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It came as quite the surprise that acclaimed director Rebecca Zlotowski’s latest film, led by Jodie Foster and an all-star French cast, did not make Cannes competition. If it turns out A Private Life might indeed be too slight for Palme consideration, this up-tempo comedic murder mystery is a breezy, fun means of showcasing delicious chemistry between legendary actors.

Foster plays Lilian, a Paris-based American psychiatrist who learns that her long-term patient Paula (Virginie Efira) has died. An aggressive outburst by Paula’s husband Simon (Mathieu Amalric) at her wake and subsequent meeting with their daughter yield suspicions she did not, as appearances suggest, commit suicide by taking all the drugs Lilian prescribed. Becoming more and more obsessed with learning who killed her patient, Lilian starts seeking answers from hypnosis-induced visions, which also lead to repercussions for her failed marriage with Gabriel (Daniel Auteuil) and strained relationship with son...

Jodie Foster confessed she was “too scared” to tackle a lead role in a French-language film until director Rebecca Zlotowski’s invitation for Vie Privée proved irresistible, marking Foster’s first starring turn speaking French since 2004’s A Very Long Engagement. The psychological thriller premiered out of competition at Cannes on May 20, where Foster’s portrayal of Lilian Steiner—a Paris-based psychoanalyst drawn into a murder investigation—earned an eight-minute standing ovation.

Filmed last autumn in Paris and Normandy, Vie Privée reunites Foster with screenwriters Anne Berest and Gaëlle Macé, with Frederic Jouve producing under Les Films Velvet and France 3 Cinéma. Cinematographer George Lechaptois captures both the city’s elegance and the story’s undercurrent of menace, while Robin Coudert’s score underlines Lilian’s unraveling as she challenges official conclusions about her patient’s apparent suicide.

At Cannes, foster’s fluency in French surprised critics and attendees alike.

Jodie Foster has plenty of Oscars, Emmys, Golden Globes and more to prove she can do just about anything on screen, and now she is taking a step further and doing it all in French.

That part is not a huge surprise. On one occasion in 2004 she appeared in a supporting role speaking in French in A Very Long Engagement, which starred Audrey Tatou. But now for the first time she has a starring role in a French production, Vie Privée (A Private Life), that premiered tonight out of competition as an official selection of the Cannes Film Festival, a most appropriate place to debut this new landmark in Foster’s career which just continues to dazzle.

Foster plays psychiatrist Lilian Steiner, a rock-solid professional who has been doing this work a very long time. But when she learns a longtime patient, Paula, whom...

Rebecca Zlowtowski’s longtime cinematographer discusses shooting Other People’s Children, the writer-director’s latest film that stars Virginie Efira and Roschdy Zem and grapples with themes of motherhood and the concept of being child-free. See all responses to our annual Sundance cinematographer interviews here. Filmmaker: How and why did you wind up being the cinematographer of your film? What were the factors and attributes that led to your being hired for this job? Lechaptois: I met [director] Rebecca [Zlowtowski] in 2009 when shooting her first feature Belle Epine. I have since shot all her films. Filmmaker: What were your artistic goals on this […]

The post “In Preparation We Talked About Claude Sautet’s Films”: Dp George Lechaptois on Other People’s Children first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Rebecca Zlowtowski’s longtime cinematographer discusses shooting Other People’s Children, the writer-director’s latest film that stars Virginie Efira and Roschdy Zem and grapples with themes of motherhood and the concept of being child-free. See all responses to our annual Sundance cinematographer interviews here. Filmmaker: How and why did you wind up being the cinematographer of your film? What were the factors and attributes that led to your being hired for this job? Lechaptois: I met [director] Rebecca [Zlowtowski] in 2009 when shooting her first feature Belle Epine. I have since shot all her films. Filmmaker: What were your artistic goals on this […]

The post “In Preparation We Talked About Claude Sautet’s Films”: Dp George Lechaptois on Other People’s Children first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

“A cinematographer is a visual psychiatrist–moving an audience through a movie […] making them think the way you want them to think, painting pictures in the dark,” said the late, great Gordon Willis. As we continue our year-end coverage, one aspect we must highlight is, indeed, cinematography. From talented newcomers to seasoned professionals, we’ve rounded up the examples that have most impressed us this year. Check out our rundown below.

An Easy Girl (Georges Lechaptois)

The French Riviera is the fitting location for this tale of sexual discovery and class criticism. Georges Lechaptois’ frames are gorgeous not just because of the landscape––we have reoccurring overhead shots of the crystal-blue tides rustling against the beach where characters lay––but the juxtaposition of the quiet life out on the sea. The sun-soaked vistas at lunch are as lively as the quiet, sensuous nights the lovers spend in their dimly lit...

Rebecca Zlotowski on intertextuality in An Easy Girl (Une Fille Facile): “It’s a reproduction of the prologue of the summer tale by Éric Rohmer, the beginning of La Collectionneuse is Haydée Politoff, the main actress on the beach, shot exactly the same.” Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze

There is nothing easy about being an easy girl in Rebecca Zlotowski’s An Easy Girl (Une Fille Facile), co-written with Teddy Lussi-Modeste, shot by Georges Lechaptois, which is a highlight of Rendez-Vous with French Cinema.

Naïma (Mina Farid), Sofia (Zahia Dehar), Philippe (Benoît Magimel), and Andres (Nuno Lopes) in An Easy Girl (Une Fille Facile)

Naïma (Mina Farid) has just turned 16. She lives in Cannes with her mother who works as a maid in one of the fancy hotels. When her older bombshell cousin Sofia (Zahia Dehar) visits for the summer, a new chapter begins in her life. Naima is in awe...

One of our the most overlooked films last year was Alice Winocour‘s home-invasion thriller Disorder, starring Diane Kruger and Matthias Schoenaerts. As shot by Georges Lechaptois, his claustrophobic vision tracks Schoenarts’ physicality with a unnerving touch as the threat of terror creeps around every frame. We’ve known for some time a remake was in the works scripted by Taylor Sheridan (Hell or High Water, Sicario, Wind River), and now it’s found a director.

According to Deadline, Logan director James Mangold is now attached to helm the remake at Sony and it’s planned to be his next film. As for what differences to expect from the original, the trade reports Sheridan “changed the soldier’s affliction, added a romance, set the whole thing in Majorca and created a potential franchise character.” While that last aspect is a bit troubling, Mangold does have experience in creating worthwhile remakes after 3:10 to Yuma,...

“A cinematographer is a visual psychiatrist — moving an audience through a movie […] making them think the way you want them to think, painting pictures in the dark,” said the late, great Gordon Willis. As we continue our year-end coverage, one aspect we must highlight is, indeed, cinematography, among the most vital to the medium. From talented newcomers to seasoned professionals, we’ve rounded up the examples that have most impressed us this year. Check out our rundown below and, in the comments, let us know your favorite work.

Arrival (Bradford Young)

At this point, it would be unfair to call Bradford Young an up-and-coming cinematographer. While it’s an accurate description in terms of his relative years behind the camera, the caliber of his work already feels like one of the most accomplished in the genre. Ahead of a Han Solo prequel, he got his first taste with sci-fi thanks to Denis Villeneuve‘s Arrival.

It’d be one thing, a simpler thing, if Rebecca Zlotowski‘s Planetarium was a middle-of-the-road effort that’s over and done with in less than two hours. Alas, it stars at a place of such promise, such intrigue, even such wonder, and, after some point, steadily progresses from unique investigation of faith and duty to middlebrow European co-production — a rather enervating thing, then, that left me thinking “no more movies like this, ever” while a sizable portion of its runtime was still left. There isn’t a precise image of the type of movie to which I’m referring, but I can at least say it goes something like this: an English-speaking (often American) star in a well-dressed, amply lit European nation, surrounded by foreign actors who rarely (if ever) speak their native tongue. I’d come right out and say it’s best embodied by, say, Suite Française,...

Like an apparition that dissipates back into the ether before it can assume any meaningful shape, Rebecca Zlotowski’s “Planetarium” is a starry-eyed and somnambulant period adventure that captures the spirit of the movies at the expense of their soul. The film, which stars Natalie Portman and Lily-Rose Depp as vagabond sisters who land in Paris between the two great wars of the 20th century, begins with a compellingly morbid notion: Cinema isn’t dead, cinema is death itself. If only Zlotowski’s latest contribution to the medium ever found any life of its own.

A beautiful wisp of an idea that is seldom compelling and almost never coherent, “Planetarium” squanders an irresistibly alluring premise. Loosely inspired by the Fox sisters and other formative figures in the field of Spiritualism, the film clings to Laura (Portman) and Kate (Depp) Barlow as tightly as the siblings cling to each other. Orphaned...

Ground Control: Winocour Pours on the Paranoia with Tense Thriller

Director and screenwriter Alice Winocour crafts a sweaty-palmed, Ptsd inclined thriller with sophomore effort, Disorder. Somewhat inclined as a French version of The Bodyguard (1992), itself a muddled American pop culture homage to Kurosawa’s 1961 samurai classic Yojimbo, this odd genre mixture arrives with troubling political undertones hovering in the paranoid perimeter of a debatably deranged security guard’s watch of a wealthy Lebanese businessman’s family. Decidedly simplistic in form, it’s an elegantly crafted exercise enhanced by its particularly complex audio design, initially positioning its sullen protagonist as merely a madman approaching a breaking point. But more is revealed in the frequent display of observational skills, including a variety of non-verbal cues shared between its main characters through increasingly murky intrigue.

Recently returned from serving in Afghanistan, Vincent (Mathias Schoenaerts) suffers from night terrors and bouts of debilitating paranoia.

Other winners at the cinematography festival in Poland included Alfonso Cuaron’s Gravity.Scroll down for full list of winners

Competition winners at Camerimage, the International Film Festival of the Art of Cinematography, were revealed today as the 21st edition came to a close with a gala awards celebration at the Opera Nova in Bydgoszcz, Poland.

The winner of the top prize - the Golden Frog - went to Polish drama Ida, directed by Paweł Pawlikowski, the latest in a string of top awards for the film.

Ida cinematographers Lukasz Zal and Ryszard Lenczewski accepted the award.

The film stars newcomer Agata Trzebuchowska opposite Polish star Agata Kulesza in the story of a young novitiate nun in 1960s Poland who is on the verge of taking her vows when she discovers a dark family secret dating back to the years of the Nazi occupation.

It marks the first Polish-language film for Warsaw-born British filmmaker Pawlikowski, best known for...

Soon You Will Know: Zlotowski’s Sophomore Effort a Bleak and Appealing Entanglement

Reuniting with Lea Seydoux, the star of her 2010 film, Belle Epine, filmmaker Rebecca Zlotowski returns with dark romantic drama, Grand Central, set within the closed off community of nuclear power plant workers. The maudlin romantic triangle at the center of the film may unfortunately be overlooked or outshined due to other higher profile projects of domestic discord also featuring this film’s two leads (Lea Seydoux in Blue Is the Warmest Colour; Tahar Rahim in The Past). While not as forceful as either of those two features, Zlotowski’s latest is a superlative portrait of contaminated passion, using its overtly specific metaphors to create a quietly memorable tale.

We meet Gary (Rahim) as he’s being pickpocketed on a train by the scampy Tcherno (Johan Libereau). Catching up with his perpetrator, they bond rather than argue, and...

A Scandalous Method: Winocour’s Debut a Rich Case Study

Celebrated filmmaker Alice Winocour, renowned for several of her short films, makes a compelling debut with Augustine, based on the real life case study of a highly publicized teenage patient of a 19th century French neurologist. Subtle and sharply observed, unlike the shrill and spurious 2011 David Cronenberg A Dangerous Method, which shares similar unprofessional patient and doctor themes, Winocour creates an entrancing, impressionistic portrayal of historical sexism and exploitation.

In 1885 Paris, Augustine (Soko), an illiterate housemaid, suffers from a series of seizures, which usually results in partial paralysis of various body parts. After one such violent and very public display, Augustine awakens to find one of her eyes shut tight, and so her cousin, who works in the same household, shuttles her off to the Hospital of Pitie Salpetre and there she is placed under observation by the famed Professor...

NEW YORK -- By only his third feature, the misanthropy of director Bruno Dumont is already beginning to get wearisome. This latest effort, a tedious road movie in which a young couple drive around the desert, stopping occasionally to have animalistic sex, is presumably intended to be significant because of its shocker of an ending. That would be all well and good if the filmmaker has something significant to say, but "Twentynine Palms" is ultimately a hollow and pointless exercise. Currently being showcased at the Rendez-Vous With French Cinema 2004 series at New York's Walter Reade Theatre, the film opens commercially later in the spring.

Filmed in California's Joshua Tree Desert -- the widescreen compositions of Georges Lechaptois are quite beautiful -- the film chronicles the seemingly interminable road trip undertaken by David David Wissak), an American, and his Eastern European, French-speaking girlfriend, Katia (Katia Golubeva). Proving the adage about being wary of movies in which the characters' names are the same as the actors, David and Katia are virtual ciphers

indeed, they barely communicate even with each other as neither speaks the other's language.

But they do have sex, and quite a lot of it, rendered in highly graphic but ultimately laughable scenes because the onscreen orgasms are so violent and torrential in nature that one fears for the performers' safety. Needless to say, this aspect of the film, with the couplings often taking place outdoors in quite scenic locations, will no doubt figure prominently in the international marketing campaign.

The film's climax, a particularly brutal episode, won't be revealed here, but suffice it to say that memories of "Deliverance" are likely to be stirred. The director has said that he intended "Twentynine Palms" to be a horror film, but the label ill matches the sleep-inducing proceedings on display.

Twentynine Palms

Wellspring

Credits:

Director-screenwriter: Bruno Dumont

Producers: Jean Brehat, Rachid Bouchareb

Executive producers: Muriel Merlin in association with the 7th Floor, Allen Bain, Jesse Scolaro, Darren Goldberg

Director of photography: Georges Lechaptois

Editor: Dominique Petrot

Cast:

Katia: Katia Golubeva

David: David Wissak

No MPAA rating

Running time -- 130 minutes...

NEW YORK -- By only his third feature, the misanthropy of director Bruno Dumont is already beginning to get wearisome. This latest effort, a tedious road movie in which a young couple drive around the desert, stopping occasionally to have animalistic sex, is presumably intended to be significant because of its shocker of an ending. That would be all well and good if the filmmaker has something significant to say, but "Twentynine Palms" is ultimately a hollow and pointless exercise. Currently being showcased at the Rendez-Vous With French Cinema 2004 series at New York's Walter Reade Theatre, the film opens commercially later in the spring.

Filmed in California's Joshua Tree Desert -- the widescreen compositions of Georges Lechaptois are quite beautiful -- the film chronicles the seemingly interminable road trip undertaken by David David Wissak), an American, and his Eastern European, French-speaking girlfriend, Katia (Katia Golubeva). Proving the adage about being wary of movies in which the characters' names are the same as the actors, David and Katia are virtual ciphers

indeed, they barely communicate even with each other as neither speaks the other's language.

But they do have sex, and quite a lot of it, rendered in highly graphic but ultimately laughable scenes because the onscreen orgasms are so violent and torrential in nature that one fears for the performers' safety. Needless to say, this aspect of the film, with the couplings often taking place outdoors in quite scenic locations, will no doubt figure prominently in the international marketing campaign.

The film's climax, a particularly brutal episode, won't be revealed here, but suffice it to say that memories of "Deliverance" are likely to be stirred. The director has said that he intended "Twentynine Palms" to be a horror film, but the label ill matches the sleep-inducing proceedings on display.

Twentynine Palms

Wellspring

Credits:

Director-screenwriter: Bruno Dumont

Producers: Jean Brehat, Rachid Bouchareb

Executive producers: Muriel Merlin in association with the 7th Floor, Allen Bain, Jesse Scolaro, Darren Goldberg

Director of photography: Georges Lechaptois

Editor: Dominique Petrot

Cast:

Katia: Katia Golubeva

David: David Wissak

No MPAA rating

Running time -- 130 minutes...