News

Netflix’s Shafted (originally Super Males) explores the comedy of masculinity in crisis. Following four middle-aged friends—Cédric, Tom, Jérémie, and Tonio—the series examines their challenges with relationships, career setbacks, and changing gender roles in contemporary Paris. Each man, in his own way, feels disconnected from the current world, leading them to a court-mandated masculinity workshop meant to challenge their outdated attitudes.

The show’s concept intrigues—men compelled to face their worst impulses in an environment created to disassemble them. Cédric, a self-proclaimed dominant male, resents his female colleague’s promotion. Tom clings to his divorce like a trophy. Jérémie’s sense of masculinity wobbles under erectile dysfunction, while Tonio, a serial cheater, recoils when his girlfriend suggests an open relationship.

The humor shifts between cutting and exaggerated, occasionally delivering pointed social observations but frequently relying on physical comedy. The setup implies an exploration of gender dynamics, yet Shafted remains hesitant.

François Truffaut goes deep and morbid adapting a Henry James story about a man who chooses to ‘devote himself to his beloved dead.’ He builds an altar-shrine to a departed bride and comrades that didn’t survive the Great War. A sympathetic woman considers aiding him, but his obsession keeps choosing life-negating directions. It’s a weird, morbid but highly understandable tale from the edge of the fantastic. The cinematographer is Néstor Almendros; the film is part of a 4-title François Truffaut Collection.

The Green Room

Blu-ray

Kl Studio Classics

Part of Kino’s François Truffaut Collection, with The Wild Child, Small Change and The Man Who Loved Women

1978 / Color / 1:66 widescreen / 94 min. / Street Date February 14, 2023 / La chanbre verte, The Vanishing Fiancée / available through Kino Lorber / 59.95

Starring: François Truffaut, Nathalie Baye, Jean Dast´, Patrick Maléon, Jeanne Lobre, Antoine Vitez, Jean-Pierre Moulin, Serge Rousseau, Annie Miller, Nathan Miller, Marcel Berbert.

Cinematography:...

Luisa (Lou Strenger) and Chrissimo (Christoph Bertram) get distracted by the wildflowers on their way to his parents, Ferhat (Ferhat Kaleli) and Peter (Peter Brachschoss) in Florian Schmitz’ smartly edited Le Pré Du Mal

Florian Schmitz’s Le Pré Du Mal, along with Alison Kuhn's Fluffy Tales, Jonatan Schwenk’s Zoon (co-written with Merlin Flügel), Luis Schubert’s Blind Spots, Kilian Armando Friedrich’s Edgy, Lina Drevs’s Sis - Best Sister, Felix Länge’s Why We Juggle, Laurenz Otto’s Against All Odds (Allen Zweifeln Zum Trotz), and Jakob Werner’s How Such An Annoying Drizzle Can Be Silent (Wie Ein So Lästiger Regen Schweigen Kann) is in the Next Generation Short Tiger program screening at this year’s Cannes Film Festival.

Florian Schmitz with Anne-Katrin Titze: “I have different influences I would say. The basis for me - I know it sounds like a cliché, but Truffaut is always a big inspiration.

Filippo Scotti is the 21-year newcomer starring in Italy’s entry for Best International Feature Film at the 94th Academy Awards, “The Hand of God.” The film is written and directed by Paolo Sorrentino, whose film “The Great Beauty” won the Oscar in this category eight years ago. The Netflix movie is Scotti’s breakout feature film and his newfound fame is still something he’s coming to terms with. Watch the exclusive interview above.

“One thing that I love the most about this job is definitely to meet new people,” Scotti says. “This movie now, with all the travel for the promotion, I’m meeting new people and I’m sharing a lot. That’s what has changed the most.” “The Hand of God” competed for the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival earlier this year where it won the Grand Jury Prize. Scotti received the Marcello Mastroianni Award,...

“French Dispatch” director Wes Anderson is so stranger to sharing his favorite movies. Now, he’s paired with the French Institute Alliance Francaise (Fiaf) for a seven movie series devoted to Anderson’s favorite French features. The screening series will coincide with the release of Anderson’s next feature, the aforementioned “French Dispatch” starring Timothee Chalamet.

The series will kick off with a free screening of Diane Kurys’ 1977 feature “Peppermint Soda” on September 14. The other features in the series, dubbed “Wes Anderson’s French Connection” includes Max Ophuls’ 1940 film “From Mayerling to Sarajevo,” Francois Truffaut’s “The Man Who Loved Women” from 1977, “Kings and Queen” (2004), Bertrand Blier’s “Get Out Your Handkerchiefs” (1977), “Max and the Junkmen” from 1971, and Jacque Becker’s 1947 film “Antoine and Antoinette.”

These are just a few of the inspirations associated with Anderson’s “The French Dispatch,” which follows a group of journalists at a fictional French magazine.

A television adaptation of “Black Samurai” is in the works with Common set to star as Robert Sand, Variety confirms.

Based on Marc Olden’s 1974 book series, the story follows Robert after he is rescued by a Japanese samurai master and trains with him for seven years. After he suffers from racism in the military and his teacher is killed in front of him by terrorists, he sets out to seek revenge on the ones who took the lives of his friends.

Read More: Wilmer Valderrama Joins Cast of CBS’ ‘NCIS’

The series will be executive produced by Wu-Tang Clan’s RZA, Wu Films’ Mitchell Diggs and Diane Crafford and Andre Gaines with his Cinemation banner.

“Robert Sand is like black Jason Bourne. ‘Black Samurai’ is one of the most unique, timely and fun experiences I’ve ever read, while at the same time tackling some serious subjects around race and diversity,...

That naughty boy Federico Fellini goes all out with this essay-hallucination about women, a surreal odyssey that hurls Marcello Mastroianni into a world in which women are no longer putting up with male nonsense. It's an honest (if still somewhat sexist) effort by an artist acknowledging illusions and pleasures that he knows are infantile. City of Women Blu-ray Cohen Media Group 1980 / Color / 1:85 widescreen / 139 min. / La cittá delle donne / Street Date May 31, 2016 / 39.98 Starring Marcello Mastroianni, Anna Prucnal, Bernice Stegers, Iole Silvani, Donatella Damiani, Ettore Manni, Fiammetta Baralla, Catherine Carrel, Rose Alba. Cinematography Giuseppe Rotunno Film Editor Ruggero Mastroianni Original Music Luis Bacalov Written by Brunello Rondi, Bernardino Zapponi, Federico Fellini Produced by Franco Rossellini, Renzo Rossellini, Daniel Toscan du Plantier Directed by Federico Fellini

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

Federico Fellini's 1980 City of Women was called 'wonderfully uninhibited' by The New York Times. Fellini's output slowed to a crawl in the 1970s,...

It’s 1940, and the Nazi invasion of France is fully under way. A mother, father, a five-year-old girl and her tiny dog are among a throng of refugees fleeing Paris and jamming roads across the French countryside while German planes drop bombs and strafe their path with a relentless rain of machine gun fire. Soon the girl will be completely alone, her parents and that beloved dog all cut down in front of her eyes. But before she even has the chance to process what has happened (if she even can—on the most immediate level, she believes they’re only asleep), she’s given a ride by an older couple, one of whom cruelly flings the animal’s corpse, the only thing the girl has been able to save of her now-devastated familiar world, into a creek. The girl, Paulette (Brigitte Fossey), jumps off their wagon, retrieves the dog...

Some movies just vanish.

While Costa-Gavras continues to enjoy a high reputation for his sixties and seventies political thrillers (perhaps more respected than watched, which is a shame) and to some extent for his later American movies (more watched than respected, also a shame), The Sleeping Car Murders (1965), one of his earliest works, is so hard to see that I wound up watching a pan-and-scanned off-air recording taped on VHS from Scottish Television sometime in the eighties, and dubbed into English. At least Simone Signoret seems to have done her own re-voicing, but her erring husband Yves Montand has that strained Amurrican tone I associate with Robert Rietty doing Orson Welles.

So Costa-Gavras' movie, formerly a missing person, turns up as a homicide victim, mutilated to prevent identification. With the performances defaced, the compositions utterly ruined, and the editing patterns minced in this copy (because a cut doesn't mean the...

Women directors make up 70% of competition films.

Abu Dhabi Film Festival (Adff) (Oct 23-Nov 1) has announced the selection for this year’s Emirates Film Competition (Efc).

The upcoming edition of the competition features a total of 53 films, of which 37 films are directed by women, across a variety of genres.

The line up also features films by Emirati filmmakers such as Nasser Al Tamimi’s Female Scream, Nasser Al-Yaqoubi’s Haneen, Hassan Kiyani’s Marwan The Boxer and Ali Mostafa’s musical Rise. In addition, Sarah Al Agroobi’s Super Lochal is among the selected films.

Desire by Hala Matar (Bahrain, starring Johnny Knoxville) has been selected for Adff’s Short Film Competition along with Koshk, from Emirati director Abdullah Al-Kaabi. These two films will participate in both Efc and the Short Film Competition.

Highly anticipated films from the Gcc region include Now Showing directed by Abdullah Al Daihani (Kuwait), Rainbow directed by Mahmood Al-Shaikh (Bahrain) and 623 directed...

By Mireille Latil-Le-Dantec. Originally published in Cinématographe, no. 35, February 1978 in an issue with a Chaplin dossier.

Translation by Ted Fendt. Thanks to Marie-Pierre Duhamel.

The Chaplinesque Quest

The overbearing weight of interpretative studies devoted to Chaplin makes any pretension to some "fresh look" at a universe already studied from every angle seem absurd from the outset. At least, on the occasion of the homages currently being made in theaters to the little man who would become so big, a few fragmentary re-viewings more modestly allow for the rediscovery of the thematic unity of this body of work and the inanity of any artificial divide between the "excellent" Charlie films and the "mediocre" Chaplin films – a divide corresponding, of course, to the event which his art was not supposed to have survived: the appearance of those talkies that – in the excellent company of Eisenstein, Pudovkin, René Clair and many others – he...

(René Clément, 1952; StudioCanal, 12)

René Clément (1913-96) worked for years on documentaries before making his feature debut immediately after the second world war with La bataille du rail (1946), a celebration of the role of railway workers in the Resistance. It won the international jury prize at the first Cannes film festival, and his most famous movie, Forbidden Games (Les jeux interdits), also about the second world war, won an Oscar as best foreign language movie.

Set in 1940, this delicate, beautifully paced film centres on a middle-class five-year-old (Brigitte Fossey), orphaned by the Luftwaffe while fleeing from Paris, and her new friend, a young peasant lad (Georges Poujouly), who become obsessed with the rituals of burial as the war goes on around them. The film is both deeply moving and darkly comic, and the performances of Poujouly and the infinitely expressive Fossey (both of whom had acting careers as adults) are among...

Perhaps we should all agree the term “urban update” should be kept as far away from studio pitches as possible? The descriptor -- besides sounding like a mandatory software patch -- just does not do the film it's touting any favors whatsoever. But, that hasn't stopped the latest remake to be deigned as such from picking up a charismatic leading man in rapper/actor Common, and worthy source material in Francois Truffaut's 1977 film “The Man Who Loved Women.”

Shadow and Act reports that the update, which comes after a pretty dismal Blake Edwards remake starring Burt Reynolds and Julie Andrews, will transplant the original film's Paris location to Buenos Aires, where Marc Guiness (Common) decides to pen a memoir about the myriad relationships throughout his life. First-time feature director J. Kevin Swain, who has 'til now made a name with music videos and, er, “Being Bobby Brown,” will helm the project,...

Common is attached to star in an "urban update" of Francois Truffaut's 1977 romantic comedy classic The Man Who Loved Women for writer and director J. Kevin Swain. The film was previously remade in 1983 by director Blake Edwards with Burt Reynolds and Julie Andrews. However, instead of Paris or Los Angeles, Swain's version will be set in Buenos Aires, with Common playing Marc Guiness, a world famous artist, who decides to write down his memoirs about his life with women. There's a dramatic plot twist, but if you haven't seen either the Truffaut or the Edwards version, I won't spoil it for you. Currently Swain is pursuing Alicia Keys, Taraji...

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,...

Film director best known for the Pink Panther, Breakfast at Tiffany's and 10

The film-maker Blake Edwards, who has died aged 88, will be best remembered as the creator of the Pink Panther films, and as the husband of the entertainer Julie Andrews. But Edwards was a third-generation show-business figure whose complex and controversial career spanned more than 50 years, initially as an actor and writer and subsequently as one of America's most prolific producer-directors, primarily concerned with the popular genres of comedy and musicals and with creating television series.

Despite working in mainstream cinema, his maverick spirit and ego made him an uneasy partner with Hollywood studios. He famously savaged the hand that had fed him so well with S.O.B. (1981), a raucous, vitriolic attack on Tinseltown. His sophisticated work drew strongly on his love of early cinema (his stepgrandfather had directed silent films), and on his own life and psychological problems (he...