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I imagined it as a fun icebreaker. “Hey, Chandler, are you perhaps in the market for a new best friend?” was the vision. What came out to filmmaker Chandler Levack during a recent interview was more like, “Do you need a new friend? Because I loved your film, I felt so seen by it,” almost immediately followed by my throat closing up and my eyes welling in a way that was undeniably obvious, even in a tiny Zoom window.

At least my inclination was right: the “Mile End Kicks” filmmaker got what I was saying. “I’m going to cry,” Levack said in her first interview for the film. “That means the world to me. That really, really does.”

It’s only fitting that Levack’s film would stir big emotions in both its maker and its audience. Much like her debut, “I Like Movies,” “Mile End Kicks” is based on her own experiences.

Swimming Home is an adaptation of Deborah Levy’s 2011 novel, written and directed by debut UK flmmaker Justin Anderson.

The UK-Dutch co-production premiered in the Tiger competition of this year’s International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR).

The film centres around a war reporter played by Mackenzie Davis, on a family holiday with her husband (Christopher Abbott), a poet, and their teenage daughter. Returning home to their villa with a friend (Nadine Labaki) they find a naked stranger, Kitti (Ariane Labed) floating in the pool. Invited to stay, Kitti’s presence comes to emphasise the tensions within the family.

Anderson studied...

Swimming Home is an adaptation of Deborah Levy’s 2011 novel, written and directed by debut UK flmmaker Justin Anderson.

The UK-Dutch co-production premiered in the Tiger competition of this year’s International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR).

The film centres around a war reporter played by Mackenzie Davis, on a family holiday with her husband (Christopher Abbott), a poet, and their teenage daughter. Returning home to their villa with a friend (Nadine Labaki) they find a naked stranger, Kitti (Ariane Labed) floating in the pool. Invited to stay, Kitti’s presence comes to emphasise the tensions within the family.

Anderson studied...

Award-winning artist Justin Anderson’s debut feature “Swimming Home” has its world premiere in competition at International Film Festival Rotterdam. Variety has secured access to the first clip from the film.

The film, an adaptation of Deborah Levy’s 2012 Man Booker Prize shortlisted novel, centers on poet Joe (Christopher Abbott) and war photographer Isabel (Mackenzie Davis), whose marriage is dying when Kitti (Ariane Labed), a naked stranger found floating in the pool at their sunny holiday villa in Greece, is invited to stay. Oscar nominated Lebanese actor-director Nadine Labaki plays a significant role in the film as does emerging actor Freya Hannan-Mills.

In 2014, Anderson directed “Jumper,” a short inspired by Pasolini’s “Teorema,” about a man emerging from a pool and standing naked in the window during a family dinner. A friend saw the film and suggested that he read Levy’s novel. The book resonated with Anderson and he contacted Levy.

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.

The Fever (Maya Da-Rin)

The Fever, director-cum-visual artist Da-Rin’s first full-length feature project, puts a human face to a statistic that hardly captures the genocide Brazil is suffering. This is not just a wonderfully crafted, superb exercise in filmmaking, a multilayered tale that seesaws between social realism and magic. It is a call to action, an unassuming manifesto hashed in the present tense but reverberating as a plea from a world already past us, a memoir of sorts. – Leonardo G. (full review)

Where to Stream: The Criterion Channel

French New Wave

Dive into one of the most fertile eras of moving pictures with a new massive 45-film series on The Criterion Channel dedicated to the French New Wave. Highlights include Le...

With a seemingly endless amount of streaming options—not only the titles at our disposal, but services themselves–each week we highlight the noteworthy titles that have recently hit platforms. Check out this week’s selections below and past round-ups here.

Bad Vacations

I imagine your summer plans didn’t go as expected, but in at least a few films in a new Criterion Channel series, some characters have it worse off than having to quarantine inside. Titled Bad Vacations, the collection includes Bonjour tristesse (Otto Preminger, 1958), La collectionneuse (Éric Rohmer, 1967), The Deep (Peter Yates, 1977), House (Nobuhiko Obayashi, 1977), Long Weekend (Colin Eggleston, 1978), The Green Ray (Eric Rohmer, 1986), The Comfort of Strangers (Paul Schrader, 1990), The Sheltering Sky (Bernardo Bertolucci, 1990), Funny Games (Michael Haneke, 1997), Fat Girl (Catherine Breillat, 2001), La Ciénaga (Lucrecia Martel, 2001), Unrelated (Joanna Hogg, 2007), and Sightseers (Ben Wheatley, 2012).

Where to Stream: The Criterion Channel

Epicentro (Hubert Sauper)

“This is utopia, bright and burning.

An intellectually stimulating art-house treasure all too easily overlooked amid the near-constant flood of Netflix content, “An Easy Girl” depicts a transformative summer in the life of a 16-year-old girl, but not the one described in the film’s title. That label — which writer-director Rebecca Zlotowski employs ironically, calling into question the patriarchal idea that a woman’s worth is tied up in how “hard to get” she plays it — refers to the protagonist’s 22-year-old cousin, no girl at all, but a comely temptress who breezes into the coastal French city of Cannes like a seductive tropical storm, turning heads and jostling perceptions wherever she goes.

Shifting gears from her widely panned “Planetarium”, Zlotowski delivers a relatively modest but far more thought-provoking project — a Rohmerian moral tale, à “La Collectionneuse,” with a shrewd feminist twist. It’s at once a striking auteur statement (launched during Director’s Fortnight at...

Welcome to the exciting, hesitant, guilt-laden and provocative world of Eric Rohmer, and his varied voyages of slightly intimidated romantic discovery. There are six Moral Tales (and some short subjects) and each finds a main character stymied by indecision: should he hew to the narrow moral path, or stop being so conflicted and let relationships happen as they may? Some are moral debates and others are just ruminations on the foolishness of males that overthink their love lives — or are these self-directed men simply trying to be considerate and fair while navigating their amorous possibilities?

Eric Rohmer’s Six Moral Tales

The Bakery Girl of Monceau, Suzanne’s Career, My Night at Maud’s, La collectionneuse, Claire’s Knee, Love in the Afteroon

Blu-ray

The Criterion Collection 342

1963-1972 / B&w + Color / 1:37 flat Academy / available through The Criterion Collection / Street Date May 5, 2020 / 99.95

Produced by Barbet Schroeder

Written and Directed by Eric...

Rebecca Zlotowski on intertextuality in An Easy Girl (Une Fille Facile): “It’s a reproduction of the prologue of the summer tale by Éric Rohmer, the beginning of La Collectionneuse is Haydée Politoff, the main actress on the beach, shot exactly the same.” Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze

There is nothing easy about being an easy girl in Rebecca Zlotowski’s An Easy Girl (Une Fille Facile), co-written with Teddy Lussi-Modeste, shot by Georges Lechaptois, which is a highlight of Rendez-Vous with French Cinema.

Naïma (Mina Farid), Sofia (Zahia Dehar), Philippe (Benoît Magimel), and Andres (Nuno Lopes) in An Easy Girl (Une Fille Facile)

Naïma (Mina Farid) has just turned 16. She lives in Cannes with her mother who works as a maid in one of the fancy hotels. When her older bombshell cousin Sofia (Zahia Dehar) visits for the summer, a new chapter begins in her life. Naima is in awe...

Rebecca Zlotowski, director of the fascinating, disturbing romance Grand Central with Léa Seydoux and Tahar Rahim, and the rather less successful Natalie Portman-starrer Planetarium, has come up with a summer popsicle of a movie set in Cannes, with the flair of Luca Guadagnino and Éric Rohmer.

The director herself calls An Easy Girl a “simple film on a complex subject,” which is as fine a one-liner as I’ll ever come up with. This is a straightforward coming-of-age story from France, a country for whom this is almost a national cliché, but elevated by a key eye for gender roles of its protagonists and an up-to-date message for a teenage generation growing up in a #MeToo world.

School’s out for the summer and 16-year-old Naïma (enchanting first-timer Mina Farid) is enjoying her freedom in the Riviera sun, before she has to make big decisions about the rest of her life.

Now over a decade since its 2003 release, Kino Lorber is releasing the Lars Von Trier and Jorgen Leth experiment/documentary The Five Obstructions in a Special Remastered Edition. While this serves as an excellent opportunity for those unfamiliar with the title to take a gander, the timing serves as more of an interesting conversation piece in regards to Von Trier’s release of the final chapter in his Depression trilogy (or quadrilogy, if you will).

Around the same time that Von Trier’s masterpiece Dogville was provoking audiences, he unleashed this exciting exercise in filmmaking that’s as engaging as it is thoroughly entertaining. As much as it is an examination of filmmaking, it’s also a rather brilliant motivation to goad one friend into creative action, for, as we move along through the film, one can assume that Von Trier and Leth both seem to struggle with issues of depression,...

Eric Rohmer’s La Collectionneuse (1967) serves as a purposeful point of reference for writer-director Will James Moore’s Satellite of Love — not only does Moore cast the lead actor of La Collectionneuse (Patrick Bauchau) as an eccentric friend, but Moore even mimics the tranquil Mediterranean atmosphere of La Collectionneuse by setting Satellite of Love in the vineyards of the Texas Hill Country. Satellite of Love maintains the visually vibrancy of the French New Wave, particularly with its impeccably crafted mise-en-scène. Satellite of Love is absolutely gorgeous, from the oh-so-beautiful cast to Steve Acevedo’s masterful cinematography. Rohmer would probably be very proud that he inspired Moore’s film. Moore and I have been in correspondence ever since the film’s world premiere at the 2012 Dallas International Film Festival; but it was not until the 2012 Austin Film Festival that I finally had a chance to sit down with him and Jonathan Case (co-writer and music supervisor) to talk...

Eric Rohmer’s La Collectionneuse (1967) serves as a purposeful point of reference for writer-director Will James Moore’s Satellite of Love -- not only does Moore cast the lead actor of La Collectionneuse (Patrick Bauchau) as Samuel’s eccentric friend, but Moore even mimics the tranquil Mediterranean atmosphere of La Collectionneuse by setting Satellite of Love in the vineyards of the Texas Hill Country. While the fourth of Rohmer’s Six Moral Tales functions as a sharp criticism of the lack of morality in the youth of the 1960s, Moore allows his characters to criticize each other and refrains from stamping any sort of directorial judgment on them. The script lives up to the classic intellectualism of Rohmer without ever feeling too stilted or forced; while, visually, Satellite of Love maintains the vibrancy of the French New Wave, particularly with its impeccably crafted mise-en-scène. Satellite of Love is absolutely gorgeous,...

Director: Will James Moore Writer: Will James Moore, Jonathan Case Starring: Nathan Phillips, Zachary Knighton, Shannon Lucio, Janina Gavankar, Patrick Bauchau, Turk Pipkin, Chad Mathews, Mike Lutz, Meaghan Cooper Satellite of Love begins at a carnival as Blake (Zachary Knighton), Samuel (Nathan Phillips) and Catherine (Shannon Lucio) trip the lights fantastic. This turns out to be sometime in the past, presumably while the characters were best friends in college. We flash-forward to a period of time after graduation. Samuel has become a musician and bohemian of the world; Catherine and Blake got married, now they run a restaurant (which Austinites will recognize as Justine's) together. The threesome might have been BFFs in college, but Catherine and Blake have taken a decidedly different path in life than Samuel. Catherine and Blake are initially stand-offish when Samuel returns home, obviously still sore from Samuel not attending their wedding. As an apology for his absence at their wedding,...

The oldest member of 1960s France’s Nouvelle Vague, the late Eric Rohmer receives the retrospective treatment starting today, through September 3rd, at New York’s Walter Reade Theater at Lincoln Center with “The Sign of Rohmer.” Rohmer had a style all his own that was not really picked up on until many years later, and indirectly at that, arguably in the 1990s and now quite prevalently in today’s indie cinema. He started with an idea, and then created a film as an essay about that idea. This is the essence of film as art. Pictures like "The Kids Are All Right" and "Cyrus," likely unconsciously, are more mainstream and significantly less-intellectualized versions of Rohmer constructs. They each start with an idea, or conflict, and then we watch characters discuss that idea—with plot only functioning as a means to bring us different sides of the arguments. Highlights are...

To celebrate its 20th Anniversary, it appears as though the Tiff Cinematheque is set to pull out all the stops.

According to Criterion, the Tiff, formerly known as the Cinematheque Ontario, will be bringing out a rather superb and cartoonishly awesome summer schedule, that will include films ranging from Kurosawa pieces, to films from Pier Paolo Pasolini. Other films include a month long series dedicated to James Mason, Eric Rohmer’s Six Moral Tales, a tribute to Robin Wood, and most interesting, a retrospective on the works of one Catherine Breillat.

Personally, while the Kurosawa, Pasolini, and Rohmer collections sound amazing, the Breillat series is ultimately the collective that I am most interested in. Ranging from films like the brilliant Fat Girl, to the superb and underrated Anatomy of Hell, these are some of the most interesting and under seen pieces of cinema of recent memory, and are more than...

One of the great masters of the French New Wave his no longer with us. Eric Rohmer passed away Monday at the age of 89. Rohmer was known for making movies about young, modern French people who fall in love and talk and talk and talk, spurring the infamous comment that his films were like "watching paint dry." But the secret of Rohmer is that, even though his characters are smart and educated and know a little something about human nature, they can't help themselves from succumbing to feelings of love and lust and jealousy, no matter how many words they use or how often they try to intellectually justify themselves.

That duality worked in almost all of Rohmer's films, which he tended to direct in specific groups. His "Six Moral Tales" is perhaps the most well-regarded, including La Collectionneuse (1967), My Night at Maud's (1969), Claire's Knee (1970) and Love in the Afternoon...

Idiosyncratic French film-maker who was a leading figure in the cinema of the postwar new wave

In Arthur Penn's intelligently unconventional private eye thriller Night Moves (1975), Gene Hackman's hero – who finds the mystery he faces as unfathomable as his personal relationships – is asked by his wife whether he wants to go to an Eric Rohmer movie. "I don't think so," he says. "I saw a Rohmer film once. It was kind of like watching paint dry."

Behind that exchange lies a jab at ­Hollywood's mistrust of any film-maker, especially a French one, who neglects plot and action in favour of cerebral exploration, metaphysical conceit and moral nuance. The Dream Factory, after all, had proved through trial and error that cinema is cinema, literature is ­literature, and the twain shall meet only provided the images rule, not the words.

Of the major American film-makers, perhaps only Joseph Mankiewicz allowed his scripts,...

The French New Wave director Eric Rohmer has died aged 89. We look back over his film career in clips

Le Signe du Lion (1959)

Rohmer's first feature was a pure-blood product of the burgeoning French New Wave; a loose-limbed, low-budget tale of poverty-row Paris, evocatively played out in the Latin Quarter as its hero rattles between the houses in search of loot. The film was destined to be eclipsed by the likes of Breathless and The 400 Blows – but Rohmer had yet to find his perfect rhythm.

La Collectionneuse (1968)

The fourth of Rohmer's six "moral tales" offers a wry and playful battle of the sexes, as the nymphet of the title makes a point of bedding a different man each night – and dances constantly away from the two male friends who try to tame her. Its St Tropez setting showed how Rohmer was as comfortable in France's wide open spaces as in the bustling metropolis.

MADRID -- San Sebastian Film Festival organizers said Friday they will honor French director, producer and actor Barbet Schroeder with a retrospective of his works at the 54th annual event to run Sept. 21-30. Schroeder "is a moviemaker who has always endeavored to portray the attitudes of his times," the festival said, and hailed some of the films he has directed such as Barfly, Single White Female, Kiss of Death and Reversal of Fortune, for which he received an Oscar nomination. Before turning to directing in the late 1960s, Schroeder founded a company that produced some of Eric Rohmer's earliest works including Claire's Knee, My Night at Maud's and The Collector. Organizers said the films to be shown for the retrospective will be announced later. Past honorees at the festival in northern Spain have included Woody Allen and Bette Davis.