Patrice Leconte’s Monsieur Hire is a deeply affecting portrait of the dark side of obsession. Monsieur Hire (Michel Blanc) is a lonely, middle-aged tailor who has taken up the rather depraved pastime of watching his beautiful neighbor, Alice (Sandrine Bonnaire). Observing his demeanor, one can hardly call him a voyeur. It is as if he […]
In its idiosyncratic, tongue-in-cheek mixture of documentary, self-confessional, and deconstruction, Land of Madness is a droll and refreshing throwback to Luc Moullet’s early essay films like Anatomy of a Relationship and Origins of a Meal. Returning to his bucolic, ancestral hometown in the Southern Alps, Moullet embarks on a whimsical, homegrown investigation of the region’s […]
Incisively anticipating such sobering and indelible agricultural documentaries as Hubert Sauper’s Darwin’s Nightmare, Nick and Mark Francis’ Black Gold, and Nikolaus Geyrhalter’s Our Daily Bread (as well as the dysfunctionality of big business economics as presented in Mark Achbar and Jennifer Abbot’s The Corporation), and infused with Luc Moullet’s irrepressibly droll, tongue-in-cheek humor that has […]
Ostensibly framed as a postwar melodrama that loosely evokes Leo McCarey’s Love Affair in its story of a shipboard encounter between two emotionally unavailable people, Joseph Morder’s L’Arbre mort is also a tone piece that seeks to reconcile the space between love and death, history and memory, documentary and fiction. This duality is suggested in […]
A jeweler presents Max (Vincent Cassel) with three prospective rings for his upcoming marriage to Muriel (Sandrine Kiberlain): the first is elegant, yet understated; the second is intensely beautiful, but dangerously sharp and cutting; the third is seemingly ordinary, but has an inner glow and luster beneath the surface. Unable to choose among them (and […]
Le Samouraï opens to a shot of rain beating onto the window of a darkened room. At the corner of the frame, a puff of smoke emanates from a lit cigarette. An occasional shrill chirp is heard from a caged bird. The rest is silence. An impassive man, Jef Costello (Alain Delon), rises from the […]