News

French crime films of the 1950s and ’60s often centered on professional criminals who followed codes of honor that put them on a more-or-less level moral playing field with the detectives tracking them down. Whether it was Jean Gabin’s aging gangster Max in Jacques Becker’s Touchez Pas au Grisbi or Alain Delon’s steely eyed assassin Jef in Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Samouraï, these men had a sophistication and moral grounding that minimized the violence and chaos they caused. They were dangerous, even deadly, but only when they needed to be and in a way the cops could wrap their heads’ around.

Fun City Editions’s new Blu-ray set, Seeing Red: 3 French Vigilante Thrillers, consists of a trio of films that play like French twists on the hyper-violent Italian poliziotteschi crime films that reached the height of their popularity in the ’70s. In Jean-Claude Missiaen’s Shot Pattern,...

Scorsese's Letterboxd list reveals his love for cinema, featuring companion movies from a wide range of genres and time periods. The list demonstrates Scorsese's role as a scholar of film, with many obscure choices that show his depth of knowledge. The cinematic elements in Scorsese's latest epic, Killers of the Flower Moon, reflect his passion for classic works and his ability to reimagine them.

Martin Scorsese details which films are the ideal double-features for his movies in his Letterboxd list. The auteur filmmaker directed his first feature movie, Who’s That Knocking at My Door, in 1967. Since then, Scorsese created more copious iconic epics and features, including Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, The Wolf of Wall Street, and most recently, Killers of the Flower Moon, which is currently in theaters.

Taking to Letterboxd, Scorsese reveals an annotated list of the best companion movies to his work. The list included titles across nearly a century of cinema,...

Martin Scorsese now has a Letterboxd profile, and he took the opportunity to list companion films for every movie he’s ever made on the social media platform for cinephiles.

“I love the idea of putting different films together into one program. I grew up seeing double features, programs in repertory houses, evenings of avant-garde films in storefront theatres,” he wrote on his Companion Films page. “You always learn something, see something in a new light, because every movie is in conversation with every other movie. The greater difference between the pictures, the better.”

For his latest film, “Killers of the Flower Moon” adapted from David Grann’s best-selling book, Scorses suggested it be paired with “The Heiress” (1949), “The Last of the Line” (1914), “The Lady of the Dugout” (1918), “Blood on the Moon” (1948), “Red River” (1948) and “Wild River” (1960).

For “Goodfellas” (1990), Scorsese listed “Ocean’s Eleven” (1960) and “Jules and Jim” (1962).

The full list contains almost 60 films.

With it being seven years since his last live-action film, 2014’s The Grand Budapast Hotel, Wes Anderson is hard at work. Following a Cannes premiere, The French Dispatch finally arrives in limited theaters on October 22 followed by a wide release the following week, and he’s already shooting his next film (recently revealed to have the title Asteroid City) outside of Madrid with Tilda Swinton, Bill Murray, Adrien Brody, Tom Hanks, Margot Robbie, Rupert Friend, Jason Schwartzman, Scarlett Johansson, Bryan Cranston, Hope Davis, Jeffrey Wright, Liev Schreiber, Tony Revolori, and Matt Dillon.

As is the case with all of his work, Wes Anderson synthesizes cinema history in his own specific language and for The French Dispatch he has provided a list of influences. As revealed in a promotional book sent to The Flim Stage and styled after the film’s magazine, 32 films are listed that “provided inspiration to the filmmakers,...

Sony Music Masterworks today releases The Irishman Original Motion Picture Soundtrack, an album of music from the Martin Scorsese-directed film starring Robert De Niro, Al Pacino and Joe Pesci. Available everywhere now, the soundtrack features music carefully curated by Scorsese and music supervisor Randall Poster as a sonic companion to the film's enthralling narrative of organized crime in postwar America.

The twenty-track collection includes top hits by legendary artists Fats Domino, Jackie Gleason, Jerry Vale, Johnny Ray, Marty Robbins, P&#233rez Prado and more, as well as a new theme composed by legendary guitarist and composer Robbie Robertson - listen here. Making its critically-acclaimed world premiere at this year's New York Film Festival, The Irishman is in theaters now and begins streaming on Netflix Wednesday, November 27.

You can buy The Irishman soundtrack available everywhere now. Of the soundtrack, director Martin Scorsese says, "For me, music is always essential. When I hear the music,...

The 23rd annual Colcoa French Film Festival in Los Angeles, taking place September 23-28 at the Directors Guild of America, has landed the U.S. premiere of Amazon Studios’ Oscar contender “Les Misérables” for its opening night. The film directed by Ladj Ly, which won the Jury Prize at the 2019 Cannes Film Festival, will kick off a week of new and classic French-language films for La audiences.

The event will offer a splashy La bow for Amazon’s Oscar hopeful in a city packed with Academy voters. France has yet to submit a film for the 2020 Best International Film Oscar, but “Les Misérables” is among the top contenders. Inspired by the riots of 2005 in the suburbs of Paris, Ly’s film revolves around three members of an anti-crime brigade who are overrun while trying to make an arrest.

“This high-profile program includes several films from Cannes and Venice programmed for...

Line-up includes the North American premieres of Costa-Gavras’ political thriller Adults In The Room, the Dardenne brothers’ drama Young Ahmed.

The 23rd annual Colcoa French Film Festival in Los Angeles will open on Sept. 23 with the Us premiere of Ladj Ly’s hit Cannes drama Les Misérables.

The line-up includes the North American premieres of Costa-Gavras’ political thriller Adults In The Room, the Dardenne brothers’ drama Young Ahmed, Christophe Honoré’s On A Magical Night, Cédric Klapisch’s Someone, Somewhere, Cédric Kahn’s Happy Birthday, and Marie-Sophie Chambon’s debut feature Stars By The Pound.

Receiving its Us premiere is...

As part of Kino Lorber’s resurrection of Jean Gabin classics once owned by Criterion, on top of bringing Port of Shadows to Blu-ray, the label also re-releases 1954’s Touchez Pas au Grisbi (aka Don’t Touch the Loot or Honor Among Thieves), a classic which revitalized the French icon’s film career. A crime saga which inspired Melville and Claude Sautet, Gabin stars as an aged gangster struggling to see his final heist to its conclusion, which happens to be the daring robbery of 96 kilos of gold bullion from the Orly airport.

The plan couldn’t be simpler—Gabin’s Max the Liar simply has to filter the kilos through his family contact, Uncle Oscar (Paul Oettly), who needs to melt the gold down so it’s untraceable.…...

Louis Malle’s French thriller is cooler than cool — his first dramatic film is a slick suspense item with wicked twists of fate and images to die for: 1) Jeanne Moreau at the height of her beauty 2) walking through beautifully lit Parisian back streets 3) accompanied by a fantastic Miles Davis soundtrack. Murder in Paris doesn’t get any better.

Elevator to the Gallows

Blu-ray

The Criterion Collection 335

1957 / B&W / 1:66 anamorphic 16:9 / 88 min. / Ascenseur pour l’échafaud, Frantic / available through The Criterion Collection / Street Date March 6, 2018 / 39.95

Starring: Jeanne Moreau, Maurice Ronet, Georges Poujouly, Yori Bertin, Jean Wall, Iván Petrovich, Elga Andersen, Lino Ventura, Charles Denner.

Cinematography: Henri Decaë

Film Editor: Léonide Azar

Original Music: Miles Davis

Written by Louis Malle, Roger Nimier, Noël Calef from his novel

Produced by Jean Thuillier

Directed by Louis Malle

French director Louis Malle’s first fiction film is an assured and artistically adventurous suspense item. Unlike...

Mubi's series Jacques Becker's Companies is showing June 16 - July 18, 2017 in the United States.Le trouA striking thing about Jacques Becker, one of the last great classicists in French cinema, is the range of genres with which he was apparently at total ease. Astonishingly, the great critic and filmmaker Bertrand Tavernier recently said that Becker was maybe greater than Howard Hawks in this respect—a startling admission given that Hawks is an even more sacrosanct name for cinephiles of Tavernier’s age and predilection than his more obscure French contemporary. Becker, Tavernier said, had “an enormous range, and always [made films] with the same deeply organic quality.” Both Hawks and Becker are fascinated by genre, by the way that they can seemingly countermand inbuilt expectations by cultivating an atmosphere of life-like behavior that at least appears to undercut the revolving gears of plot. Both directors have come to be known as the makers of plotless movies,...

With a seemingly endless amount of streaming options — not only the titles at our disposal, but services themselves — we’ve taken it upon ourselves to highlight the titles that have recently hit platforms. Every week, one will be able to see the cream of the crop (or perhaps some simply interesting picks) of streaming titles (new and old) across platforms such as Netflix, iTunes, Amazon, and more (note: U.S. only). Check out our rundown for this week’s selections below.

Daughters of the Dust (Julie Dash)

That there’s a fair chance you’ve never seen Daughters of the Dust — full disclosure: I am among these people — should be taken as a failure of distribution and exposure, not the film’s quality and impact. There’s also a fair chance that the closest you’ve really come to Julie Dash‘s 1991 film is Beyoncé’s Lemonade, which paid a direct visual tribute that,...

Lovers of hot-blooded French noir will love this 1958 B&W drama, which swaps violence for a dangerous sexual relationship between a cop and drug addict suspected of a murder. If this is a ‘lazy’ star vehicle for French superstar Jean Gabin, please bring us more — in his paunchy ‘fifties Monsieur Gabin takes on a beauty half his age, and convinces us that he can keep her.

Le désordre et la nuit

All-Region Blu-ray

Pathé (Fr)

1958 / B&W / 1:66 widescreen / 93 min. / Street Date April 1 2017, 2017 /

available through Amazon.fr / Eur 14,99

Starring: Jean Gabin, Danielle Darrieux, Nadja Tiller, Paul Frankeur,

Hazel Scott, Robert Berri, François Chaumette, Louis Ducreux, Jacky Bamboo and his combo,

Harald Wolff, Roger Hanin.

Cinematography: Louis Page

Film Editor: Jacqueline Sadoul

Original Music: Jean Yatove

Written by Michel Audiard, Gilles Grangier, Jacques Robert from his novel

Produced by Lucien Viard

Directed by Gilles Grangier

Sometime in the 1990s Sherman Torgan...

The Sicilian Clan

Blu-ray

Kl Studio Classics

1969 / Color B&W / 2:35 widescreen / 122 min. (French, without exit music); 118 min (American) / Le clan des Siciliens / Street Date February 7, 2017 / available through Kino Lorber / 29.95

Starring Jean Gabin, Alain Delon, Lino Ventura, Irina Demick, Amedeo Nazzari, Danielle Volle, Philippe Baronnet, Karen Blanguernon, Elisa Cegani, Yves Lefebvre, Leopoldo Trieste, Sydney Chaplin.

Cinematography: Henri Decaë

Production design: Jacques Saulnier

Original Music: Ennio Morricone

Written by: Henri Verneuil, José Giovanni, Pierre Pelegri from a novel by Auguste Le Breton

Produced by: Jacques-e. Strauss

Directed by Henri Verneuil

American crime fanatics wary of European imports now have access to a fully Region-a disc of a big-star, big budget French-Italian-American gangster film from 1969, Henri Verneuil’s exciting The Sicilian Clan. It was filmed in two separate versions, a multi-lingual European original and a less exciting, English language cut for America. A huge hit overseas, The Sicilian Clan didn’t...

Recommended Viewing Paul Thomas Anderson has directed a relaxed, plaintive music video for Radiohead's "The Numbers."The teaser trailer for Olivier Assayas and Kristen Stewart's truly odd-ball psychic thriller-melodrama, Personal Shopper.The teaser trailer for the second biopic directed by Pablo Larraín this year, Jackie, starring Natalie Portman. Tag Gallagher makes some of the very best video essays around, rich in detailed analysis and poetics. Here is his video dedicated to the silent films of The Blue Angel director, Josef von Sternberg. Chinese mega-director Feng Xiaogang (Aftershock) won top prize, the Golden Shell, as well as Best Actress, at the San Sebastien Film Festival last month, and we're super intrigued by this irised (!) trailer.We think Jim Jarmusch's Paterson is one of the best films of the year. Amazon has cut an unexpectedly lovely trailer for it, though—warning—it has some minor spoilers throughout.Okay, this isn't exactly a film,...

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...

Jules and Jim

Directed by François Truffaut

Written by François Truffaut and Jean Gruault

France, 1962

In François Truffaut’s debut feature, The 400 Blows, widely seen as the flagship production of the French Nouvelle Vague, or “New Wave,” he was able to convey a representation of youth in a very specific era and, at that time, in a very unique way. Autobiographical as the 1959 film was, it also featured a notable vitality and honesty, two traits that would distinguish several of these French films from the late 1950s and into the ’60s. While The 400 Blows was an earnest and refreshing portrayal of adolescence, in some ways, Truffaut’s 1962 feature, Jules and Jim, his third, feels even more youthful, in terms of stylistic daring and energetic exuberance. Though dealing with adults and serious adult situations, Jules and Jim exhibits a formal sense of unbridled glee, with brisk editing, amusing asides,...

If there’s one thing I sometimes love looking at even more than movie posters it’s old photographs of movie posters as they originally looked pasted on walls or hung outside movie theaters. I especially love this Walker Evans photograph with billboard posters for Chatterbox and Love Before Breakfast pasted in front of a row of clapboard houses in Atlanta in 1936. And Christian Broutin has some great photos of his posters in situ which you can see towards the end of my interview with him.

So, while searching for posters for Jacques Becker’s Antoine and Antoinette, which opens in a revival at Film Forum next week, I was especially pleased to run across some superb photos of the posters for the film as they appeared in Paris in 1947.

The size of these posters, and that incredible marquee lettering on the second photo, give a sense of what a...

I've mentioned before how several years ago I created a list using Roger Ebert's Great Movies, Oscar Best Picture winners, IMDb's Top 250, etc. and began going through them doing my best to see as many of the films on these lists that I had not seen as I possibly could to up my film I.Q. Well, someone has gone through the exhaustive effort to take all of the films Roger Ebert wrote about in his three "Great Movies" books, all of which are compiled on his website and added them to a Letterbxd list and I've added that list below. I'm not positive every movie on his list is here, but by my count there are 363 different titles listed (more if you count the trilogies, the Up docs and Decalogue) and of those 363, I have personally seen 229 and have added an * next to those I've seen. Clearly I have some work to do,...

I've mentioned before how several years ago I created a list using Roger Ebert's Great Movies, Oscar Best Picture winners, IMDb's Top 250, etc. and began going through them doing my best to see as many of the films on these lists that I had not seen as I possibly could to up my film I.Q. Well, someone has gone through the exhaustive effort to take all of the films Roger Ebert wrote about in his three "Great Movies" books, all of which are compiled on his website and added them to a Letterbxd list and I've added that list below. I'm not positive every movie on his list is here, but by my count there are 362 different titles listed (more if you count the trilogies and Decalogue) and of those 362, I have personally seen 229 and have added an * next to those I've seen. Clearly I have some work to do,...

A BFI Southbank season of films starring the great Jean Gabin has put a new print of this 1938 masterpiece of poetic realism back on to the big screen at lucky cinemas around the country. Raymond Chandler said that Bogart could be tough without a gun, and Gabin was France's Bogart. He was at his best in the 1930s playing doomed, blue-collar losers, gangsters and military deserters (as in Le quai des brumes), most especially for Duvivier, Carné and Renoir. His postwar films were less good, though Becker's Touchez pas au Grisbi and Renoir's French Cancan are excellent, and he got to play Maigret three times as well as the French president, and to co-star with Bardot in one of her better films, En cas de malheur.

DramaWorld cinemaCrimeRomancePhilip French

guardian.co.uk © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject...

While New Yorkers have plenty of opportunity to see classic films on the big screen, you'll be hard pressed to find a lineup as front to back awesome as the Film Society Of Lincoln Center's "15 For 15: Celebrating Rialto Pictures."

The series honors the reknowned arthouse distribution shingle founded in 1997 that has brought some of the best known (and previously unknown) classics of cinema to American audiences. And the selection here by programmers Scott Foundas, Eric Di Bernardo and Adrienne Halpern represents the breadth and scope of the films Rialto has put their stamp on, ranging from the French New Wave ("Breathless") to film noir ("Rififi") to comedy ("Billy Liar") and more. There is something here for everybody and with the series kicking off tonight, we've got a special prize for some lucky readers.

Courtesy of Film Society Of Lincoln Center, we've got a copy of the excellent Rialto DVD...

Former British politician Jeffrey Archer could be the new Robert Ludlum if producer Frank Marshall has his way: he’s developing a movie version of Archer’s novel A Matter Of Honour. The tale was written in 1986 but set 20 years earlier, and it follows Adam Scott, a man who goes on the run from the Kgb and the CIA after receiving a Pandora’s Box of a letter from his military father. Scott appears in a follow-up novel, Honour Among Thieves, which is also expected to be brought to the big screen. Marshall, who has produced...

.

Jean Gabin, Simone Simon, La Bête Humaine Jean Gabin on TCM: Grand Illusion, Pepe Le Moko, Touchez Pas Au Grisbi Schedule (Et) and synopses from the TCM website: 6:00 Am Gueule D'Amour (1937) A retired cavalry officer discovers the woman who won his heart was in love with the uniform. Dir: Jean Grémillon. Cast: Jean Gabin, Mireille Balin. Bw-88 mins. 8:00 Am Remorques (1941) A married tugboat captain falls for a woman he rescues from a sinking ship. Dir: Jean Grémillon. Cast: Jean Gabin, Alain Cuny, Bw-83 mins. 9:30 Am Le Jour Se Leve (1939) A young factory worker loses the woman he loves to a vicious schemer. Dir: Marcel Carne. Cast: Jean Gabin, Jacqueline Laurent, Arletty. Bw-90 mins. 11:00 Am L'air De Paris (1954) An over-the-hill boxer stakes his fortune on training a young railroad-worker. Dir: Marcel Carne. Cast: Arletty, Jean Gabin, Roland Lesaffre. Bw-100 mins. 1:00 Pm Leur Derniere Nuit (1953) A schoolteacher...

Jean Gabin was France's answer to Humphrey Bogart, many (English-language) historians have claimed. Either that, or Gabin was France's answer to Spencer Tracy. Never mind the fact that Gabin was a major international star before either Bogart or Tracy achieved Hollywood stardom. In other words, if there was someone emulating someone else, it was Bogart and Tracy who followed the Frenchman's lead so as to become the American Jean Gabins. Turner Classic Movies is devoting a whole day to Jean Gabin's movies today, August 18, as part of its "Summer Under the Stars" series. [Jean Gabin Movie Schedule.] Right now, TCM is showing Julien Duvivier's Pépé le Moko (1937), the tale of a Parisian gangster (Gabin) hiding in Algiers' Casbah neighborhood, but who becomes careless after he falls for a beautiful woman (Mireille Balin, Gabin's co-star that same year in Jean Grémillon's Gueule d'amour / Lady Killer). Those whose idea of cinema begins...

Olivier Assayas's engrossing movie traces the life of one of the 20th century's most notorious terrorists

Conventional wisdom suggests that we look to America for the essential models of the crime movie, but in fact, in addition to providing a name for that most respected of Hollywood genres, the film noir, the French were way out front when, early in the last century, Louis Feuillade directed a succession of sophisticated, surreal serials of underworld activities that remain unsurpassed, among them Judex, Fantômas, Les vampires and Tih Minh.

This tradition was carried on in Marcel Carné's classics of the 1930s and after the second world war by Jacques Becker with Touchez pas au grisbi (based on a Série noire novel by Albert Simonin that was accompanied by a 14-page glossary of underworld argot) and Jean-Pierre Melville, who specialised in gangster movies of a purity unrivalled by Hollywood.

Numerous petits-maîtres...

• Introduction to The Great Movies III

You'd be surprised how many people have told me they're working their way through my books of Great Movies one film at a time. That's not to say the books are definitive; I loathe "best of" lists, which are not the best of anything except what someone came up with that day. I look at a list of the "100 greatest horror films," or musicals, or whatever, and I want to ask the maker, "but how do you know?" There are great films in my books, and films that are not so great, but there's no film here I didn't respond strongly to. That's the reassurance I can offer.

I believe good movies are a civilizing force. They allow us to empathize with those whose lives are different than our own. I like to say they open windows in our box of space and time.

Leave it to The Daily Beast to get Scorsese talking about films. Not that it would be hard to do. The man is “Mr. Cinema.” He directs, produces and he even has his own nonprofit organization for preserving classic films, The Film Foundation. The director may have toyed with other genres during his lifetime, but the one people would discuss aplenty is his contributions to crime cinema. To think of Scorsese is to think of Goodfellas, Casino and The Departed, despite also directing films like After Hours and The Last Temptation of Christ. As he turns his attention to the small screen with HBO’s Boardwalk Empire – touted as being the network’s costliest production to date – the director lists off his 15 favorite gangster movies. Scorsese writes:

“Here are 15 gangster pictures that had a profound effect on me and the way I thought about crime and how to portray it on film.

This past weekend saw the All Tomorrow’s Parties music and film festival head up to Monticello, New York. Criterion alum, Jim Jarmusch, curated the music for the festival, which saw the likes of Sonic Youth, Iggy and the Stooges, and Explosions In The Sky take the various stages. If you had some down time between bands, you could spend some time watching 22 films that Criterion brought with them for the festival.

As we’ve previously highlighted, Criterion commissioned several independent comic book artists to create movie posters for all of the films. We’ve already shown you the posters for Brute Force, Touchez Pas Au Grisbi, and Night of the Hunter, and have been eagerly awaiting some images of the various other posters.

Today on their Facebook page, Criterion took a snapshot of the entire line-up, which I’m embedding below:

In the comments for the image, Criterion named all of the contributing artists,...

Last Thursday, we brought you the epic line-up for this years All Tomorrow’s Parties film screening series, which is once again being curated by the Criterion Collection. In the post I shared some lo-res images that Criterion produced as make shift posters for each of the films. Over the weekend, a couple artists began tweeting about the fact that they had been selected to design some posters for this years event.

Over at his blog, Matt Kindt published the artwork that he designed for The Night Of The Hunter (available this November on DVD and Blu-ray), and it looks pretty fantastic. Head on over to his website, to see more of his art, and find his books.

Just as Matt was posting his artwork, Scott Morse and upped the game by posting 2 images that he had worked up for the festival. His art for Brute Force and Touchez Pas Au Grisbi are absolutely gorgeous,...

As if the recent November titles weren’t enough, we now have some other films to add to our upcoming Criterion Collection wishlists.

The Criterion Collection will once again be curating the upcoming All Tomorrow’s Parties Film Screenings, in Monticello New York, this September. The event overall, will be curated by Criterion alum, Jim Jarmusch (Down by Law, Night on Earth, Stranger Than Paradise, Mystery Train). Earlier today, Atp & Criterion announced their line-up of films, and hidden among the list of epic titles that we already knew were going to be released, or are already available, were a few little verifications of rumors going around.

The line-up looks to be pretty amazing, and if I could afford the flight, I would surely head out for that weekend. Several of the new Bbs box set will be screening, as well as some other films that we’ve discussed on the...

One of my favorite parts of this news reporting facet of our podcast, is discussing the new releases. Every month, around the 15th, we get several new titles to look forward to, knowing that this collection of films continues to grow, and that our passion for important films has not passed into the night. Easily the worst, most disappointing part of the news reporting has to be when the titles go out of print. This is something we all have come to expect, as titles have gone out of print since Criterion has been licensing films on Laserdisc.

Over the past few months, we’ve seen the incredible Blu-ray and DVD edition of the Third Man go out of print, along with a slew of releases that Studio Canal had originally licensed to Criterion, and then moved over to Lionsgate. Two of the Studio Canal titles, Ran and Contempt, have...