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A black doctor with plans to become filthy rich arrives in a picturesque, nostalgia-drenched and lily-white hamlet in 1950s France in the obnoxiously misguided dramatic comedy Dr. Knock (Knock). The film is based on the darkly satirical and oft-adapted Jules Romains play about how nascent advertising techniques can fan the flames of an entire village’s hypochondria while enriching a man in a position of respect and power who is supposed to help the community. But in the version of writer-director Lorraine Levy, the conman is not only the town’s only person of color — not at all acknowledged, which is...

“Knock” (original French title, “Knock ou le Triomphe de la médecine”) is a French satirical play written in 1923 by Jules Romains. It follows the ambitious Dr. Knock who arrives in the rural village of Saint-Maurice to succeed Dr. Parpalaid,… Continue Reading →...

Coming to Blu-ray for the first time from the Cohen Media Group, Claude Chabrol’s late career thriller, Nightcap (better known by its French title, Merci Pour Le Chocolat) is often lumped into conversation as merely one of the seven films the director made with actress Isabelle Huppert. While it is certainly outshined by some of their finer achievements together (particularly The Story of Women and La Ceremonie), it stands firmly on its own as an odd exercise that’s more character study than murder mystery. Chabrol seems amused at the convention and convenience of the narrative, supplied by Charlotte Armstrong’s nonsensically titled 1948 novel The Chocolate Cobweb. Armstrong was in high regard in the 1950’s (her novel Don’t Bother to Knock was turned into a very strange Marilyn Monroe vehicle in 1952), and Chabrol seems keen on retaining the rather deliberate ambience from a tradition of genre gone by.

We at Mubi think that celebrating the films of 2010 should be a celebration of film viewing in 2010.  Since all film and video is "old" one way or another, we present Out of a Past, a small (re-) collection of some of our favorite of 2010's retrospective viewings.

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Always on Sunday (Ken Russell, 1965), pictured above

Always on Sunday is one of Ken Russell's early British television films, most of which were portraits of artists. It was customary for years for Russell's haters to praise these unavailable films and bemoan the director's decline into heavy-handed vulgarity. It turns out that they were half right: the TV work is excellent, and tends to be more muted than the gaudy features that followed, no doubt in part due to BBC censorship. But the critics were wrong to miss the nuances, and genius, of Russell's blockbuster marathons of bad taste and joyous camp, and...