In Aude Léa Rapin’s sci-fi drama, Planet B, the French government has imprisoned dissidents in a virtual prison. Bodies are kept in a vegetative state…
In a concise opening, Thierry de Peretti’s In His Own Image introduces its heroine Antonia (Clara-Maria Laredo), a young and passionate photographer who seems to…
The title of Claire Burger’s film Foreign Tongue holds both literal and symbolic meaning: its leading characters, French and German teenagers Fanny (Lilith Grasmug) and…
Patricia Mazuy is one of the greatest directors working today, but you’d hardly know it from how often her films are screened or talked about.…
A French drama exploring a complicated, ultimately toxic marriage told from the perspective of a desperate wife and mother, Valérie Donzelli’s Just the Two of…
There’s a difference between a breakfast of scrambled eggs (with sausage, tomatoes, and mixed peppers) and a proper omelet. The combination of the same ingredients…
The Book of Solutions Michel Gondry feels like an artist from another time, even if that time wasn’t very long ago. The only movie he…
Michel Gondry feels like an artist from another time, even if that time wasn’t very long ago. The only movie he directed with any real…
In Mona Achache’s Little Girl Blue, actress Marion Cotillard first appears as herself. As Achache gives her a wig, brown-colored contacts, perfume, a cherished necklace,…
There’s a mystery at the heart of writer/director Iris Kaltenbäck’s debut feature film The Rapture, but unlike the reams of true-crime documentaries and adjacent media…
Death hangs over the first moments of The Temple Woods Gang, the riveting seventh feature from French-Algerian filmmaker Rabah Ameur-Zaimëche. Grizzled military retiree Pons (Régis…
There are strange goings-on in the Stains suburbs of France, an assemblage of stark high-rise buildings that are home to a collection of everyday working-class…
Patricia Mazuy, now six films deep in a three-decade-plus career with Saturn Bowling, has always risked a certain, tantrum-centric filmmaking, favoring characters with shared psychoses…
Sebastien Marnier’s latest breezy, twisty thriller The Origin of Evil may lack any deeper interrogation in its Agatha Christie-reinvention of deception, but its strong ensemble…
Reinventing the superhero genre often entails energizing it, usually with piled-on camp (as with Troma Entertainment’s The Toxic Avenger and, more recently, Marvel’s Deadpool) or…
Somewhere along the line, not all that long ago, Arnaud Desplechin ceased to be a marketable name in the U.S. film biz. While certainly never…
The latest film from French actor-director Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi is difficult to evaluate. One could argue that, for what it is, it is fairly accomplished. A…
Ballet school drama Neneh Superstar is the kind of film that gives festivals like Rendez-Vous with French Cinema a reason to reach out to younger…
Three Nights a Week is less the love story between a straight man and a drag queen it has been billed as, and rather a…
Lovers A deceptively boilerplate film noir with shades of drab eroticism, Nicole Garcia’s Lovers belies an astonishing sublimation of its cultural and existential milieux. Premiering…
Love Affair(s) Like several films in the Rendez-Vous with French Cinema lineup, Love Affair(s) is a title that was meant to premiere at Cannes 2020,…