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Long before Stanley Kubrick made waves with book adaptations like The Shining and A Clockwork Orange, he directed one of the most powerful anti-war stories of all time. Based on Humphry Cobb’s book, Paths of Glory is a powerful anti-war drama that explores the futility of battle. But, in true Kubrick style, the film condemns war by creatively dissecting the power structures that sustain it.

Paths of Glory is less about the battlefield and more about the forces pulling the strings behind the scenes: the generals who see soldiers as disposable, the bureaucratic system that turns life-and-death decisions into calculated operations, and the ethical compromises made in the name of victory. Kubrick shifts the spotlight from combat to corruption, making a war film where the real enemy is the system itself.

Paths of Glory Explores the Machinations Behind War

In 1916, during the First World War in Northern France, French...

Standing in the rain, on a barge on the Seine, waiting to be part of the Opening Ceremony for the Paris Olympics, American sprinter Noah Lyles was already talking about his desire to rewatch the entire launch, presumably from a warm and dry place.

“I just love seeing moments made,” explained Lyles, an absurdly charismatic figure on the verge of global ubiquity.

Lyles will get a kick out of the Paris opening when he gets around to his rewatch, especially if he’s watching on a service with a fast-forward button.

Your typical Olympics Opening Ceremony represents a desperate and wildly expensive struggle to deliver one or two moments that people will be talking about for the following two weeks, if not for years to come. Masterminded by artistic director Thomas Jolly, the Opening Ceremony from Paris provided possibly dozens of wild, visually stunning and even emotional moments. I’d...

Celine Dion overcame the challenge of stiff person syndrome at the Opening Ceremony of the Paris Olympics on Friday to give her first live performance in four years.

Dressed in a striking white gown, she belted out Edith Piaf’s classic song Hymne de l’Amour (Hymn To Love) as the final number of the ceremony against the backdrop of the Eiffel Tower.

It marked the end of an extravagant, four-hour 2024 Olympics opening ceremony unfolding along a six-kilometer (4.5 mile) stretch of the River Seine under the pouring rain.

There was hardly a dry eye along the river at the end of the Dion’s dramatic return after battling stiff person syndrome for close to five years.

Related: Lady Gaga Pays Tribute To French Culture At Olympics Opening Ceremony With Cabaret Tune ‘Mon Truc En Plumes’

The star, who last performed live in New York in the spring of 2020, has strong connections with the Olympic games.

France has set its sights on making history on Friday with its audacious Paris 2024 Olympics opening ceremony unfolding on the River Seine in the heart of the French capital.

Kicking off at 7:30 p.m. local time, it will be the first ever Olympic inauguration to take place on a river and outside of a sports stadium for its entirety.

Over the course of three hours and 45 minutes (if the planned timing is respected), close to 7,000 of the 10,500 athletes competing in the games, representing 206 national delegations, will travel in 94 boats along a six-kilometer (3.7 mile) stretch of the river between the Pont d’Austerlitz and Pont d’Iena bridges.

The water parade will pass beside or under a host of Paris landmarks including the Notre Dame Cathedral, currently under re-construction following the devastating 2019 fire; the Pont Neuf, the Louvre and Place de la Concorde to arrive at the foot of the Eiffel Tower.

Yoav (Tom Mercier) is speed-walking down the rainy streets of Paris, past cafes and cars and people reading newspapers; he’s moving so fast that the camera can barely keep up with him. Once he finds the apartment he’s going to crash in —and the key to the front door under the mat — the twentysomething Israeli makes himself at home. Halfway through some interrupted mid-shower onanism, Yoav runs into the bare living room, slips on the hardwood floor…and finds that everything from his clothes to his sleeping bag has just been stolen.

Close-Up is a feature that spotlights films now playing on Mubi. Grand Illusion (1937) is showing July 27 - August 26, 2017 in the United States as part of the retrospective Jean Renoir.Considering Jean Renoir's Grand Illusion today in no small part involves an awareness of status and stature, the most prominent (or maybe just the most intimidating) aspect of which surely being the cherished status the film continues to enjoy in the canon of film history. To this day, it remains a singular achievement, not only as one of Renoir's foundational masterpieces, but also as a film of its time whose contents have remained timeless. Released in 1937 to great acclaim, it bid farewell to one era of European history and warfare as another, far darker one was about to begin; thus, more than the grimly comical The Rules of the Game (made and released two years closer to the brink...

World War, a solemn vow, and a promise betrayed lead to a ‘night of the living war dead’ – all cooked up by the director of Napoleon, Abel Gance. The early, famed pacifist fantasy is back in near-perfect condition and restored to its full length. It’s a reworking, not a remake, of Gance’s 1919 silent classic.

J’accuse

Blu-ray

Olive Films

1938 / B&W / 1:37 flat full frame / 120 min. / That They May Live; J’accuse: Fresque tragique des temps modernes vue et Réalisée par Abel Gance / Street Date November 15, 2016 / available through the Olive Films website / 29.98

Starring Victor Francen, Line Noro, Marie Lou, Jean-Max, Paul Amiot, Jean-Louis Barrault, Marcel Delaitre, Renée Devillers, Romuald Joubé, André Nox, Georges Rollin, Georges Saillard.

Cinematography Roger Hubert

Film Editor Madeleine Crétoile

Original Music Henri Verdun

Written by Abel Gance, Steve Passeur

Produced & Directed by Abel Gance

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

Around 1973, UCLA film school professor Bob Epstein...

The already-incredible line-up for the 2016 New York Film Festival just got even more promising. Ang Lee‘s Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk will hold its world premiere at the festival on October 14th, the NY Times confirmed today. The adaptation of Ben Fountain‘s Iraq War novel, with a script by Simon Beaufoy (Slumdog Millionaire), follows a teenage soldier who survives a battle in Iraq and then is brought home for a victory lap before returning.

Lee has shot the film at 120 frames per second in 4K and native 3D, giving it unprecedented clarity for a feature film, which also means the screening will be held in a relatively small 300-seat theater at AMC Lincoln Square, one of the few with the technology to present it that way. While it’s expected that this Lincoln Square theater will play the film when it arrives in theaters, it may be...

The Film Society of Lincoln Center has announced the Retrospective section of the 54th New York Film Festival, an ambitious two-part lineup that is both headlined and directly inspired by Bertrand Tavernier’s documentary “My Journey Through French Cinema.” Nyff will screen Tavernier’s doc — which clocks in at a hefty and informative 190 minutes — along with a selection of French classics that feature prominently in the film. Additionally, Nyff will play home to a 12-film exploration of the films of Henry Hathaway, one of Tavernier’s favorite American directors. What follows is a feast of French cinema and a crash course in the works of Hathaway.

Read More: New York Film Festival Announces James Gray’s ‘The Lost City of Z’ As Closing Night Selection

Highlights of the “A Brief Journey Through French Cinema” section, as it’s being quite charmingly billed, include Jean Renoir’s revolutionary epic “La Marsellaise,...

The new 2K digitization and restoration of Jean-Luc Godard's Masculin Féminin (1966) that premiered at the Cannes Film Festival is exclusively playing on Mubi in most countries around the world May 22 - June 21, 2016.Over opening credit titles that proclaim the film to be a French production, the “La Marseillaise,” the French national anthem, is heard being whistled off-screen. Then, spelt out with grating gunshots, the film’s title: Ma – Scu – Lin FÉMININ: 15 Faits PRÉCIS.It’s Paris. 1965. Sex, violence, revolution—change is in the air. Two youths, one male and one female, meet in a small cafe and begin a love affair. Paul (Jean-Pierre Léaud) is a passionate idealist who is driven by poetry and literature and is becoming increasingly indignant with the commercialization (read: Americanization) of the world around him. Madeline (Chantal Goya) is a hard worker who has a stable job at a magazine and is pursuing her...

A retrospective at San Sebastian Film Festival will show all 13 of Jacques Becker's features. Photo: Courtesy of San Sebastian Film Festival San Sebastian Film Festival has announced that it will dedicate a retrospective to French filmmaker Jacques Becker.

The Parisian-born director, who was born in 1906, only made 13 features - from his first Dernier Atout, in 1942, to his final film The Hole (Le Trou), released in 1960, the month after he died.

Born into money, he considered himself a Communist and trained in the cinema of the Popular Front, working as Jean Renoir's assistant on films including The Grand Illusion, Madame Bovary and The Marseillaise.

His work includes Casque d’Or, Edward and Caroline (Édouard et Caroline) and Hands Off The Loot (Touchez pas au grisbi) and he was a key name in the evolution of French Cinema. The Cahiers du cinéma critics saw in him the modernity that they...

"If anyone earned the title of the fifth Beatle, it was George," Sir Paul McCartney wrote Wednesday after the death of legendary producer George Martin. That's no small tribute, but Martin earned it. Aside from signing the Beatles when no one else would - a laurel plenty of people would have been happy to rest on - he worked closely with the group in the studio, where he and Abbey Road engineer Geoff Emerick embarked on a series of musical innovations that made the Beatles' discography as groundbreaking as it was catchy. Below, some of Martin's best moments with the group.

"If anyone earned the title of the fifth Beatle, it was George," Sir Paul McCartney wrote Wednesday after the death of legendary producer George Martin. That's no small tribute, but Martin earned it. Aside from signing the Beatles when no one else would - a laurel plenty of people would have been happy to rest on - he worked closely with the group in the studio, where he and Abbey Road engineer Geoff Emerick embarked on a series of musical innovations that made the Beatles' discography as groundbreaking as it was catchy. Below, some of Martin's best moments with the group.

On the occasion of Bam's screening of Straub-Huillet's Class Relations on May 1 for International Workers' Day, a text on the film by infrequently translated French writer-critic Louis Seguin.

***

Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet are afraid of nothing. To use as a title, in 1984, for an adaptation of Amerika, those “class relations” whose conception figures so prominently in The German Ideology is tantamount to either obliviousness or provocation. There’s nothing more absurd or more obsolete than being stuck in the past with these rapprochements that were already out of fashion ten years ago. Is it not understood, within the very small world of film criticism, that Marx—once more but for good, for the last time—is definitively forgotten, buried, and that any allusion, any reference to him will only provoke one of those smiles mixing the respect we owe saints of the recent past and the pitiable irony such vain perseverance calls forth?...

After the first screening of the restored Napoleon, Abel Gance’s beleaguered 1927 masterwork, at the Empire Leicester Square, London, on November 30th, 1980, the director of the British Film Institute Anthony Smith was quoted as saying “After Sunday the world will be divided into those who have seen Napoleon and those who haven’t.” The world of the haves over the have-nots expanded to the Us the following year when Francis Ford Coppola famously brought Napoleon to Radio City Music Hall to be performed with his father’s score, but in the intervening three decades the film has not been seen again in the Us. Come March 24th, however, thanks to the San Francisco Silent Film Festival, the world will once again be divided between those who have and those who haven’t when the film returns to the Us for four screenings of Kevin Brownlow’s complete restoration—accompanied by...

You remember the scene in "Casablanca" in which Victor Lazlo (Paul Henreid) ticks off the Nazis by leading a stirring rendition of "La Marseillaise," the French national anthem. That scene was copied from one in "La Grande Illusion," Frenchman Jean Renoir's brilliant 1937 antiwar movie -- one of 22 films unreeling in a Renoir retrospective at Bam Rose Cinemas. The series was programmed by Jake Perlin and Florence Almozini, who had this to...