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For a film that is not much more than pure, delightful homage to 1930s cinema and the various genres of the time, there is nothing stale about The Crime Is Mine. François Ozon’s frilly farce/pointed courtroom drama is closest in style to his previous film, Peter von Kant — and equally, if not more, eye-popping. But thematically it shares most common ground with 8 Women (which also features Isabelle Huppert), where murder, melodrama and storming female leads also combine. The result is a lavish, briskly witty period romp with an ultra-modern post-MeToo sensibility.

The first of said leads is Nadia Tereszkiewicz as Madeleine Verdier, an ailing actor who we initially see skedaddling from the impressive Art Deco mansion of a powerful theatre producer (Jean-Christophe Bouvet), after he has tried to attack her. Not long later, her assailant is discovered dead, and Madeleine inadvertently becomes a prime suspect. To make...

Ozon and a stellar cast serve up an entertaining, if shallow caper that shades a little too close to #MeToo

François Ozon has directed plenty of complex, demanding and serious dramas: Everything Went Fine, Summer of 85 and By the Grace of God, along with adaptations of Fassbinder. But he also has a sweet tooth for breezy, silly, crowd-pleasing theatrical comedies like this one. Watching it is like being force-fed a large box of chocolates; moreish, though. There is certainly an amazing blue-chip cast of French movie-acting royalty, including Isabelle Huppert, Fabrice Luchini and André Dussollier.

The Crime Is Mine is adapted from a 1934 French stage comedy called Mon Crime by Georges Berr and Louis Verneuil which has already spawned two different madcap Hollywood versions in the 30s and 40s, respectively starring Carole Lombard and Betty Hutton. Nadia Tereszkiewicz plays Madeleine, an impecunious would-be stage star, engaged to wealthy young...

It is curious how life and death interweave and collide in the final feature from French director Sophie Fillières who passed away aged only 58 last year, leaving notes written from her hospital bed on how the film should be completed.

A heightened poignancy, therefore, surrounds this autobiographical study of a mid-life crisis for its main protagonist Barberie Bichette (a bravura performance from Agnès Jaoui) who is separated from her husband and thoroughly bored with her job as an advertising copywriter. It emerges she is also a published novelist and poet.

Her mental state is revealed in a series of encounters with her circle of support, family and acquaintances including her grown-up son and daughter (Edouard Sulpice and Angelina Woreth) and sister (Valérie Donzeli) who regard her behaviour with a mix of disinterested intrigue and mounting concern. Meanwhile her therapist listens indulgently but fails to provide any real assistance while colleagues and.

What is poignant about “This Life of Mine” — the final film by French writer-director Sophie Fillières — is all but impossible to extract from the beleaguered circumstances of its creation. Aged just 58, Fillières died last summer, shortly after completing the shoot of this wistful, somewhat autofictional study of midlife feminine crisis. Postproduction was supervised by her children, the actors Agathe and Adam Bonitzer, with the guidance of notes Fillières made in hospital, when it became clear to her that she’d never complete the project herself. What emerges from this process is a suitably elegiac testament to Fillières’ curious comic voice, centered on a fragile alter ego — played with a game lack of vanity by Agnès Jaoui — fearful that her life is passing her by. As filmmaking, however, it wants for shape and drive, and the intuitive editorial decision-making that only an author can bring to her work.

Heavy on wordplay and loose conversational drift,...

French writer-director Sophie Fillières, who tragically died last year from cancer at the age of 58, was no stranger to depicting manic situations on screen.

Her genre of choice was comedy, and in films like Gentille (2005), Pardon My French (2009) and When Margaux Meets Margaux (2018), she used the prism of humor to portray women going through major personal crises, whether involving their turbulent love lives or the excorcism of their own inner demons. Fillières’ chatty, messy, offbeat movies played like darker Parisian takes on the films of Woody Allen, and they would inspire a generation of younger female auteurs like Justine Triet, whose Oscar-winning Anatomy of a Fall Fillières played a small role in.

A major personal crisis is what guides the director’s final feature, This Life of Mine (Ma Vie Ma Gueule), which stars Agnès Jaoui as a writer combatting her mental illness with plenty of wit and a fair amount of gravitas.

Agnès Jaoui in This Life Of Mine to be screened as the opening film in the Cannes Directors’ Fortnight Photo: The Party Film Sales Sophie Fillières who died last year at the age of 58, left behind a 'very intimate self-portrait, to which Agnès Jaoui lends body and soul' Photo: Photo Unifrance A respected French female filmmaker who died last year, will have her final film This Life of Mine screened in the opening slot on May 15 of the 77th edition of the Cannes Directors’ Fortnight.

Sophie Fillières managed to shoot the film last summer before her untimely death at the age of 58. The film titled in French Ma Vie, Ma Gueule, was finished by members of her family who include her partner, the filmmaker Pascal Bonitzer.

The film follows a middle-aged woman who travels to the Scottish Highlands to escape the harsh realities of her life and stars Agnès Jaoui,...

Directors’ Fortnight has unveiled the selection for its 56th edition heavy on films from first-time US filmmakers, South American titles, and talent including Isabelle Huppert, Michael Cera and Agnès Jaoui.

Artistic director Julien Rejl revealed the line-up at a press conference in Paris on Tuesday (April 16) for the Cannes parallel section run by French directors guild the Srf.

Scroll down for the full selection

After undergoing a complete rebranding for last year’s edition complete with new artistic director Rejl and a new more inclusive female-forward name in French to La Quinzaine des Cinéastes, this year’s selection includes eight...

Paris-based sales company is kicking off sales for the projects at Unifrance’s Rendez-Vous in Paris this week

Paris-based sales company The Party has added an eclectic blend of new titles to its 2024 line-up including Sophie Fillières’ posthumous This Life of Mine, Oscar nominated Four Daughters director Kaouther Ben Hania’s next film and a Franco-Vietnamese musical comedy.

The Party is kicking off sales at Unifrance’s Rendez-Vous in Paris this week for Fillières’ seventh feature, the comedy drama This Life Of Mine.

Fillières died in July 2023, at age 58, shortly after completing filming - sending shockwaves through the French film industry.

Quick, silly and lent weight only by the costume department’s copious wigs and furs, “The Crime Is Mine” finds tireless French auteur François Ozon in the playful period pastiche mode of “Potiche” and “8 Women.” It’s a film less about any frenetic onscreen shenanigans as it is about its own mood board of sartorial and cinematic reference points — Jean Renoir, Billy Wilder, some vintage Chanel — and as such it slips down as fizzily and forgettably as a bottle of off-brand sparkling wine. This story of an aspiring stage star standing trial for a top impresario’s murder (and making the most of her moment in the tabloid flashbulbs) may be based on a nearly 90-year-old play, but for those versed more in Hollywood and Broadway than in French theater, Ozon’s adaptation resembles a kind of diva fanfic: What if Roxie Hart went up against Norma Desmond, except in rollicking 1930s Paris?...

Theatricality is the name of the game in The Crime Is Mine — for both the characters and the actors playing them. Even when the subject is murder, penury or thwarted ambition, everyone seems to be having a blast in François Ozon’s latest. Based on a 1934 play and set in the mid-’30s, the comedy opens with the image of a red velvet stage curtain, abounds in exquisite art deco flourishes, and is propelled by a screwball zaniness that arrives as a welcome antidote to awards season’s Serious Cinema Syndrome.

Sending up celebrity, the legal system and a medley of movie tropes, Ozon has spun serious ingredients into a zesty soufflé, albeit one that doesn’t avoid a sense of deflation. Led by two relative newcomers, with colorful support from a who’s who of French movie stars — key among them Isabelle Huppert, Fabrice Luchini, Dany Boon and André Dussollier...

François Ozon’s fizzy comedy The Crime Is Mine, a loose adaptation of Georges Berr and Louis Verneuil’s 1934 play Mon crime, begins with murder, poverty, and a suicide threat. But the film delivers this material with such a bubbly optimism that it wouldn’t be a surprise if the cast broke into a choreographed number from Gold Diggers of 1933.

Set in 1935 Paris, the film follows two best friends fending off criminal charges, eviction, and professional failure. Struggling actress Madeleine (Nadia Tereszkiewicz) flees the casting couch of producer Montferrand (Jean-Christophe Bouvet) only to discover that he was later murdered and that she’s the prime suspect. Her roommate, Pauline (Rebecca Marder), a struggling lawyer, offers to defend her. Given the media’s hyperventilating coverage of other accused female killers, Madeleine figures that a splashy trial could help her and Pauline’s careers. Madeleine then falsely confesses to shooting Montferrand and takes Pauline as her lawyer,...

The Cineuropa folks confirm that production on Sophie Fillières‘ seventh feature film is now complete (production took place in Scotland) – which means we’ll be aiming for a 2024 major film festival release. Fillières has been to Berlinale, Locarno and TIFF with her previous features. Among the cast in Ma vie ma gueule we find Agnès Jaoui, Philippe Katerine, Édouard Sulpice, Angelina Woreth, Emmanuel Salinger and filmmaker-actress Valérie Donzelli. Mother to actress Agathe Bonitzer, Fillières’ last film was La belle et la belle which starred Bonitzer, Sandrine Kiberlain and Melvil Poupaud.

Here is the synopsis from the Cineuropa folks:

This revolves around Barberie Bichette who’s also known as Barbie, and much to her dismay, she might have been beautiful, loved, a good mother to her children, a trustworthy colleague and a great lover, but now her life can be sombre, brutal, and often absurd, and it feels very strange for...

A romantic surprise has unexpected consequences in a gentle comedy channelling Éric Rohmer crossed with Carry on Camping

Here is a terrifically fresh, funny and gentle film from director and co-writer Guillaume Brac, which takes quite seriously something that’s always getting dismissed or patronised in pop culture: the holiday romance. The French title is À L’Abordage!, more properly translated as “Attack!” and the film is about seizing the day, going on the offensive and fortune favouring the bold.

Newcomer Eric Nantchouang plays Félix, an easygoing young guy in Paris with a naturally smiley open face; he has a moment with Alma (Asma Messaoudene) and when she says she’s going on holiday with her parents and sister in the beautiful valley of Die in south-eastern France, Félix secretly resolves to go there himself and give her what he is confident will be a wonderful romantic surprise. But he...

With 2017’s “This Is Our Land,” director Lucas Belvaux examined the ways in which far right movements attract, recruit and reformat new converts, curdling contemporary anxieties for acrid political goals. With his follow-up, “Home Front,” the Franco-Belgian auteur explores the roots of those prejudices. The film, which was part of Cannes’ selection last year, is screening this week at UniFrance’s Rendez-Vous with French Cinema in Paris (Jan. 13-15).

Adapted by Belvaux from Laurent Mauvignier 2009 novel “The Wound,” the film follows two working-class cousins as they fulfil their colonial military duties in 1960s Algeria and as they nurse their scars and traumas in Burgundy of 2003. While the more cerebral Rabut has tried to forge ahead, his cousin Bernard remains a livewire, looking for any provocation to snap back into violence. Local draw Catherine Frot rounds out the cast.

Synecdoche and Artemis Productions are producing. The Party Film Sales in partnership...

The American Film Institute has unveiled its lineup of 124 films, adding notable titles including the documentaries “Belushi,” “Citizen Penn” and “Hopper/Welles” and the Albert and Allen Hughes thriller “Dead Presidents.”

AFI Fest, which is going virtual this year without the usual glitzy Hollywood premieres at the Tcl Chinese Theatre, had announced previously that Rachel Brosnahan’s crime drama “I’m Your Woman” had been selected as its opening night title on Oct. 15. The festival also announced last month that it would close Oct. 22 with “My Psychedelic Love Story,” and host the world premieres of Kelly Oxford’s “Pink Skies Ahead” and Angel Kristi Williams’ “Really Love,” in addition to special presentations of Florian Zeller’s “The Father,” Werner Herzog and Clive Oppenheimer’s “Fireball” and Mira Nair’s “A Suitable Boy.”

“Belushi” is directed by R.J. Cutler and features interviews with John Belushi, Jim Belushi, Chevy Chase, Carrie Fisher, Dan Aykroyd and Penny Marshall.

The American Film Institute (AFI) has today announced the full lineup of this year’s AFI Fest, including the World Cinema, New Auteurs, and Documentary sections. These titles, including buzzy festival features like “I Carry You with Me,” “Shadow in the Cloud,” “Jumbo,” “Farewell Amor,” “Wander Darkly,” “Tragic Jungle,” “Sound of Metal,” “Wolfwalkers,” “New Order,” and “Hopper/Welles,” join previously announced films, including Julia Hart’s “I’m Your Woman,” which will open the festival, and Errol Morris’ “My Psychedelic Love Story,” which will close it.

This year’s complete AFI Fest program includes 124 titles of which 53 percent are directed by women, 39 percent are directed by Bipoc, and 17 percent are directed by Lbgtq+.

“AFI Fest is committed to supporting diverse perspectives and new voices in cinema and this year is no different,” said Sarah Harris, Director of Programming, AFI Festivals, in an official statement. “While we wish we were able to be together in Hollywood,...