News

In director Dominik Moll’s superb 2022 police thriller, The Night of the 12th, the focus was on French detectives pursuing a vicious killer who was forever out of reach. The closer they came to nabbing him, the more he got away, leaving them to turn in circles year after year during a long, existential quest that left none of them unscathed.

In that movie, the cops were flawed human beings and clearly chauvinistic (there was only one woman on the squad), but they were still the good guys. In Dossier 137, a piercing slow-burn examination of police brutality, the tables have turned and the cops have become the criminals, making us question the very notion of policing in a France racked by social unrest and class division. Made with the same laser-cut precision as his previous work, but with a greater emphasis on procedure than before, Moll’s new thriller...

A rare flagship indie producer left on the French market, Bruno Nahon’s Paris-based company Unité is preparing to conquer international audiences with “Rematch,” a period psychological thriller chronicling the historical battle between world chess champion Garry Kasparov, and Ibm’s supercomputer Deep Blue in 1997.

The sprawling show, directed by Yan England (“The Red Band Society”) and co-created with Nahon and André Gulluni (“Sam”), was commissioned by Arte in France and has already been sold by Federation Studios to major outlets around the world, including HBO Europe for Spain, Portugal, the Nordics, Iceland, Baltics, Central Europe, Greece and the Netherlands. Disney+ has bought first-window rights for the U.K. and will air the show in France after the Arte broadcast.

Nahon, who created Unité a decade ago, has been making bold shows and movies exploring social, religious and political aspects of societies, and has often captured the zeitgeist in the process.

Watching a police-procedural homicide drama, whether it’s the grungiest of VOD potboilers or the most visionary film of the genre, Michael Mann’s silvery, dread-drenched “Manhunter,” we more or less know one thing: At the end of two hours, the grisly mystery we’ve been dunked in will have its catharsis and its resolution. We will know who the killer is, and in knowing that a kind of order will have been restored. David Fincher’s “Zodiac,” with its tantalizing ambiguities, might stand as an exception to the form — a singular winding creep-out, without the closure we’re thirsting for — yet even there you feel, by the end, that you’ve glimpsed the face of evil.

But “The Night of the 12th,” the French thriller that was nominated for 10 César Awards and won six of them, including best picture (it opens here on May 19), throws the audience a slow-motion...

Besting the likes of Albert Serra’s Pacifiction and Louis Garrel’s The Innocent to win Best Film at this year’s César Awards––not to mention picking up six other awards––Dominik Moll’s mystery thriller The Night of the 12th is now arriving at U.S. shores to kick off the summer. Based on a true crime book by Pauline Guéna, the film was picked up by Film Movement for a May 19 theatrical release, and we’re pleased to exclusively debut the first trailer.

“In nearly every police precinct, detectives are inevitably confronted with a case that goes unsolved. The more heinous the crime, the more it haunts those whose duty it is solve it,” the synopsis reads. “Such is the dilemma for Yohan Vivès—a young, recently promoted police Captain—when he begins investigating the gruesome murder of a young women named Clara in the town of Grenoble.

Animation ‘Mummies’, French hit ‘The Night Of The 12th’ also open.

Action adventure Dungeons & Dragons: Honour Among Thieves sets off on its UK-Ireland box office run this weekend in 680 cinemas through eOne.

The film depicts a charming thief and band of unlikely adventurers who embark on a quest to retrieve a lost relic, but run afoul of the wrong people.

It is based on the tabletop role playing game that was first published in 1974, which has become one of the most popular tabletop games worldwide, with the game’s publisher Wizards Of The Coast claiming that over 50 million people...

A young woman is murdered in this unnerving, fictionalised version of a real case that haunts the police officers unable to solve it

French film-maker Dominik Moll has given us a gripping true-crime procedural, a desolate study of the ubiquity of evil and misogynist violence and the abyss of unknowing into which everyone finds themselves gazing: crime victims, relatives and the police themselves. And crime in the real world is often not bounded by the Agatha Christie conventions of clearcut motives and culprits unmasked.

Moll and screenwriter Gilles Marchand have fictionalised a real case recounted by the French author Pauline Guéna in her 2020 eyewitness reportage book 18.3: Une Année à la Pj, for which she was embedded for a year with France’s Police Judiciaire (equivalent to the UK’s Cid); 18.3 being that part of the French penal code which governs their existence. On a certain ominous night in 2016, a...

It’s clear from the outset that the murderer in Dominik Moll’s true crime procedural will never be found as an intertitle notifies us that 20% of murder investigations in France go unsolved. But while a specific killer may not be unmasked, toxic masculinity and its co-conspirator the patriarchal society stand in the dock - and the case against them is damning.

Clara Royer (Lula Cotton-Frapier) is a pretty typical 21-year-old, although we get to know her in person only briefly, as she leaves a friend’s house in the small hours, enthusiastically recording a voice message on her phone, unaware her murderer is lying in wait. It’s a premeditated and horrific crime, brought home by Moll in a way that feels bleak without being voyeuristic. Based on part of Pauline Guéna’s non-fiction book Une année à la Pj - concerning the workings of the police judiciaire (a sort of detective hive off.

Hollywood star power enlivens the Césars in Paris last night Photo: Academie des Césars

Director Dominik Moll had to wait 22 years to bag his second César, as Best Director for The Night Of The 12th, a thriller which delves into issues of gender and violence. It was a major winner in last night’s César awards, France’s answer to the Oscars, also winning the award for Best Film. Bouli Lanners and Bastien Bouillon, as two cops trying to solve a gruesome murder, received actor nods as Best Supporting Actor and Best Male Newcomer respectively.

Written in tandem with his frequent collaborator Gilles Marchand the pair were also rewarded with best adapted screenplay from the novel by Pauline Guéna. The last time Moll received the Best Director César was in 2001 for another thriller, Harry, He's Here To Help.

Happy nights: Virginie Emir named Best Actress in the Césars Photo: Academie...

Raft of sales for police procedural following Cannes Premiere debut.

Memento International has sold Dominik Moll’s The Night Of The 12th to a slew of territories, including the US and the UK, following its debut in Cannes’ Premiere section.

Film Movement has acquired the title in North America, while Picturehouse Entertainment has picked it up for the UK and Ireland.

Night Of The 12th has also sold to Australia and New Zealand (Potential Films), Latin America (Impacto), Taiwan (Swallow Wings), Poland (Aurora), the Baltics (A-one Films) and Israel (Lev Cinema).

The sales are the latest in a raft of...

French director Dominik Moll’s seventh feature debuts in the Cannes Premiere section.

Memento International has unveiled first deals for French director Dominik Moll’s Night Of The 12th ahead of its debut in Official Selection’s Cannes Premiere section.

In Europe, it has sold to Italy (Teodora), Spain (Filmin), Greece (Cinobo), ex-Yugoslavia (McF Megacom), Bulgaria (Beta Films) and Ascot Elite has acquired rights for Austria, Germany and Switzerland.

The title is also generating interest in Asia with deals for Japan (Tohokushinsha Film Corporation) and Indonesia (Pt Falcon).

Paris-based Haut et Court, which produced the film, distributes in France. Brussel-based...

High-profile French creators and showrunners, David Elkaïm, Vincent Poymiro, and producer Jeremy Sahel, are joining forces with Anca, a banner which is backed by German powerhouse Beta Group, to develop and produce ambitious TV series.

Anca was created in 2021 by Rose Brandford Griffith and Christophe Thoral, two former bosses of Lagardere Studios, to invest in production banners.

Elkaïm, Poymiro and Sahel’s production company Perpetual Soup marks Anca’s first investment with a minority stake. Poymiro and Elkaïm are known for having written a pair of top-rated drama series ordered by Arte, “Ainsi soient-ils” and “En Thérapie,” the French adaptation of Hagai Levi’s series “BeTipul” (“In Treatment”).

The Paris-based outfit is at Series Mania with “Le monde de demain,” a show about the birth of France’s hip-hop movement in the 1980s which will soon launch on Arte in France and Netflix globally. A critically acclaimed screenwriter involved in both movies and series,...

Colcoa, the L.A.-based French film and series festival, has unveiled the television section of its upcoming 25th anniversary edition.

“In Treatment,” Eric Toledano and Olivier Nakache’s French adaptation of the original Israeli series “BeTipul”; Julie Delpy’s series debut “On The Verge”; and “Germinal,” the 19th century-set ambitious period series adapted from Emile Zola’s masterpiece created by Julien Lilti (“Hippocrate”) are among the nine TV titles set to have their North American premiere at Colcoa.

The other series set to compete at Colcoa include “High Intellectual Potential” starring Audrey Fleurot (“Spiral”) as an intractable cleaning lady-turned-ace detective and “Nona and her Daughters,” co-written and directed by Valerie Donzelli (“Declaration of War”).

Set to take place Nov. 1-7 at the DGA, the festival will showcase 12 programs, including seven series, four TV movies and one documentary. The section is being backed by Titrafilm and has enlisted some of France’s top companies,...

Exclusive: Cush Jumbo (The Good Fight), James Nesbitt (The Missing), Richard Armitage (The Stranger) and Sarah Parish (Bancroft) have been set as cast in the series adaptation of Harlan Coben’s New York Times bestselling novel Stay Close at Netflix.

Nicola Shindler is exec producing the project for Studiocanal-owned Red Production Company, alongside Coben, Danny Brocklehurst and Richard Fee. Creator Coben is penning the eight-episode show alongside lead writer Brocklehurst and Fee. Juliet Charlesworth (Happy Valley) is series producer and Daniel O’Hara (The Stranger) is lead director and an exec producer.

In keeping with previous Coben adaptations at Netflix, Stay Close will be relocated from the U.S. to the UK. The story follows three people living comfortable lives who each conceal dark secrets that even the closest to them would never suspect; Megan (Jumbo), a working mother of three; Ray (Armitage), the once promising documentary photographer, now stuck in...