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As Cannes Film Festival kicks off, the Paris-based international sales company MK2 Films has revealed it has acquired three films and made substantial investments in new restorations, set against the backdrop of a strong presence at Cannes Classics.

MK2 Films has entered into a collaboration with the Niki Charitable Art Foundation on the global rights (excluding the U.S.) for two films directed by artist Niki de Saint Phalle: “Un Rêve plus long que la nuit” (1976) and “Daddy” (1973). “Un Rêve plus long que la nuit” has been restored in 4K by L’Immagine Ritrovata (Bologna-Paris) under the supervision of Arielle de Saint Phalle and with funding from Dior. It was presented at Il Cinema Ritrovato in Bologna, New York Film Festival and the new Los Angeles Festival of Movies. “Daddy” will soon be available in a restored version. MK2 Films described it as a “unique feminist work by one of...

The 400 Blows' ambiguous ending leaves viewers without clear answers, mirroring Antoine's uncertain future and Truffaut's artistic journey without his mentor. The iconic freeze-frame ending signifies that Antoine's story is just a chapter in his life. Viewers wondering what happened to Antoine after The 400 Blows can follow his story in sequels and anthology movies, where he navigates various relationships and experiences.

While François Truffaut's The 400 Blows is a famous addition to the French New Wave, its ambiguous ending leaves viewers without any clear answers. Truffaut was one of the leading voices of the French New Wave movement, and the director helped shape the aesthetic of independent cinema with movies like Jules et Jim, Shoot the Piano Player, and Fahrenheit 451. However, before any of those projects made him an icon, Truffaut made a name for himself with his 1959 feature directorial debut, the coming-of-age drama The 400 Blows.

Across Amanda, Carolina Cavalli’s writing and cinematic style dovetail with lead actor Benedetta Porcaroli’s calibrated strangeness to express a sensibility that feels genuinely new. It’s also the rare film about mental instability (among other things) that doesn’t pathologize and reduce its characters to a diagnosis. Rather, it’s a vindication of idiosyncrasy.

The younger of two daughters in an Italian family that runs a chain of pharmacies across Europe, Amanda (Porcaroli) is a loner. While her harried sister, Marina (Margherita Missoni), has resigned herself to the family’s bourgeois responsibilities, the 25-year-old Amanda rejects them to the best of her ability, and to the aggravation of everyone around her. Her only friend is the family’s domestic worker, Judy. Amanda lives on her own in a barebones apartment but, without a job or an income, still begrudgingly depends on her family’s financial support.

Stubbornly opposed...

In the fall of 1975, Sam Shepard — the hottest playwright on both sides of the Atlantic — returned to his new home in Northern California one day to find a note waiting for him that said Bob Dylan had called. Having never met him, the 31-year-old Shepard called the phone number on the note and was informed that Dylan wanted him to write the screenplay for the film to be based on his upcoming, star-studded Rolling Thunder tour. Because Shepard, who would later be nominated for an Academy Award for his portrayal of Chuck Yeager, America’s most famous test pilot, in The Right Stuff but was so afraid of flying that he had not been inside a plane for the past twelve years, he crossed the country by rail to meet Dylan in New York. As Robert Greenfield recounts in an exclusive excerpt from his new biography of Shepard, True West,...

Stubborn and iconoclastic as always, Jean-Luc Godard has passed to another realm–and by his own choice– at age 91. Ever-iconoclastic, impudent and exasperating, forever pushing boundaries but remaining elusive, and an artist in every fiber of his being, Godard always did exactly what he wanted to do; for a few years many followed him ardently, and for lots of us in the 1960s he led the way into a vastly exciting and personal form of cinema. Thereafter he went entirely his own way, losing most of his audience but remaining at the forefront of exploring what cinema is, could be, and, sometimes, what it absolutely shouldn’t be.

The official obituaries and tributes will certainly convey Godard’s importance and influence through the 1960s, the way he helped liberate cinema from its literary and orderly appearance to something far more energized, unexpected, jarring and often exhilarating. Although Godard consumed and...

As the discourse continues around Martin Scorsese’s criticism of the Marvel franchise, the legendary director himself has offered one more clarification of the comments that sent the internet into a collective meltdown.

By now, you’re likely aware of Scorsese’s heavily circulated remarks from a recent Empire interview, in which the Irishman helmsman argued that Marvel movies aren’t real cinema, likening the films to theme parks and claiming that they don’t try to convey “emotional, psychological experiences to another human being.”

The director later expanded on his thoughts in a New York Times op-ed, where he wrote that McU movies lack “revelation, mystery or genuine emotional danger” and “are designed as variations on a finite number of themes.”

Since then, the filmmaker has made an appearance on Popcorn with Peter Travers, where he touched upon the subject once more. After conceding that some younger viewers may regard superhero movies as cinema,...

Throughout his career, Sriram Raghavan has made neo-noir style his trademark. First, the director successfully exploited it in his debut feature “Ek Hasina Thi”, then in cunning “Johnny Gaddar”, and finally in maybe not flawless, yet intriguing “Badlapur”. With “Anandhun,” he departs from seriousness. Although Raghavan still explores the darkest corners of human souls, this time he plays with structures and genres, skillfully mixing a deceitful thriller with a dark comedy. Time and again, he winks to his audience, playing with the typical pulp threads, and he seems to have a good laugh at it. From the director, he turns into a prestidigitator. Yes, we have already seen this kind of tricks, but the way he crafts his illusions leaves us in a childlike amusement. And he stuffed plenty of rabbits in his hat.

A rabbit, actually, is the starting point. After the hilarious motto is displayed “What is life?...

French-Armenian singer-songwriter-actor Charles Aznavour, best known for songs such as “She,” “Yesterday When I Was Young” and “For Mama,” has died. Aznavour, who was 94, died in his sleep from a cardiac arrest in his home in Mouries, France, according to his agent.

Aznavour sold more than 180 million records and appeared in more than 60 films. Bob Dylan considered Aznavour, sometimes referred to as a Gallic Frank Sinatra, to be “one of the greatest live performers” he’d ever seen. CNN named him Entertainer of the Century in 1998, and he received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame last year.

French President Emmanuel Macron tweeted Monday: “Charles Aznavour was profoundly French, deeply attached to his Armenian roots and known throughout the world. He has accompanied the joys and pain of three generations. His masterpieces, the tone of his voice, his unique radiance will long survive him.”

Aznavour, who continued to perform...

Close-Up is a feature that spotlights films now playing on Mubi. Pere Portabella's Nocturno 29 (1968) is showing May 9 - June 8, 2018 in the many countries around the world as part of the series The Directors' Fortnight.Pere Portabella’s Nocturno 29 arrives at the beginning of his directorial career, the film being his first feature after the short No compteu amb els dits (1967). Together, these form the start of a filmography marked with the political charge and deliberate abstraction that were hallmarks of Spain’s so-called Barcelona School. There is a tendency among film writing to see films of the Barcelona School in light of ‘authorial intention’—that is, as a deposit of a social relationship brought about by a specific time and place. Yet one can also view the film individually as a collection of unique iconography pertaining to Spanish class consciousness in its own right.The film is, ostensibly, about...

Each month, the fine folks at FilmStruck and the Criterion Collection spend countless hours crafting their channels to highlight the many different types of films that they have in their streaming library. This March will feature an exciting assortment of films, as noted below.

To sign up for a free two-week trial here.

Friday, March 2

Friday Night Double Feature: The Ladykillers and La poison

Criminal schemes take unlikely targets in these two pitch-dark comedies from the 1950s. In Alexander Mackendrick’s Ealing Studio farce The Ladykillers (1955), a team of thieves (led by Alec Guinness) descends on a boardinghouse run by an elderly widow, who becomes the victim of their misdeeds. In Sacha Guitry’s brisk, witty, and savage La poison (1951), a gardener (Michel Simon) and his wife, fed up after thirty years of marriage, find themselves plotting each other’s murder.

Tuesday, March 6

Tuesday’s Short + Feature: Art* and In...

Cécile Decugis, one of the key early figures of the French New Wave, passed away June 11, according to El Watan, the French-language newspaper in Algeria. The news only started to spread throughout the film world when fellow editor and protege Mary Stephens paid tribute to the Decugis in a Facebook post.

At the dawn of the New Wave in 1957, Decugis edited a young Francois Truffaut’s short film “Les Mistons,” which is largely credited as being the first film in which Truffaut found his cinematic voice and being a key early short of the film movement that would dominate international cinema in the ’60s.

Read More: Jean-Luc Godard’s Rare, Early Film, ‘Une Femme Coquette,’ Appears on YouTube — Watch

Decugis also edited Jean-Luc Godard’s first feature, “Breathless,” one the most important pieces of editing in film history and the movie that made Godard a filmmaking sensation. Although the film...

Going unconventional yet again, Ayushmann Khurrana has signed Sriram Raghavan’s next in which he is essaying the role of a pianist. However, that’s not all. The actor will be playing a visually challenged character too in the film that is apparently titled Shoot The Piano Player. Playing the protagonist, Ayushmann Khurrana is currently prepping forRead More

The post This is how Ayushmann Khurrana has been prepping for Sriram Raghavan’s next appeared first on Bollywood Hungama.

Only last week, we had reported about the coming together of Ayushmann Khurrana and Tabu in the film maker Sriram Raghavan’s next. The film has now got its title, a rather unique and unusual one. The film has been titled as Shoot The Piano Player. While everyone was busy watching the India-Pakistan match yesterday, AyushmannRead More

The post Revealed: Sriram Raghavan’s film starring Ayushmann Khurrana and Tabu to be called Shoot The Piano Player appeared first on Bollywood Hungama.

Besides the fact that Ayushmann Khurrana and Sriram Raghavan are joining hands for the first time for a film, we had earlier also reported that Tabu too will be a part of the film. But this film, which is the filmmaker’s next after Badlapur has him reuniting with actress Radhika Apte for his next titledRead More

The post Radhika Apte in Sriram Raghavan’s next titled Shoot The Piano Player appeared first on Bollywood Hungama.

It was the jump that did it.

You know the one. It happens roughly a third of the way in to Fast & Furious 6. We're already deep into a chase scene, one involving a mustache-twirling British bad guy, Michelle Rodriguez's back-from-the-dead female badass Letty (she was never really dead, just had amnesia, but never mind that), Vin Diesel's Dom Toretto, his crew, a load of cars and, of course, a tank. As this high-pursuit cat-and-mouse game whizzes down the road, Dom and the tank find themselves on parallel...

Former army documentary cameraman worked on Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless [pictured].

Legendary French cinematographer Raoul Coutard who worked with Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, Pierre Schoendorffer, Jacques Demy and Costa-Gavras has died aged 92.

Coutard worked on more than 80 features in a career spanning from 1958 to 2001 but is best known for his work with New Wave pioneers Godard and Truffaut.

He got his big break working with Jean-Luc Godard on 1960 classic Breathless, which was credited with reinventing cinema at the time for its stripped-down, fast-paced aesthetic.

Godard — who wanted to shoot the film as much as possible with a handheld camera and natural lighting — had partly hired Coutard for his background as a documentary cameraman for the French army.

Coutard spent five years working with the army’s press service, mainly in French Indochina (today Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia) in the late 1940s and early 50s.

Prior to that, he worked in a Paris photography lab, having dropped...

Raoul Coutard, a prominent figure in French cinema, has died after suffering from a long illness. He was 92.

The cinematographer passed away on Tuesday night, near Bayonne, France. The news was confirmed by the French newspaper Le Figaro who was notified by his family. The specific cause of death is yet unknown.

Coutard was born on September 16, 1924 in Paris. He is most associated with the New Wave period and shooting most of Jean-Luc Godard’s early films (“Breathless,” “Contempt,” “My Life to Live”) along with his collaborations with Francois Truffaut (“Shoot the Piano Player,” “Jules and Jim”). He also was the director of photography on Costa Gavras’ “Z.”

His career lasted nearly half a century and included over 80 features. He made his directorial debut in 1970 with the film “Haoa Binh,” which was nominated for...

TV stalwart Paul Wendkos' biggest success in movies was as the director of the Gidget series. I'm Scottish so I don't know what that was. But it turns out he had a real gift for expressionistic noir, as demonstrated in his debut film The Burglar, which was scripted by pulp noir icon David Goodis, whose novels provided source material for Delmer Daves' Dark Passage, Jacques Tourneur's Nightfall, Truffaut's Shoot the Piano Player, René Clément's And Hope to Die, Beineix's Moon in the Gutter (the author was big in France) and Sam Fuller's Street of No Return.The movie, a low-budget affair, substitutes flair and vigor for production values, and stars lifelong noir patsy/creep Dan Duryea and up-and-coming sex bomb Jayne Mansfield, with the result that it always seems to be in the wrong aspect ratio. Duryea's cranium seems to have an extra story built...

Marie Dubois, actress in French New Wave films, dead at 77 (image: Marie Dubois in the mammoth blockbuster 'La Grande Vadrouille') Actress Marie Dubois, a popular French New Wave personality of the '60s and the leading lady in one of France's biggest box-office hits in history, died Wednesday, October 15, 2014, at a nursing home in Lescar, a suburb of the southwestern French town of Pau, not far from the Spanish border. Dubois, who had been living in the Pau area since 2010, was 77. For decades she had been battling multiple sclerosis, which later in life had her confined to a wheelchair. Born Claudine Huzé (Claudine Lucie Pauline Huzé according to some online sources) on January 12, 1937, in Paris, the blue-eyed, blonde Marie Dubois began her show business career on stage, being featured in plays such as Molière's The Misanthrope and Arthur Miller's The Crucible. François Truffaut discovery: 'Shoot the...

Bill Hader has come a long way since his stint on Saturday Night Live, creating many popular characters and impersonations such as Stefon, Vincent Price and CNN’s Jack Cafferty. He is one of the highlights in such films as Adventureland, Knocked Up, Superbad and Pineapple Express, and so it is easy to see why author Mike Sacks interviewed him for his new book Poking A Dead Frog. In it, Hader talks about his career and he also lists 200 essential movies every comedy writer should see. Xo Jane recently published the list for those of us who haven’t had a chance to read the book yet. There are a ton of great recommendations and plenty I haven’t yet seen, but sadly my favourite comedy of all time isn’t mentioned. That would be Some Like It Hot. Still, it really is a great list with a mix of old and new.

★★★★★French critic and auteur François Truffaut's tone and style have been both successfully and unsuccessfully mined by numerous directors over the years, including the likes of Wes Anderson, Richard Ayoade and Shane Meadows. Never as knowingly hip and revolutionary as others, his cinema belongs to Renoir and Vigo, and is carried on by that doomed depressive Leos Carax. Truffaut claimed that if he walked into a casino, his first instinct would be to master the rules. Godard's first instinct, Truffaut added, would be to invent new ones. With his second and third films, Shoot the Pianist (1960) and Jules et Jim (1962) - both rereleased this week - we see a true master at work.

Sometimes the work of a great filmmaker can hit all the right notes but not strike the right chord in audiences, critics or both at the time of the film’s initial release. Such was the case with Orson Welles’ "Citizen Kane" (1941), Alfred Hitchcock’s "Vertigo" (1958), Francois Truffaut’s "Shoot The Piano Player" ("Tirez sur le pianiste" - 1960) and of course most famously with Frank Capra’s "It's A Wonderful Life" (1946).(1) Although many films miss their commercial and/or critical marks, some films gain in reputation and commercial success only after repeated viewings, revivals and reappraisals by audiences and critics. I am not above such critical...

Peter Lennon meets François Truffaut, one of the founding fathers of French new wave cinema, on the set of his new film

By now the main points of François Truffaut's career are fairly generally known: he was the pugnacious young critic on "Arts" and the "Cahiers du Cinéma" who helped to lead the attack on the entrenched film industry of the fifties, and went on to demonstrate that not only could he tell people what was wrong with their films but he could do better himself.

His "400 Coups" won both the grand prix and the International Catholic Office award at the Cannes Festival of 1955. This, and Resnais's "Hiroshima, mon amour," were the beginning of the "new wave" which was to make the hand-held camera, improvisation and a low budget characteristic of the young French cinema.

A zany adaptation of an American thriller, "Shoot the Pianist," and "Jules and Jim,...

Young filmmaker Colin Levy reached out to Martin Scorsese asking him for some film recommendations to further his cinematic education and Scorsese's assistant responded with the following list and a note that read: Mr. Scorsese asked that I send this your way. This should be a jump start to your film education! The list is comprised of 39 foreign films and I've gone through and put a little check mark next to those that I have personally seen, which, I guess, means I have 19 films I need to begin to explore. Of those I haven't seen, Rocco and His Brothers and Children of Paradise are two I've meant to watch for a long time. Rocco was one Francis Ford Coppola told me was one of his favorite films back when I interviewed him for Tetro and I've still yet to give it a watch. (slacking) According to the post from Colin at Reddit,...

François Truffaut believed that artworks resemble their makers. As the BFI presents a retrospective of his films, it is clear that the man who made them was the most humane of directors

It seems a cliché that a film might change your life. Yet a film by the French director François Truffaut changed mine. Having just heard of how, in the 1950s in Northern Ireland, a child was brought up in a hen house, I watched L'Enfant sauvage (Wild Child) (1969) late one night on BBC2. It presented the story of Victor, a young boy discovered, in the years following the French revolution, living wild and alone in the woods of France. The film so mesmerised and moved me that I began researching a book on Victor and children like him.

In L'Enfant sauvage, Truffaut himself played Jean-Marc Gaspard Itard, the young man who educated the wild boy, teaching him language,...

After taking on Jean Luc Godard in last weeks Not In The English Language it seemed only appropriate to place his contemporary Francois Truffaut in the frame this week.

Following the literary adaptation of Fahrenheit 451 and the film that would later go on to inspire Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill series The Bride Wore Black, Francois Truffaut returned to the Antoine Doinel series in 1968 with Stolen Kisses.

We pick up on the story that began in The 400 Blows and Antoine et Colette with Antoine freshly discharged (dishonorably) from the army, and on the lookout for his sweetheart (although not Colette the earlier object of his affections from the second film in the series). Through a series of events Antoine ends up working for a private detective agency, fall for the boss’s wife and finally end up working as a TV repairman. It’s all very scattershot but works incredibly well on screen.

Dustbin Film Festival, Chipping Sodbury

As the awards seasons winds towards its climax, why not forget about all those prestige movies and red-carpet fashion trends and come to where the real action is? This resolutely glamour-free event, now in its 11th year, screens only salvaged 16mm footage of machinery in action – from out-of-date promotional reels for vintage agricultural equipment to archive footage of trams being scrapped, cranes being tested or the first flight of Concorde – "anything with a fuel tank", they say. Best of all is the programming process: there isn't one. You just fish a random reel out of the big dustbin (hence the festival's name) and they stick it on.

Town Hall, Sat

Civic Life, On tour

You could be forgiven for thinking Joe Lawlor and Christine Molloy were newcomers after their 2008 feature debut Helen – an unsettling work centred around a police reconstruction. In fact, they've been carving...

This week, a few readers noted on my Facebook page that I had been away from Pajiba for a while. The story of my absence is not a particularly entertaining one, as I was simply bogged down with various types of school work and a Ta assignment for a European Film History class. I had originally thought about typing up one review a week based on the class screenings, yet my eyes proved to be too big for my stomach. So, in the midst of my spring break, I've decided to strike a conservative compromise: I'll write up one review of one film screened in class, François Truffaut's French New Wave masterpiece Jules and Jim (Jules et Jim, 1962).

While I already highlighted some of the historical and theoretical concerns of New Wave in my review of Jean-Luc Godard's Contempt, this is arguably the more relevant place to offer up a summary.