaki, Nuri Bilge Ceylan and Catherine Corsini, among others.

Veteran distributor and producer Fabienne Vonier, who co-founded Paris-based distribution and production company Pyramide, has died after a long illness. She was 66.

“Fabienne was passionate about film,” said long-term collaborator Eric Lagesse, who took over Pyramide’s distribution and international sales activities in 2008. “She was someone who was constantly on the look-out for interesting productions, directors.”

Lagesse continued: “She had done it all: exhibition, distribution and lastly production. She did everything to the full and was as demanding of herself as she was of everyone else. She was a true professional, working right up until the end.”

In a career spanning more than 40 years, Vonier supported the work of scores of directors from across the world including Finland’s Aki Kaurismaki, Canadian Denys Arcand, Mexico’s Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, Palestinian Elia Suleiman, Egyptian [link=nm...

The Paris-based Pyramide co-founder, producer and distributor worked closely with AKi Kaurismaki, Nuri Bilge Ceylan and Catherine Corsini, among others.

Veteran distributor and producer Fabienne Vonier, who co-founded Paris-based distribution and production company Pyramide, has died after a long illness. She was 66.

“Fabienne was passionate about film,” said long-term collaborator Eric Lagesse, who took over Pyramide’s distribution and international sales activities in 2008. “She was someone who was constantly on the look-out for interesting productions, directors.”

Lagesse continued: “She had done it all: exhibition, distribution and lastly production. She did everything to the full and was as demanding of herself as she was of everyone else. She was a true professional, working right up until the end.”

In a career spanning more than 40 years, Vonier supported the work of scores of directors from across the world including Finland’s Aki Kaurismaki, Canadian Denys Arcand, Mexico’s Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, Palestinian Elia Suleiman, Egyptian [link=nm...

Olivier Assayas looks back at the days following the events of May 1968 – and at his own youth – with a delicate wit

Link to video: Something in the Air: watch trailer here

The son of a movie director and now in his 50s, Olivier Assayas has built up an interestingly varied body of work as a critic for Cahiers du cinéma, authored several books including a monograph on Ingmar Bergman, and directed over the past 20 years a succession of modest, intelligent films. Most are concerned with moral problems and social responsibility in a middle-class setting like his Les Destinées sentimentales about a rebellious young man reluctantly taking over the family's prestigious porcelain factory in the 1920s, and Summer Hours, the tale of siblings and their elderly mother gathering to settle the estate of a recently deceased painter. Slightly different are Irma Vep, a cinéaste's celebration of Hong Kong movies and...

Olivier Assayas seems to be dramatising his own youth with this beautiful-looking account of the soixante-huitard aftermath – but politics give way too easily to nostalgia

In contemporary French and European cinema, the events of May 1968 live stubbornly on – intensely debated and treasured and re-mythologised. A whiff of tear gas is a madeleine. For wasn't it cinema itself, and the attempted sacking of the Cinématheque Française chief Henri Langlois, that helped spark the Paris uprising? Philippe Garrel's Les Amants Réguliers, or Regular Lovers (2005), showed a young poet, played by the director's son Louis, taking to the barricades in 1968. Louis Garrel played something similar in Bernardo Bertolucci's soixante-huitard swoon, The Dreamers (2003). Before that, Louis Malle's Milou En Mai, or May Fools (1990) starred Michel Piccoli as the provincial Milou, whose family estate in May 1968 is on the verge of being dismembered by history itself.

Olivier Assayas's Après Mai, or After May,...

Legendary French writer Jean-Claude Carrière has crafted strange, wonderful films with directors from Buñuel to Godard. He talks here about the art of creating cinematic enigmas

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Jean-Claude Carrière welcomes me into the former gaming house and den of iniquity that he has called home for nearly half his 80 years; the 19th-century building stands in a sun-dappled Parisian courtyard. It's a glorious afternoon, and I apologise for being so demonstrably English in remarking on that fact, but the legendary screenwriter – tall, with salt-and-pepper stubble and warm, alert eyes – waves away my words. "Why shouldn't we discuss it?" he chuckles. "At least everyone can agree on the weather." Imagine the sense of social rupture if they didn't. "I have a little of that," he confesses, settling into an armchair in a high-ceilinged living room where wooden sculptures stand guard over Persian rugs. "Coming from...

French actor who played several classic roles on stage and dubbed the voice of Marlon Brando in The Godfather

In order to fully appreciate the wide-ranging acting talents of Michel Duchaussoy, who has died from a heart attack aged 73, one would have to be both French-speaking and resident in France. To those less fortunate, the knowledge of Duchaussoy is restricted to his striking appearances in several Claude Chabrol movies, and others by Alain Jessua, Louis Malle and Patrice Leconte, which were among the relatively few of his many films to be released in Britain and the Us.

In France, Duchaussoy was equally known as a television actor, whose voice was also recognisable from his dubbing of cartoon characters and stars such as Marlon Brando, in The Godfather. Prolific as he was in films and television, Duchaussoy was celebrated mainly for his 20-year tenure with the Comédie-Française theatre in Paris. There,...

Alexander 'Sideways' Payne is on fine form again, while The Artist never fails to get a standing ovation – Jason Solomons on the news and gossip from the London film festival

Payne sailing

For a director who specialises in cute comedies about men unravelling, Alexander Payne is an unruffled chap. Taking to the stage to introduce his new film, The Descendants, at the mayor's gala, the maker of Sideways and Election sported a bright blue suit — how else should you dress to outshine George Clooney? – and told the audience to forget they'd ever seen an Alexander Payne film (or a George Clooney performance) before. "Look at it as if it's the first time you've discovered us," he said. Judging by the film that followed, these two will go far. The Descendants emerged from the London film festival a very strong awards contender, the audience giving it one of the...

French actor best known for her role in Jean Renoir's 1939 masterpiece The Rules of the Game

Although Paulette Dubost, who has died aged 100, appeared in far more films than the number of years she lived, most cinemagoers know her best as Lisette, the coquettish chambermaid in Jean Renoir's La Règle du Jeu (The Rules of the Game, 1939), one of cinema's masterpieces. Lisette, who attends the Marquis de la Chesnaye during a lavish weekend party at a country chateau, flirts dangerously with a poacher turned servant (Julian Carette), while her overly jealous gamekeeper husband (Gaston Modot) tries to catch them at it.

Dubost and Carette play a deliciously sly and comic cat-and-mouse game with the absurdly rigid Modot, especially during the after-dinner entertainment, a breathtaking sequence, described by the critic Richard Roud as something from "a Marx brothers film scripted by a Feydeau who suddenly acquired a tragic sense...

Paulette Dubost, known as the "Dean of French Cinema," and an actress in films directed by Jean Renoir, Marcel L'Herbier, Jacques Tourneur, Julien Duvivier, Max Ophüls, Preston Sturges, François Truffaut, Louis Malle, and Marcel Carné, died of "natural causes" on Sept. 21 in the Parisian suburb of Longjumeau. The Paris-born Dubost had turned 100 years old on October 8, 2010. Dubost's show business career began at the age of seven, performing various duties at the Paris Opera. Following some stage training, her film debut took place in 1931 in Wilhelm Thiele's Le bal, which also marked the film debut of Danielle Darrieux (who's still around and still active). Ultimately, Dubost's film career was to span more than seven decades, during which time she was featured in over 140 movies. She is probably best remembered as the adulterous chambermaid Lisette in Jean Renoir's 1939 comedy-drama La règle du jeu / The Rules of the Game, considered by...

AA Milne's Pooh Bear is one of the thickest, most tedious characters in fiction, but elsewhere in the movies apiarists and honey collectors are a mysterious, obsessive collection of individuals. One thinks of the taciturn father in Víctor Erice's Spirit of the Beehive, Marcello Mastroianni in Theo Angelopoulos's The Bee Keeper, Michel Piccoli in Louis Malle's Milou en mai and Peter Fonda's Oscar-nominated performance in Ulee's Gold. Honey (aka Bal) is the concluding film in Semih Kaplanoglu's The Yusuf Trilogy, about a boy growing up in rural north-eastern Turkey where his father keeps bees in hives at the top of tall trees in the nearby forest and supports his young wife and little son by collecting honey. The six-year-old Yusuf, a serious, introspective boy through whose large, expressive eyes the world is presented, has a serious stammer that sets him apart from most of those around him,...

Having previously directed some episodes of “Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace” and that Pulp Fiction episode of “Community,” Richard Ayoade finally dives into feature filmmaking with his debut, Submarine. The Sundance hit tells the coming-of-age story of a young boy named Oliver, who meets an off-beat girl named Jordana while going through his own domestic problems.

I sat down with Ayoade to discuss his cinematic influences, what he was like at Oliver’s age, and more. Submarine opens in Chicago on June 10, 2011.

Oliver wishes that someone would make a documentary about his life. What would the reviews of your documentary be like?

It really depends on how well it was made.

How well do you think it would be made?

I imagine poorly. It could only be of limited interest. So I guess [the reviews] would say, “Why was this made?” I don’t think it would be a theatrical release.

What would it be about?...