समाचार

Jeanne Moreau was to French cinema as Manet’s “Olympia” was to French painting — the personification of the gait, glance, and gesture of modern life. Her darting brown eyes and enigmatic moue were the face of the French New Wave. Her candid sensuality and self-assurance, not to mention the suggestion that she was always in control, made her the epitome of the New Woman. From Orson Welles and Luis Bunuel to Joseph Losey and Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Moreau was the muse to the greatest directors of world cinema.

“She has all the qualities one expects in a woman,” quipped Francois Truffaut, director of her most beloved film, “Jules and Jim” (1962), “plus all those one expects in a man — without the inconveniences of either.”

Surprisingly, this quintessence of French femininity had an English mother, a dancer at the Folies Bergere. Her French father, a hotelier and restaurateur, upon learning that his daughter likewise had theatrical ambitions,...

Journal d’une femme de chambre

Director: Benoit Jacquot // Writers: Benoit Jacquot, Helene Zimmer

French auteur Benoit Jacquot tends to get overlooked, though his recent international success with Berlin premiered Farewell, My Queen (2012) seems to have boosted his status, even though he’s been making excellent films since the 1970s and used to serve as Assistant Director to Margeurite Duras (India Song; Nathalie Granger). He’s worked several times with Isabelle Huppert (The School of Flesh; Keep It Quiet; False Servant; Villa Amalia) and Isild Le Besco (A Tout de Suite; Deep in the Woods), and generally tends to favor female perspectives. His latest, 3 Hearts, competed in Venice and starred Catherine Deneuve, Charlotte Gainsbourg, and Chiara Mastroianni. We’re thrilled to see he’s following in the footsteps of Jean Renoir and Luis Bunuel with an update of Octave Mirabeau’s Diary of a Chambermaid, reuniting him with the exciting Lea Seydoux,...

With 2010 only a week over, it already feels like best-of and top-ten lists have been pouring in for months, and we’re already tired of them: the ranking, the exclusions (and inclusions), the rules and the qualifiers. Some people got to see films at festivals, others only catch movies on video; and the ability for us, or any publication, to come up with a system to fairly determine who saw what when and what they thought was the best seems an impossible feat. That doesn’t stop most people from doing it, but we liked the fantasy double features we did last year and for our 3rd Writers Poll we thought we'd do it again.

I asked our contributors to pick a single new film they saw in 2010—in theaters or at a festival—and creatively pair it with an old film they saw in 2010 to create a unique double feature.

DVDs, 12/2.

"In its blunt, bludgeoning way, White Dog ranks among the toughest and most probing examinations of racism in American cinema," writes Dennis Lim in the Los Angeles Times . "[Sam] Fuller's brute-force direction gives this outrageous allegory the hyperbolic treatment it demands." More from Erin Donovan at the Guru and notes on it from Craig Phillips.

"The late Marguerite Duras's novels, with their accretion of visual detail and incantatory dialogue, lent themselves to movies, but Duras disliked others' adaptations of her work and began, in the 1960s, to direct," writes Richard Brody in the New Yorker. "Her fourth film, Nathalie Granger (in a two-disk set from Blaq Out / Facets), from 1972, is a vehicle for a pair of international divas, Jeanne Moreau and Lucia Bosé, albeit an unusually low-key one; the setting is a cluttered old house near Paris, which was Duras's own."...