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While 2014 saw the passing of (reluctant) New Wave icon Alain Resnais, there was an intense resurgence of interest in the directorial efforts of Last Year at Marienbad (1961) scribe Alain Robbe-Grillet. Grillet and Resnais would never collaborate again, but it left the screenwriter with his own directorial options, which he used to explore his abstract fetishes in a filmography that would span ten films, many of which never made it to the United States. Kino Lorber’s Redemption label resurrected five rare titles for Blu-ray over the past year, including his 1963 debut L’immortelle and New Wave classic Trans-Europ-Express (1967). But it would be Grillet’s eighth feature that would serve to be his most internationally renowned, the 1983 La Belle Captive, which chanteys its way into Blu-ray this month courtesy of Olive Films. No more cohesive than any of the other puzzling titles in his filmography, the stunning work from DoP Henri Alekan...

Edited by Adam Cook

Above: there is no news this week more monumental than that of the return of Twin Peaks. In 2016, we'll have nine new episodes, all directed by David Lynch. The 72nd issue of Senses of Cinema is now online, and amidst a plethora of content, features an amazing dossier on "one of the true legends of Australian screen culture," John Flaus. Also included is a piece by Tony McKibbin on a new Alain Robbe-Grillet box set—and in Mubi Us, we're currently hosting a retrospective on the Robbe-Grillet featuring Trans-Europ-Express, L'immortelle, Eden and After, and Successive Slidings of Pleasure. Writing for Reverse Shot, Adam Nayman offers his two cents on Mia Hansen-Love's Eden:

"Time is a weapon in the movies of Mia Hansen-Løve. The gaping narrative holes in the middles of All Is Forgiven, The Father of My Children, and Goodbye First Love are exit wounds,...

Redemption Films revives several more titles in its continuing resurgence of Alain Robbe-Grillet with his 1968 film, The Man Who Lies. Starring the director’s preferred leading man, Jean-Louis Trintignant, it’s an interesting exercise that seems perfectly calibrated for Robbe-Grillet’s style of filmmaking, that of the fractured, elliptical narrative. Here, we follow a protagonist who makes up his story as he goes along, which feels not unlike how Robbe-Grillet writes his narratives, where a series of accidental strands may or may not work together to create a discernible tale.

While running from a band of soldiers in hot pursuit, Boris (Jean-Louis Trintignant) stumbles into a small European town and ingratiates himself upon the community by claiming to be the friend of one of their missing citizens named Jean Robin. Arriving at Robin’s castle, he seduces his maid, his sister, and his wife, each telling them some fabricated tale about his associations with Robin.

Kino’s Redemption label continues with the resurrection of New Wave provocateur Alain Robbe-Grillet’s 1963 directorial debut, L’Immortelle, (this is the third title in the planned series, and we can expect to see three more) a stylistic mish-mash of surreal flourishes, sensuality, and mysterious foreboding. Arriving two years after Robbe-Grillet penned the landmark film Last Year at Marienbad for director Alain Resnais, the first outing feels indebted to the look and style of his collaboration with Resnais, despite the realization that his framework for this film was actually developed first. Featuring the highly stylized cinematography of Maurice Berry, Robbe-Grillet transforms Istanbul into a perversely abandoned palette of architectural facades, calling into question the notion of originality and restoration, dreams and waking life.

A Frenchman traveling in Istanbul, known only as N (Jacques Doniol-Valcroze) seems to be aimlessly experiencing the landscape when he runs into a beautiful, mysterious woman (Francoise Brion...

Trans-Europ-Express (1967)

Redemption films resurrects two long unavailable titles from director Alain Robbe-Grillet, a member of the Nouvelle Vague best known as the screenwriter for Last Year at Marienbad, the surrealist classic from Alain Resnais. As a director, Robbe-Grillet has a lesser known yet equally lucrative body of work, consisting of ten titles that seem to exist somewhere out in the frayed hinterlands of any sort of definable movement. Many of his titles will put you in mind of works by other filmmakers, but each title seems to walk the line between sweet dream and beautiful nightmare, defying notions of narrative and, often, logic. That said, his films don’t cater to popular tastes, and many of his titles as director seem to have floated into an oblivion, the exception being his 1983 fantasy/nightmare La Belle Captive, one of his few offerings available on DVD. Until now, that is. While the...

Belgium is country of honour at summer festival in French capital which also hosts the industry-focused Paris Project co-production market.

Roman Polanski’s Venus in Fur, starring his wife Emmanuelle Seigner opposite Mathieu Amalric as an actress and director embroiled in a racy, pschological battle of the sexes, will open this year’s Paris Cinema film festival.

The summer, public-focused event has drawn heavily on Cannes for its 11th edition, running June 28 to July 9.

There will be previews of Abdellatif Kechiche’s Palme d’Or winner Blue, in the presence of co-stars Adèle Exarchopoulos and Léa Seydoux, as well as Ari Folman’s Directors’ Fortnight opener The Congress and Francois Ozon’s Palme d’Or contender Young and Beautiful among others.

Some 50 upcoming titles will screen at the festival.

The International Competition includes Singaporean Anthony Chen’s Ilo Ilo, which won the Camera d’Or for best first feature film in Cannes, and [link=nm...

After establishing his reputation as a playwright, Martin McDonagh made a remarkably confident movie debut in 2004 directing the Oscar-winning, half-hour Six Shooter, set on a train in his native Ireland, where grieving widower Brendan Gleeson is confronted by a gun-toting psychopath. He followed it up in 2008 with his first feature, the dazzling, accomplished In Bruges, a conscious cross between Hemingway's The Killers and Beckett's Waiting for Godot in which Gleeson and Colin Farrell play Irish hitmen waiting for their psychopathic British boss to dictate their next assignment. Now McDonagh has moved to the States, where his hero, Colin Farrell, is Marty, an incipient alcoholic Irish playwright working on a Hollywood film, and the number of psychopaths involved has exponentially advanced to seven.

At the opening of the startling and funny Seven Psychopaths the camera pans across the hills above Los Angeles, taking in the iconic sign that has loomed over...