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The second 2025 Oscar nominated short available to stream for Netflix’s vast audience alongside The Only Girl in the Orchestra, live action short Anuja from Adam J. Graves is a Delhi set coming of age tale with a narrative crafted to advocate as much as entertain. The story of the titular gifted 9-year-old orphan and her older sister, who like many are forced into work for the cheap conveniences we enjoy, Graves manages to highlight the unacceptable exploitation of their situation while also offering us moments of joy. Despite the victimisation they experience in the sweatshop, the sisters’ bond and resilience fortify them to do everything in their power to make the best of dire circumstances and when the youngest – played by a real life resident of a home for girls echoing her character’s situation – is offered a life-changing opportunity, a beacon of hope emerges from the gloom. As...

For five seasons, "The Bernie Mac Show" provided a hilarious and often heartwarming portrayal of fatherhood. The sitcom followed a fictionalized version of Mac, who still works as a stand-up comedian, but is thrust into fatherhood when he has to assume the parental duties over his two nieces and nephew. The premise is loosely based on real life, as Mac actually did have to look over his sister's kid for a little bit. But in reality, Mac was a proud father to one daughter.

"The Bernie Mac Show" has an almost timeless quality to it, whether it's the humor or the lessons learned. It was unlike any other sitcom at the time, or even today really, which makes sense when considering creator Larry Wilmore drew inspiration from French New Wave films like "The 400 Blows" when crafting the style. The show also featured Mac breaking the fourth wall to address the audience,...

CIA lawyer Owen Hendricks starts Season 2 in a precarious situation—sidelined by his superiors after the tumultuous Prague operation from the previous season. With excess time and growing restlessness, a cryptic message about an old greymail case pulls him toward Seoul, South Korea, where peril awaits.

This mission represents more than routine work; it’s Owen’s opportunity to redeem himself or potentially meet his downfall. Personal connections to South Korea deepen the emotional complexity, as memories of his deceased father emerge during a treacherous conspiracy.

In Seoul, Owen becomes deeply involved with Jang Kyun, a South Korean intelligence agent whose wife Russian mercenaries have kidnapped. What initially appears as a straightforward rescue mission transforms into a complex plot linked to cryptocurrency, threatening global political stability.

Working with allies like Nichka Lashin, Max Meladze’s daughter, and Janus Ferber—an unenthusiastic partner—Owen confronts dangerous operatives, criminal organizations, and internal CIA challenges.

Jeanne Balibar Photo: Richard Mowe

Everywhere you go during the Premiers Plans festival of first films in Angers (on the river Maine and the gateway to the Loire valley) you cannot escape the influence of legendary figure of French cinema Jeanne Moreau.

Although she died in July 2017, her links to the Premiers Plans festival continue to make their presence felt. She had an association with the festival for more than ten years, becoming an unofficial 'godmother' to the event, as described by Claude-Eric Poiroux, artistic director and founder of the Festival and also the creator of the cinema and hub Les 400 Cents Coups (after François Truffaut’s classic The 400 Blows) in the heart of the town.

Top prize in Angers: Vers Un Pays Inconnu / To A Land Unknown by Mahdi Felafel, about two Palestinian cousins seeking a better life. Photo: Angers Premiers Plans

Poiroux, who was a close friend of the actress,...

Movies encompass the length and breadth of the human experience, making any Best Of list hopelessly subjective. Comparing, say, The Silence of the Lambs to Fantasia to determine which is "better" actively insults both movies. Similarly, scholarly lists — like the British Film Institute's once-a-decade model which sets the pace on this front — tend to overlook "base" genres like horror and comedy, which often prove more influential. If a reader isn't already inclined to seek arthouse fare like The 400 Blows or The Passion of Joan of Arc, their inclusion in a given list means very little.

Influential films, however, can be measured a little more objectively, as well as encompassing popular movies that find the sweet spot between art and commerce. While it can be difficult to separate the true game-changers from the flashes in the pan, time has a way of revealing. Below is a list of the greatest films — subjective,...

Nicolas Cage is one of our most impressive living actors, and a big part of that is because of his intense love of cinema. He's a true student of the craft, with an obsession for older films that has led him to an extensive knowledge of all the medium has to offer. Cage's passion for his projects has led to him becoming the subject of many memes, mostly using his most over-the-top performances, but the man really knows his stuff. So, when Rotten Tomatoes asked Cage for his five favorite films of all time, he came a little over-prepared, offering his top 13 favorite films instead. He said that he simply couldn't narrow it down to five because "there's different movies for different reasons in different lifetimes," which is the most Nicolas Cage thing he could have said.

The actor often looks back to older cinema for inspiration and compares...

One of the most famous scenes in Peter Weir's "Dead Poets Society" finds unorthodox prep school English teacher John Keating vilifying an essay written by the fictional Dr. J. Evans Pritchard that seeks to determine the excellence of individual poems via the application of a geometrical formula. The works of Byron and Shakespeare are measured in terms of their importance and degree of technical perfection; those that score highly on both counts cover a large area, and are thus considered truly "great." The horrified Keating therefore commands his teenage pupils to tear Pritchard's laughably square introduction out of their textbooks.

Art is not math. Creative works can't be measured on a numerical scale, or, worse, by up- or downturned thumbs. When you walk out of a movie or hash out your feelings about a novel with your book club compatriots, you don't quickly assign whatever it is you've just engaged a number,...

Recently, Martin Scorsese shared a list of his top 39 must-watch foreign films. The list includes a note that the films are a "jump start" for film education. The long list includes some of the greatest films ever made, with many having helped change the landscape of cinema. It's hard to pick just 39, and Scorsese certainly saw something special in each film on his list.

Some of the reasons might seem obvious given that the films are considered legendary in their genre. For example, The 400 Blows kick-started the French New Wave, and films like The Rules of the Game were provocative at a sensitive time and received violent criticism. Films like Seven Samuri went on to inspire some of the most commercially successful films in recent years. There are also films that did neither. However, the reason why Scorsese chose them is worth pondering.

Beauty and the Beast (La Belle et la Bete...

One of the most effective and emblematic stories in cinema is the tumultuous coming-of-age film, focusing on a young protagonist growing up and learning more about themselves. Each generation has distinct differences and perspectives on what growing up is like, creating great levels of variety in each coming-of-age film despite the universal experience of self-growth. Some of the greatest and most acclaimed films of all time belong to the coming-of-age genre, from pillars of classic filmmaking like The 400 Blows to modern masterpieces like Lady Bird.

Coming-of-age stories are a staple of Hollywood, and have proved to be one of its most diverse and evergreen genres. The stories can take the form of comedies like Dazed and Confused or Clueless, more dramatic turns like The 400 Blows or The Graduate, or somewhere in between with Stand By Me, The Breakfast Club, and The Perks of Being a Wallflower. The underlying similarities between them are thematic, centering around the sometimes joyful, sometimes heartbreaking, almost always complicated changes that occur in the transition from childhood to adulthood, and how these change the individual. 2021s Murina perfectly fits into this mold with its own unique spin on the formula.

All coming-of-age movies essentially hit the same beats: the getting of wisdom, the loss of innocence, the passage from childhood to some hard-won form of adulthood. Only the names, regions, eras and cultures change. Trace a through line from The 400 Blows to Lady Bird, however, and you’ll notice the best of these stories don’t just look back — in anger, in sorrow, in a misty cloud of nostalgia — but spark recognition of the good, bad and very ugly of your own formative years. You can add Sean Wang...

Newsa.I. Artificial Intelligence.Voting is underway to ratify IATSE’s tentative agreement with AMPTP, as union leaders try to assuage the fears of members about new allowances for AI. Results will be announced tomorrow, July 18.Agnieszka Holland, James Gray, Andrew Haigh, and Kleber Mendonça Filho, are among the members of the main competition jury of next month’s Venice Film Festival, led by Isabelle Huppert. An AI company called Flawless is developing technology to dub films and television programs into different languages with “perfectly lip-synced visuals,” playing to the aspirations of non-English-language productions, especially, to reach a subtitle-averse market in the US.In PRODUCTIONTimothée Chalamet will star in and produce Josh Safdie’s Marty Supreme, apparently inspired by the professional ping pong player Marty Reisman. This is Safdie’s first solo outing as a director since The Pleasure of Being Robbed (2008), having shared the credit for his last five films with his brother,...

lodie Yung is a French actress who got her start in her native country before transitioning to Hollywood, where she has starred in movies and TV shows of all genres. On the small screen, Yung is known as playing the titular anti-heroine in The Cleaning Lady The actress' biggest role to date is Elektra in the Marvel Comics' shows Daredevil and The Defenders.

French actress lodie Yung started her career in her home country, quickly gaining prominent roles in TV and movies before making the jump to Hollywood, where her star has continued to rise. Born to a Cambodian father and a French mother, Yung began her career in the highly influential French movie and TV industry. Her first appearance came in the TV show La vie devant nous, where she had a recurring role as Jade Perrin. From there, she went on to bigger and bigger parts, even landing...

Spirited AwayImage: Gkids

Now that we’re used to HBO Max shedding the best part of its name to become just Max, we can concentrate on what really matters: the movies. Max’s impressive library includes most films released by Warner Bros., along with HBO original movies, plus titles from...

George Sikharulidze’s feature debut “Panopticon” is, the director says, a very personal movie.

The film, screening as a world premiere in Karlovy Vary Film Festival’s main competition, is a coming-of-age story about a young man floundering to find himself in the absence of any meaningful parental authority.

Sikharulidze, who grew up in a rough neighborhood of Georgia’s capital, Tbilisi, in the 1990s, where he lived with his grandmother, mother and sister, says he was inspired to draw on his own experiences in his first film by watching François Truffaut’s seminal 1959 film “The 400 Blows.”

“I am a graduate of New York University’s Media and Communications program,” the New York-based director tells Variety. “At the time, I was not sure that I wanted to make films, but saw a couple of movies, including the Truffaut, that led me to go to Columbia Film School to study directing.

New York – Last week, the competition awards were conferred at the (click) Tribeca Festival and the top narrative films were “Griffin in Summer” (U.S.) and “Bikechess” (International). While different in story arc, both films involved individuals facing a truth they inherently knew but never expected to encounter.

The 2024 Tribeca Festival, presented by Web3 tech company Okx, brings artists and diverse audiences together to celebrate storytelling in all its forms, including film, TV, VR, gaming, music, and online work. With strong roots in independent film, Tribeca is a platform for creative expression and entertainment. For all information, including more on the final weekend, Click Tribeca 2024.

2024 Tribeca Best U.S. Narrative: ‘Griffin in Summer’

Photo credit: TribecaFilm.com

Capsule Reviews, 2024 Tribeca Film Festival

Griffin in Summer involves 14-year-old Griffin (Everett Blunck) who likes to spend his summers producing stage plays. However, when his tween collaborators get distracted by more trivial pursuits like boys and camp,...

For his tenth Cannes feature premiere, Arnaud Desplechin chose to present a docu-fictional love letter to cinema. Two years after Brother and Sister was in Competition, Spectateurs (or Filmlovers!) is one of the festival’s Special Screenings, an effervescent walk down memory lane with a director who has helped shape contemporary French cinema for the better. It’s not hard for a Frenchman to be a cinephile––almost everyone is trained in film knowledge, either formally or informally, as part of their cultural upbringing. But Filmlovers! manages to set itself apart from all the other meta-documentaries or essays about how cinema made their director the person they are today. Instead it is both an honest and highly poetic feature that quite naturally absorbs film and literary references to address the structural role cinema has played for both Desplechin himself and our way of viewing the world.

Filmlovers! is narrated by Paul Dédalus,...

Though Richard Linklater’s Hit Man is about to debut in theaters and on Netflix––just after his under-the-radar documentary God Save Texas: Hometown Prison came to Max––the ever-prolific American was recently in Paris for Nouvelle Vague, his chronicle of the making of Godard’s Breathless. (If not more: casting notices for Jean-Pierre Léaud around the time of François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows and Martin Lassale around the time of Robert Bresson’s Pickpocket popped up.) With filming recently wrapped, one might expect a fall premiere––expectations bolstered by today’s unveiling of our first real look, courtesy (who else!) Cahiers du cinéma.

Therein one can find Guillaume Marbeck as Jean-Luc Godard (previously unveiled in a cast-and-crew portrait) and filming of a scene on the Champs-Elysees. Meanwhile, Jean-Louis Fernandez shared a set photo suggesting the production design team should be paid handsomely.

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French cinema revolutionized film history with groundbreaking masterpieces like Breathless and The 400 Blows. Iconic directors like Godard and Truffaut paved the way for modern classics with the French New Wave movement. From Bresson's realism to Tati's slapstick to Chabrol's suspense, French films offer an innovative and diverse cinematic experience.

From Breathless to The 400 Blows to Au Hasard Balthazar, there are some groundbreaking French masterpieces that every movie lover around the world should watch. France is responsible for some of the most influential revolutions in film history. Robert Bresson created a new kind of cinematic realism with his restrained, ascetic shooting style. Jacques Tati pioneered his own brand of filmed slapstick, and those timeless sight gags are still just as funny today. Claude Chabrol’s Hitchcockian suspense thrillers and Éric Rohmer’s naturalistic, semi-improvised comedies reimagined familiar genres and styles with a whole new way of approaching a story on film.

Between last week’s release of his under-the-radar documentary God Save Texas: Hometown Prison and the June release of his wildly entertaining crowdpleaser Hit Man Trailer: Glen Powell Shapeshifts for Richard Linklater’s Comedy, Arriving in June”>Hit Man, Richard Linklater is embarking on his next film. Set to shoot this month and April in Paris, his new feature will capture the beginnings of the French New Wave, centered on the making of Jean-Luc Godard’s 1960 debut masterpiece Breathless.

We now have our first piece of casting as our new Jean Seberg has been unveiled. Zoey Deutch has revealed her Seberg look on Instagram, with hair colorist Tracey Cunningham confirming it’s for the role of the French New Wave Icon, who made her breakout in Godard’s debut. The film will mark a reunion following Everybody Wants Some!! for Linklater and Deutch, who will deliver the latest portrayal of...

“The last thing I hate is that life always forces us to keep moving forwards.”

In the aftermath of the New York Film Festival, reporter Vincent Canby wrote an article about the films of the festival he aptly named “Why Some Films Don't Travel Well”. Works such as Zhang Yimou's “Red Sorghum”, Andrei Konchalovsky's “Asya's Happiness” and Hou Hsiao-Hsien's “Daughter of the Nile” are mostly relevant thanks to their “sociology factor” Canby begins his article, an aspect that these works are and have been applauded for around the world while as films themselves they are not that interesting. Hou Hsiao-Hien, one of the most popular directors of Taiwanese New Cinema along with Edward Yang, was still trying to find a cinematic language for his films, one which strongly resembled the works of Yasujiro Ozu in terms of style and content, the sense of resignation, as he writes...

Sometime in the late 1940s, two youngsters in François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard met in Paris through their common love of the movies, forming a friendship that changed the world of cinema forever. As they grew up and bonded over the moving pictures, they became critics for the fabled Cahiers du Cinéma, championing de la politique des auteurs, or the auteur's policy which eventually became the foundation for viewing filmmakers as artists. The international critical and commercial successes of their first films, The 400 Blows, and Breathless, were the catalysts for putting The French New Wave into the cultural zeitgeist, a movement whose foundations have their names etched for all eternity. Notably, this kinship, fruitful as it was, had its own ebbs and flows. Truffaut and Godard had their own ways of doing things, and unfortunately, what was initially a mark of artistic diversity became the wedge that drove the...

Back in 1992 Wes Anderson and Owen Wilson — who had met the University of Texas in Dallas and were roomies — decided to make a movie. But after spending $10,000 and shooting 13 minutes of the crime caper comedy “Bottle Rocket,” they ran out of money. Eventually, the short and the full script made its way to Oscar-winning writer/director/producer James L. Brooks. It just so happened that Columbia had a deal with Brooks to finance a low-budget film selected by the filmmaker. And in 1996, the feature-length version of “Bottle Rocket” was released with Owen Wilson, Luke Wilson and James Caan. Though the film didn’t set the box office on fire, critics realized Anderson was a new and exciting cinematic voice.

Anderson has made 11 feature films — his latest “Asteroid City” came out earlier this year — and has been nominated seven times for an Oscar including three for screenplay, two for animated features,...

The werewolf, loup-garou, and the Lycanthrope are back in the brilliant thought-provoking film Wolfkin . Coming from the rich tradition of fiction such as Guy Endore’s 1933 seminal novel The Werewolf of Paris and the 1896 story The Were-wolf by Clemence Housman, this film is in my opinion an essential new addition to the werewolf film canon.

You can lump this film into the abyss of Folk Horror yet its just plain simple a damn good film from top to end credits because it tells an essential human story. Wolfkin (2022) a.k.a. Kommunioun is a Luxembourgian/French/Belgium production; directed by Jacques Molitor. The picture is elegantly shot and paced with true mastery and restraint, as does befit the subject matter of extreme, old-world control and remedy for the modern, uncontrolled animalistic urges.

Taking a cue from Hammer’s The Curse of the Werewolf (1961), Wolfkin (2022) reverses the fact that in that film,...

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.

Kids can be difficult, but so can our parents and guardians. Such notions are explored with an artistic hand in David Depesseville's debut narrative feature, which will be released Friday, Sep. 1. Astrakan — whose mystery of a title is finally revealed in the film's groundbreaking third act — is French Impressionism at its finest, chronicling hard-hitting, slow-burn sequences of a young orphan named Samuel (Mirko Giannini). It's an utterly realistic portrayal of youth in revolt that sheds light on the work of Francois Truffaut (The 400 Blows) and could even fit well into a Wes Anderson film — I'm looking at you, Moonrise Kingdom.

Gripping French cinema is often hard to refute, even if this isn't exactly a commercial-grade project. But sometimes, less is more — and here, the simple yet lush 16mm film component allows Astrakan to really shine.

A Gripping Look at Youth in Revolt

First, a word about French Impressionism,...

"Barbie" might be a multimillion-dollar corporate product based on a ridiculously lucrative multimedia property, but it's also an earnest love letter to cinema history. Of course, that's nothing new for co-writer and director Greta Gerwig. A quick glimpse at the multi-hyphenate's filmography will reveal she's never shied away from openly acknowledging her influences. "Frances Ha," the 2012 dramedy Gerwig starred in and co-wrote with the film's director and her "Barbie" co-writer/real-life partner, Noah Baumbach, overtly tips its hat to the French New Wave, as does Gerwig's semi-autobiographical directorial debut, "Lady Bird" (her answer to Francois Truffaut's "The 400 Blows").

When it comes to "Barbie," there's no missing the references to "The Wizard of Oz" and Gene Kelly musicals like "An American in Paris," nor the deliberate parallels between the red pill/blue pill scene from "The Matrix" and Stereotypical Barbie (Margot Robbie) consulting Weird Barbie (Kate McKinnon) about her sudden existential crisis.

Adrian Tomine's 2007 graphic novel Shortcomings is a sharp, insightful, and dryly funny story with a protagonist who could easily be described as insensitive, self-centered, and condescending. That doesn't sound like something that would lend itself to an accessible film adaptation, but Tomine and director Randall Park have made Shortcomings into an entertaining, audience-friendly movie while remaining faithful to Tomine's original story. Park's version of Shortcomings is brighter and glossier than Tomine's graphic novel, but it retains the source material's acerbic wit and commitment to unlikeable characters.

There's something charming about the proud misanthropy of frustrated filmmaker and movie theater manager Ben Tagawa (After Yang's Justin H. Min), who bluntly speaks his mind even when -- sometimes especially when -- it isn't called for. Shortcomings opens with an amusing parody of a Crazy Rich Asians-style upscale dramedy starring Asian-American actors, featuring cameos from Stephanie Hsu and Ronnie Chieng. Ben...

Kohn’s Corner is a weekly column about the challenges and opportunities of sustaining American film culture.

Chances are that if you care about international cinema, you care about the French New Wave. A loose collective of young directors who came to define their country’s cinema as the 1950s gave way to the ’60s, the French New Wave gave cinema permission to be audacious and uncompromising while bolstering its style and personality. It was cool with purpose.

Jacques Rozier, the last living member of the Nouvelle Vague, died this week at 96. Rozier was a blind spot for me, but the French New Wave was my guide to grasping what the movies could be.

As a teenager, Jean-Luc Godard’s “Breathless” got me excited about the possibilities of the movies like nothing that came before. Francois Truffaut’s “The 400 Blows” was a formative encounter with the expansive possibilities of the coming-of-age story.

Kohn’s Corner is a weekly column about the challenges and opportunities of sustaining American film culture.

When you’re living in the bubble of daily cinema life during the Cannes Film Festival, it’s hard to know if the rest of the world cares about any of the movies you’ve seen over the past two weeks. The obvious marketing hooks for “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny” and “Killers of the Flower Moon” will take care of them. For everything else, who knows?

The last three Palme d’Or winner winners — “Triangle of Sadness,” “Titane,” and “Parasite” — leveraged their Cannes success into genuine cultural impact. The challenges in getting movies made and seen is higher than ever, but Cannes 2023 came ready for battle. Here are some of the most promising signs I found.

The French New Wave Isn’t Finished

For a generation of cinephiles, the death...

Christophe Honoré's Winter Boy is now showing exclusively on Mubi starting April 28, 2023, in many countries in the series Luminaries.When Antoine Doinel first dons his checkered jacket and roams the streets of Paris in François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (1959), the city air is so cold that his breath clouds the frame. Truffaut’s wintry film is a tale of isolation and frustration in the life of the young Doinel, a misbehaving schoolboy bored by la dictée and the stifling teachings of his professor. Out in the frostbitten night, he sleeps in a printing press and steals a typewriter, evoking his search for his own liberation and words to live by. To everyone else, he appears a troubled youth in need of institutionalization. To Truffaut, he is his younger self looking for his identity and the means to express it, a memory committed to film. When a filmmaker sets...

When discussing the masters of French cinema, one name consistently stands out among the rest: François Truffaut. A pioneering director, screenwriter, and film critic, Truffaut left an indelible mark on the world of cinema, both in France and internationally. With a career spanning over three decades and numerous accolades to his name, Truffaut’s influence can be felt in the works of contemporary filmmakers to this day.

In this article, we will explore the life and career of François Truffaut, delving into the birth of the French New Wave, his key films, and his signature style and themes. We will also examine the impact Truffaut has had on contemporary filmmakers and his lasting legacy in French cinema. Finally, we will provide a list of essential François Truffaut films for those looking to immerse themselves in his remarkable body of work.

The Birth of the French New Wave

The French New Wave,...

The French New Wave, or La Nouvelle Vague is one of the most important movements in film history. Its fresh energy and vision changed the cinematic landscape during the 50s and 60s and greatly impacted pop culture. The new wave of cinematic auteurs was on the rise and pushed back on the traditional form of filmmaking, instead focusing on social realism, experimentation, and depicting everyday life through the lens.

At the forefront of this movement were French directors François Truffaut, Francoise Bonnot, Éric Rohmer, Jacques Rivette, and Jean-Luc Godard who pushed visual and stylistic techniques. These included a move away from traditional storytelling by applying nonlinear narrative techniques, jump cuts, and handheld cameras that impacted cinema around the world and influenced a new movement of cinema in the United States.

This volume French New Wave: A Revolution in Design celebrates the groundbreaking poster art in selling these Nouvelle Vague films...

Above: Original French release poster for Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles. Designer unknown.Jeanne Dielman wins again! Posted on the day that Chantal Akerman’s masterpiece was announced as the surprise come-from-behind winner of Sight and Sound’s decennial Greatest Films of All Time poll, the original poster for the film racked up close to 3,000 likes on my Movie Poster of the Day Instagram (helped perhaps by being paired with this photo of Akerman pensively smoking in front of the same poster back in the day). I have no doubt that any poster for the film posted on that day would have gotten a lot of attention, but I’d like to believe that some of the likes were for the poster itself: unassuming yet elegant (like Jd herself), foregrounding that radically mundane title, and containing nothing surplus to requirements, just Mrs. Dielman at her dining room table, waiting patiently,...

While we’ve known the results of Jeanne Dielman Tops Sight and Sound‘s 2022 Greatest Films of All-Time List”>Sight & Sound’s once-in-a-decade greatest films of all-time poll for a few months now, the recent release of the individual ballots has given data-crunching cinephiles a new opportunity to dive deeper. We have Letterboxd lists detailing all 4,400+ films that received at least one vote and another expanding the directors poll, spreadsheets calculating every entry, and now a list ranking how many votes individual directors received for their films.

Tabulated by Genjuro, the list of 35 directors, with two pairs, puts Alfred Hitchcock back on top, while Chantal Akerman is at number two. Elsewhere in the top ten are David Lynch, Francis Ford Coppola, Jean-Luc Godard, Agnès Varda, Orson Welles, Yasujirō Ozu, and Stanley Kubrick, and tied for the tenth spot is Wong Kar Wai and Ingmar Bergman.

Check out the list below,...

Writer, director and occasional actor Philippe Garrel shot his first full-length movie, Marie pour mémoire, when he was only 19. That was amid the turmoil of May 1968, and since then he has made a new feature every few years, becoming a regular fixture in festivals and arthouses, especially in his native France.

Working with unknown or established actors, including Catherine Deneuve and Jean-Pierre Léaud, his intimate tales of emotional unrest — often the same story told again and again, during different epochs, in color or black-and-white — have turned him into a dependable auteur but also an acquired taste. If you don’t like French movies about love, sex, family, adultery and anguish, then you probably won’t like Garrel.

His work has always had an autobiographical bent to it, and one of his best films, 1970’s La Cicatrice Intérieure, starred his girlfriend at the time, Nico of The Velvet Underground. But his latest feature,...

Robert Dalva, the film editor who earned an Oscar nomination for his work on the touching family adventure The Black Stallion and collaborated with director Joe Johnston on five films, including Jumanji and Captain America: The First Avenger, has died. He was 80.

Dalva died Jan. 27 of lymphoma in Marin County, California, his son Matthew Dalva told The Hollywood Reporter.

Dalva attended USC film school in the same class with George Lucas, and he went to work with him and Francis Ford Coppola in 1969 as the pair launched their innovative American Zoetrope production company in San Francisco.

The relationship paid off when Lucas hired Dalva to handle second-unit photography — he shot the land speeder going across the desert — on the original Star Wars (1977).

On the Coppola-produced Black Stallion (1979), starring Mickey Rooney in an Oscar-nominated performance, Dalva partnered with director Carroll Ballard, who also did second-unit work on Star Wars.

“We had...

Each week we highlight the noteworthy titles that have recently hit streaming platforms in the United States. Check out this week’s selections below and past round-ups here.

Happening (Audrey Diwan)

Diwan’s sophomore feature is an unglamorous, straightforward film that tells a simple story about an ordinary girl. It is also the single most intense, shatteringly empathetic thing I’ve seen all year. Carried by Anamaria Vartolomei’s fiercely committed performance, the ’60s-set drama takes on the subject of unintended pregnancy and illustrates how far from a political / religious issue it can be when it happens to you. Abortion has been dealt with in landmark films, but the intimacy of perspective achieved here feels truly unmatched. A vital call for kindness like no other. – Zhuo-Ning Su

Where Stream: Hulu

M3GAN (Gerard Johnstone)

Not outwardly terrifying, director Gerard Johnstone’s sci-fi slasher features a lifelike AI doll named M3GAN,...

When I saw Steven Spielberg’s “The Fabelmans” at the Toronto Film Festival in September, I absolutely loved it. And while I never expected the film to be some breakout smash, my hope for it — and my cautiously optimistic prediction — is that it would find a hook into the culture. I assumed that a drama about how Steven Spielberg got to be the genius he is would resonate, in a big way, with movie fans from multiple generations. Okay, not so much with those under 35. But that still leaves a lot of us!

“The Fabelmans,” I think, has a bad title — it sounds like a sitcom starring David Schwimmer and Mayim Bialik as the parents. But the movie is a rapt and enveloping experience, a true memoir on film. Like all good memoirs, the movie is about a few things at once — in this case, the adventure of growing up,...

After the universal acclaim met by his West Side Story remake last year, Steven Spielberg is continuing his winning streak with The Fabelmans. His most personal film to date, The Fabelmans tells a fictionalized version of the story of how a young Spielberg became interested in moviemaking in the first place. Spielberg is the latest director to bring his own life story to the big screen.

Spielberg’s frequent collaborator George Lucas turned his own childhood into American Graffiti, and François Truffaut practically invented the movie memoir with The 400 Blows.

Almost Famous

According to the biography section of Cameron Crowe’s official website TheUncool.com, Almost Famous was “the culmination of a 10-year journey to put Cameron’s experiences working for Rolling Stone on film.” Set in the 1970s, Almost Famous focuses on a teenage music critic who follows a rock band on tour in a bid to get his first cover story published.

Truffaut’s portrait of a young misfit at war with his school, his family and himself, is never sentimental but always heartrending – in the words of Godard, “rigorous and tender.” The movie was the first of four films featuring Jean-Pierre Léaud as Antoine Doinel who, over the course of 20 years, grew from beleaguered adolescent to jaded roué.

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Amir Naderi’s 1984 “The Runner” is often lauded as the first movie to emerge from post-revolutionary Iran and for having one of the best child performances of all time with Madjid Niroumand. It’s now receiving a new restoration that will debut at Film Forum on October 28 and run through November 10, with Naderi and Niroumand appearing in person for screenings. It will then make its way around the country. Exclusively on IndieWire, watch the new trailer below.

In “The Runner,” an illiterate 11-year-old orphan (Niroumand), living alone in an abandoned tanker in the Iranian port city of Abadan, survives by shining shoes, selling water, and diving for deposit bottles, while being bullied by both adults and competing older kids. But he finds solace by dreaming about departing cargo ships and airplanes and by running — seemingly to nowhere.

The movie has echoes of Vittorio De Sica’s “Shoeshine” and “The Bicycle Thief,...

Actor/writer/director Ethan Hawke discusses a few of his favorite films with Josh Olson and Joe Dante.

Show Notes: Movies Referenced In This Episode

Explorers (1985) – Glenn Erickson’s Blu-ray review

The Verdict (1982)

The Color Of Money (1986) – Rod Lurie’s trailer commentary

Nobody’s Fool (1994)

Three Faces Of Eve (1957)

Mr. And Mrs. Bridge (1990)

North By Northwest (1959)

Torn Curtain (1966)

Psycho (1960) – John Landis’s trailer commentary

Frenzy (1972) – Joe Dante’s trailer commentary

Topaz (1969)

Boyhood (2014)

An Officer and a Gentleman (1982)

Blue Collar (1978) – Josh Olson’s trailer commentary

First Reformed (2017) – Glenn Erickson’s trailer commentary

Taxi Driver (1976) – Rod Lurie’s trailer commentary

The Left Handed Gun (1958)

Hombre (1967)

Hud (1963)

Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid (1969)

The Life And Times Of Judge Roy Bean (1972) – Josh Olson’s trailer commentary, Glenn Erickson’s Blu-ray review

Buffalo Bill And The Indians, Or Sitting Bull’s History Lesson (1976) – Glenn Erickson’s Blu-ray review

The Outrage (1964)

Rashomon (1950) – Brian Trenchard-Smith’s trailer commentary,...

Brett Morgen Image: Neon After seven years spent digging into archives, searching through mounds of recordings, and viewing untold hours of footage, Brett Morgen managed to pull together the dazzling Moonage Daydream—the first and only film about David Bowie to be approved by the late artist’s estate. Despite its classification as a documentary,...

Jean-Luc Godard, the pioneering French New Wave director who challenged and upended conventional filmmaking methods for over half a century, died today according to multiple reports in the French media. He was 91.

Godard’s celebrity mystique was defined by the image of the enigmatic chain-smoking auteur, adorned in sunglasses while indulging in existential insight, revolutionary politics, and radical ideas about art. But his career never rested on that cartoonish brand.

Though he would remain most famous for his first feature, the 1960 meta-noir “Breathless,” that iconic debut kickstarted a lifetime of ambitious, often confrontational work. His filmography consists of everything from genre deconstructions to political screeds and avant-garde gambles designed to confuse and provoke new avenues for an evolving art form. Through it all, Godard remained a divisive figure whose prolific output embodied — and often interrogated — the cultural and intellectual proclivities of French society and the world at large.

His legacy...

Jean-Luc Godard, the father of modern cinema whose impish, combative provocations threw down a gauntlet with which all those who came in his wake must contend, died Tuesday. He was 91.

The director died at his home by assisted suicide in Rolle, Switzerland, where that practice is legal, Godard’s longtime legal adviser Patrick Jeanneret told The New York Times.

Jeanneret added that the filmmaker had “multiple disabling pathologies” and “decided with a great lucidity, as he had all his life, to say, ‘Now, it’s enough.’ “

In a career that began with 1960’s groundbreaking Breathless,...

No director has done more to deconstruct the myth of the suburban American family than Steven Spielberg. Dissertations have been written and documentaries made on the subject. And now, at the spry young age of 75, Spielberg himself weighs in on where his preoccupations come from in “The Fabelmans,” a personal account of his upbringing that feels like listening to two and a half hours’ worth of well-polished cocktail-party anecdotes, only better, since he’s gone to the trouble of staging them all for our benefit. Spielberg’s a born storyteller, and these are arguably his most precious stories.

From the first movie he saw (“The Greatest Show on Earth”) to memories of meeting filmmaker John Ford on the Paramount lot, this endearing, broadly appealing account of how Spielberg was smitten by the medium — and why the prodigy nearly abandoned picture-making before his career even started — holds the keys to so...

Every director, it seems, has a deeply personal coming-of-age story to tell, from Francois Truffaut’s “The 400 Blows” to Lee Isaac Chung’s “Minari” to Alfonso Cuaron’s “Roma.” And lately, every Toronto International Film Festival has made one of those films a centerpiece of its lineup. Last year, it was Kenneth Branagh’s “Belfast,” which won TIFF’s audience award and went on to receive an Oscar nomination for Best Picture; this year, it’s Steven Spielberg’s “The Fabelmans,” which had its world premiere on Saturday night in the Visa Screening Room at the Princess of Wales Theatre.

Based on Spielberg’s childhood in New Jersey (briefly), Phoenix (longer) and Northern California (for a stormy stretch in high school), “The Fabelmans” is a sweet look back at a boy who was transfixed by the movies from the moment he saw “The Greatest Show on Earth” in 1952, and...

Say what you will about Quentin Tarantino, but he never backs down from a controversial take. The filmmaker has made a career out of his ability to elevate the exploitation films he loves into high art, and has never shied away from defending the cinema that inspired him. And his tendency to appreciate the lowbrow is matched by a willingness to criticize some of cinema’s most revered figures when he thinks the praise they get is unwarranted.

The September issue of Sight & Sound features an interview with Tarantino and his “Video Archives Podcast” co-host Roger Avary and highlighted several notable clips from their podcast. Per usual, Tarantino didn’t mince words when discussing his film opinions. When discussing the films of Claude Chabrol on an episode of the show, he found time to criticize the work of François Truffaut, particularly the thrillers that the director made later in his career.

His parents were Nouvelle Vague royalty and he went on to star in one of the sexiest movies ever made. Now the actor and director is refining his “banter à la française” in a scramble to get his new film finished for Cannes

For Louis Garrel, the centre of the universe is located at the Cannes film festival. “It’s like a particle accelerator, like that place in Switzerland,” he says. “Your disappointments there are bigger, and your joy is bigger.” He is calling from Paris, where he is tinkering with the edit of his latest film The Innocent; his fourth feature as a director but the first to get an airing in Cannes’s galactic-sized Louis Lumière auditorium. At the time of our conversation he’s got 10 days to nail down the finer details: “It’s like being back at school. I used to leave everything to the last minute.