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Arrow Video is excited to announce the bow of their new subscription-based Arrow platform, available in the US and Canada beginning October 1. Building on the success of the Arrow Video Channel and expanding its availability across multiple devices and countries, Arrow boasts a selection of cult classics, hidden gems and iconic horror films, all curated by the Arrow Video team.

Arrow Video Channel begins streaming this October with headliners The Deeper You Dig, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Crumbs, The Hatred, Cold Light of Day, Videoman and The Herschell Gordon Lewis Feast. Also immediately available are perennial Halloween hits Hellraiser 1 & 2, Elvira, Ringu, tthe complete Gamera series, as well as full collections from the Arrow archives packed with exclusive extras, rarely seen interviews and documentaries.

The Deeper You Dig, the latest feature written, directed by and starring filmmaking family The Adams Family, leads the lineup of Arrow's launch, joined by The Adams Family's The Hatred,...

In today's edition of Horror Highlights, we have details on the Arrow streaming platform, the trailer for Expulsion, and a Q&a with Jacob Bloomfield-Misrach to discuss his work on 12 Hour Shift:

Arrow Launches New Streaming Platform in North America in Time for Halloween: "London, UK - Arrow Video is excited to announce the bow of their new subscription-based Arrow platform, available in the US and Canada beginning October 1. Building on the success of the Arrow Video Channel and expanding its availability across multiple devices and countries, Arrow boasts a selection of cult classics, hidden gems and iconic horror films, all curated by the Arrow Video team.

Arrow begins streaming with headliners The Deeper You Dig, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Crumbs, The Hatred, Cold Light of Day, Videoman and The Herschell Gordon Lewis Feast. Also immediately available are perennial Halloween hits Hellraiser 1 & 2, Elvira, Ringu, tthe complete Gamera series,...

If the saving of human lives somehow isn’t enough to incentivize people yet to stay home to reduce the spread of coronavirus, this might help: by not doing so you are potentially causing the July release of Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch to be delayed. Thus far, Searchlight is still banking on a July 24 theatrical debut of his star-studded, France-set ensemble feature and the promotion is continuing.

After learning production designer Adam Stockhausen created a whopping 125 sets for the film, cinematographer Robert Yeoman has now revealed the five French classics that Anderson had his cast and crew view to prepare for the shoot, which might help give a hint of the film’s tone.

Speaking with Indiewire, Yeoman says these films “gave us all the feeling of the French movies of the period, both thematically and stylistically.” Check them out below, including a snippet of Anderson discussing one of his all-time favorites.

Wes Anderson’s “The French Dispatch” is four months away from opening in theaters, but moviegoers can start preparing now by viewing the five French movies the director had his cast and crew watch before the start of production. Robert Yeoman, Anderson’s longtime cinematographer who has shot all of his live-action directorial efforts, shared in a statement that Anderson’s prep work for “The French Dispatch” included putting together “an extensive library of DVDs, books, and magazine articles” for the cast and crew to check out in order to help them “assimilate” into the film’s period setting. “The French Dispatch” cast includes Benicio del Toro, Adrien Brody, Tilda Swinton, Léa Seydoux, Frances McDormand, Timothée Chalamet, and Bill Murray.

Yeoman said Anderson’s film list featured Jean-Luc Godard’s 1962 drama “My Life to Live,” Henri-Georges Clouzot’s 1955 suspense movie “Diabolique,” Clouzot’s 1947 procedural “Quay of the Goldsmiths,” Max Ophüls’ anthology film “Le Plaisir,...

This devastating romantic melodrama is Max Ophüls’ best American picture — perhaps because it seems so European? It’s probably Joan Fontaine’s finest hour as well, and Louis Jourdan comes across as a great actor in a part perfect for his screen personality. The theme could be called, ‘No regrets,’ but also, ‘Everything is to be regretted.’

Letter from an Unknown Woman

Blu-ray

Olive Signature

1948 / B&W / 1:37 flat Academy / 87 min. / Street Date December 5, 2017 / available through the Olive Films website / 29.98

Starring: Joan Fontaine, Louis Jourdan, Mady Christians, Marcel Journet, Art Smith, Carol Yorke, Howard Freeman, John Good, Leo B. Pessin, Erskine Sanford, Otto Waldis, Sonja Bryden.

Cinematography: Franz Planer

Film Editor: Ted J. Kent

Original Music: Daniele Amfitheatrof

Written by Howard Koch from a story by Stefan Zweig

Produced by John Houseman

Directed by Max Ophüls

A young woman’s romantic nature goes beyond all limits, probing the nature of True Love.

Welcome to a pair of vintage mysteries with George Simenon’s popular Inspector Jules Maigret, a gumshoe who gets the tough cases. Top kick French actor Jean Gabin is the cop who keeps cool, until it’s time to rattle a recalcitrant suspect. In two separate cases, he tracks a serial killer in the heart of Paris, and travels to his hometown to unearth a murder conspiracy.

Maigret Sets a Trap

and

Maigret and the St. Fiacre Case

Blu-ray (separate releases)

Kino Classics

1958, 1959 / B&W /1:37 flat; 1:66 widescreen / 118, 101 min. / Street Date December 5, 2017 / available through Kino Lorber: Trap, St. Fiacre / 29.95 ea.

Starring: Jean Gabin, Annie Girardot, Jean Desailly, Olivier Hussenot, Lucienne Bogaert, Paulette Dubost, Lino Ventura, Dominique Page / Jean Gabin, Michel Auclair, Valentine Tessier, Michel Vitold, Camille Guérini, Gabrielle Fontan, Micheline Luccioni, Jacques Marin, Paul Frankeur, Robert Hirsch.

Cinematography: Louis Page

Film Editor: Henri Taverna

Original Music: Paul Misraki...

French film actor best known for Madame de … and La Ronde

There are few actors who embodied many people’s idea of a French woman of the world more than Danielle Darrieux, who has died aged 100. Starting as an ingenue in the 1930s, she grew into a sophisticate in the 40s and 50s, and retained a dignified and magical presence in films into the new century.

The outstanding examples of her art were the three films Darrieux made with the German-born Max Ophüls when she was in her 30s. In La Ronde (1950), she played the married woman who is seduced by a student (Daniel Gélin). The second and best of the three adapted tales by Guy de Maupassant in Le Plaisir (House of Pleasure, 1952) is La Maison Tellier, in which Darrieux played one of a group of prostitutes paying an annual holiday visit to the country. But it was the...

Danielle Darrieux in her Fifties hey-day Photo: UniFrance

The star acted right up to the present decade Photo: Unifrance The veteran French actress Danièle Darrieux (also credited as Danièle) has died in Paris at the age of 100.

She was particularly well known for her work with director Max Ophuls including La Ronde, made in 1950, in which she played a married woman who meets a young man (Daniel Gélin) for an assignation.

Two years later she worked with Opuls again on Le Plaisir as a good time girl, regretting her lost innocence. In 1953 she and Ophuls made the highly acclaimed The Earrings Of Madame De … in which she played opposite Vittorio De Sica.

Later she appeared in a tepid version of Lady Chatterley’s Lover in 1955 but her later career was rescued from the doldrums by `Jacques Demy who offered her singing roles in The Young Girls Of Rochefort in 1967 and...

Danièle Delorme: 'Gigi' 1949 actress and pioneering female film producer. Danièle Delorme: 'Gigi' 1949 actress was pioneering woman producer, politically minded 'femme engagée' Danièle Delorme, who died on Oct. 17, '15, at the age of 89 in Paris, is best remembered as the first actress to incarnate Colette's teenage courtesan-to-be Gigi and for playing Jean Rochefort's about-to-be-cuckolded wife in the international box office hit Pardon Mon Affaire. Yet few are aware that Delorme was featured in nearly 60 films – three of which, including Gigi, directed by France's sole major woman filmmaker of the '40s and '50s – in addition to more than 20 stage plays and a dozen television productions in a show business career spanning seven decades. Even fewer realize that Delorme was also a pioneering woman film producer, working in that capacity for more than half a century. Or that she was what in French is called a femme engagée...

Simone Simon in 'La Bête Humaine' 1938: Jean Renoir's film noir (photo: Jean Gabin and Simone Simon in 'La Bête Humaine') (See previous post: "'Cat People' 1942 Actress Simone Simon Remembered.") In the late 1930s, with her Hollywood career stalled while facing competition at 20th Century-Fox from another French import, Annabella (later Tyrone Power's wife), Simone Simon returned to France. Once there, she reestablished herself as an actress to be reckoned with in Jean Renoir's La Bête Humaine. An updated version of Émile Zola's 1890 novel, La Bête Humaine is enveloped in a dark, brooding atmosphere not uncommon in pre-World War II French films. Known for their "poetic realism," examples from that era include Renoir's own The Lower Depths (1936), Julien Duvivier's La Belle Équipe (1936) and Pépé le Moko (1937), and particularly Marcel Carné's Port of Shadows (1938) and Daybreak (1939).[11] This thematic and...

Caught

Directed by Max Ophüls

Written by Arthur Laurents

USA, 1949

Max Ophüls’ third feature in America, Caught, from 1949, is an evocative amalgam of a domesticated melodramatic tragedy and a dynamic film noir sensibility. The picture stars Barbara Bel Geddes as Leonora Eames, a studious adherent to charm school principles who dreams of becoming a glamorous model, or at least marrying a young, handsome millionaire. She gets the latter when she meets Smith Ohlrig (Robert Ryan), a wealthy “international something” who gives her the superficial materials she desires but little else. Their marriage is an arduous sham. He works late hours on unclear projects while she is left to dwell uselessly in their extravagant mansion. He’s cruel to her and careless. A way out of the stifling relationship comes in the form of a job as a doctor’s receptionist. Leonora leaves Ohlrig and moves into Manhattan, where she eventually...

Danielle Darrieux turns 97: Darrieux has probably enjoyed the longest film star career in history (photo: Danielle Darrieux in ‘La Ronde’) Screen legend Danielle Darrieux is turning 97 today, May 1, 2014. In all likelihood, the Bordeaux-born (1917) Darrieux has enjoyed the longest "movie star" career ever: eight decades, from Wilhelm Thiele’s Le Bal (1931) to Denys Granier-Deferre’s The Wedding Cake / Pièce montée (2010). (Mickey Rooney has had a longer film career — nearly nine decades — but mostly as a supporting player in minor roles.) Absurdly, despite a prestigious career consisting of more than 100 movie roles, Danielle Darrieux — delightful in Club de femmes, superb in The Earrings of Madame De…, alternately hilarious and heartbreaking in 8 Women — has never won an Honorary Oscar. But then again, very few women have. At least, the French Academy did award her an Honorary César back in 1985; additionally, in 2002 Darrieux and her fellow 8 Women / 8 femmes co-stars shared Best Actress honors...

The bloodless Cahiers du cinéma wars induced a vague but hugely influential criterion for what was to be considered good and bad in film. Elaborate sets, one of French cinema’s major traits that, in certain genres, could compete with Hollywood, were deemed stifling and were rejected in favor of urban spaces and real locations.

The infamy that Cahiers du cinéma’s critical bombardment brought to certain filmmakers, at least among a small circle of cinephiles, took years to reverse. While Cahiers du cinéma happened to be more generous to American cinema, fewer French directors were allowed to enter their cannon. If, for instance, one Robert Bresson did, otherwise many Jean Delannoys did not. While the art of some great filmmakers was acknowledged and they were given the throne, many others, who were less stylistically consistent, fell into oblivion.

Today, more than half a century after the Cahiers wars, and regardless of their accomplishments,...

After numerous viewings I'm happy to call Max Ophüls's Madame de…, made in 1953 and re-released in a new print, flawless. Ophüls returned from his extended Hollywood exile (which had resulted in four postwar films) to direct four stylish French movies, all with period settings. Made between Le Plaisir, his Maupassant portmanteau picture, and his final film, Lola Montès, this penultimate masterpiece stars Danielle Darrieux as a wilful French countess in fin-de-siècle Paris who falls in love with an Italian diplomat (Vittorio De Sica). The witty plot follows a pair of earrings given her by the Count (Charles Boyer) that pass from hand to hand. It's full of characteristically graceful tracking shots, the editing is superb, and in her third consecutive Ophüls film Darrieux has never looked more entrancing.

DramaWorld cinemaPhilip French

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Male strippers flash the flesh in Florida but director Steven Soderbergh fails to get under their skin

We can be relaxed when Jane Fonda plays a confident, unrepentant prostitute in Klute, Dolly Parton a proud madam in The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas or Natalie Wood a celebrated striptease artist in Gypsy. But we feel more than a little uneasy when leading actors appear in male versions of these roles, and an essential part of Billy Wilder's Irma la Douce, Paul Schrader's American Gigolo and Paul Thomas Anderson's Boogie Nights is to make us warm to and understand Jack Lemmon, Richard Gere and Mark Wahlberg as respectively a pimp, a gigolo and a porn star.

This is the task that Steven Soderbergh has taken on in Magic Mike. His debut film, the provocatively titled but essentially chaste sex, lies and videotape, set in prosperous, middle-class Louisiana, won...

Starting July 13th and running through September 2nd, prepare yourself to be transported to a summer vacation in France. All you have to do is check in at Tiff Cinematheque (350 King Street West, Toronto).

The 41-film sabbatical will make take you to popular and renowned destinations that include Jean-Luc Godard’s Pierrot le Fou (1965), Luis Buñuel’s Belle de Jour (1967), François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (1959), and Jean Renoir’s La Grande Illusion (1937).

We’ll even be making stops at more remote, recherché locations, such as Jean Eustache’s The Mother and the Whore (1973) and Jean-Pierre Melville’s Army of Shadows (1969).

Remember to pack lightly, re-schedule accordingly, and prepare for the ultimate staycation. Bon voyage!

Screenings include:

La Grand Illusion (1937)

Friday July 13 at 6:00 Pm

Sunday July 22 at 7:30 Pm

117 minutes

Heralded as “one of the fifty best films in the history of cinema” by Time Out Film Guide, Jean Renoir...

Between now and June 28, the deadline for Emmy voters to return nomination ballots, EW.com is running a series called Emmy Watch, featuring highlight clips and interviews with actors, producers, and writers whom EW TV critic Ken Tucker has on his wish list for the nominations announcement on July 19.

It feels like almost a foregone conclusion that Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner would submit “Far Away Places” for writing consideration. For one, it’s likely the most structurally daring hour of television we’ll see this year, a triptych of stories that take place over the course of a single day,...

Will Ferrell plays it straight as a bitter alcoholic in Dan Rush's finely observed adaptation of a Raymond Carver short story

The novel long preceded the short story, and in his celebrated history of the short story Walter Allen calls Walter Scott's "The Two Drovers", written in the early 19th century, the first fully achieved example of the genre. It is a more difficult form to master, as well as being generally less lucrative; journalists who've made a name writing for newspapers seek publishers' contracts to write novels rather than try their hands at short stories.

Paradoxically, perhaps, short stories are better suited to the cinema than novels are, whether they conclude with O Henry-style twists in the tail or Chekhovian epiphanies to be absorbed. John Huston, who took on both The Bible and Moby-Dick in his prime, had his two greatest late successes with film versions of classic stories,...

French actor best known for her role in Jean Renoir's 1939 masterpiece The Rules of the Game

Although Paulette Dubost, who has died aged 100, appeared in far more films than the number of years she lived, most cinemagoers know her best as Lisette, the coquettish chambermaid in Jean Renoir's La Règle du Jeu (The Rules of the Game, 1939), one of cinema's masterpieces. Lisette, who attends the Marquis de la Chesnaye during a lavish weekend party at a country chateau, flirts dangerously with a poacher turned servant (Julian Carette), while her overly jealous gamekeeper husband (Gaston Modot) tries to catch them at it.

Dubost and Carette play a deliciously sly and comic cat-and-mouse game with the absurdly rigid Modot, especially during the after-dinner entertainment, a breathtaking sequence, described by the critic Richard Roud as something from "a Marx brothers film scripted by a Feydeau who suddenly acquired a tragic sense...

Paulette Dubost, known as the "Dean of French Cinema," and an actress in films directed by Jean Renoir, Marcel L'Herbier, Jacques Tourneur, Julien Duvivier, Max Ophüls, Preston Sturges, François Truffaut, Louis Malle, and Marcel Carné, died of "natural causes" on Sept. 21 in the Parisian suburb of Longjumeau. The Paris-born Dubost had turned 100 years old on October 8, 2010. Dubost's show business career began at the age of seven, performing various duties at the Paris Opera. Following some stage training, her film debut took place in 1931 in Wilhelm Thiele's Le bal, which also marked the film debut of Danielle Darrieux (who's still around and still active). Ultimately, Dubost's film career was to span more than seven decades, during which time she was featured in over 140 movies. She is probably best remembered as the adulterous chambermaid Lisette in Jean Renoir's 1939 comedy-drama La règle du jeu / The Rules of the Game, considered by...