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New York City’s Metrograph has today announced the launch of the Metrograph TV App, designed to allow its members nationwide access to all Metrograph live streams and on-demand programming directly via their TV remote. The Metrograph TV App is available starting today at no cost on Apple TV, Fire TV, and Roku, with an Android TV launch coming soon.

Like most other NYC theaters, the Metrograph closed its doors in March 2020 due to the Covid-19 pandemic, but is now readying for a September re-opening. The two-screen theater, located on Ludlow Street on the Lower East Side, has yet to announce its full release plans as other NYC-area theaters continue to reopen, but today’s launch of the app makes it clear that a digital component will be part of its plans moving forward.

“Metrograph’s digital expansion this past year has brought our programming to a nationwide audience, and...

Mubi's series Éric Rohmer: Comedies and Proverbs is now showing in many countries around the world.A devout Catholic and staunch cine-moralist, a director of marvelous consistency and constant reinvention, a miser whose unfashionably talky films turned a consistent profit well into his old age, a committed environmentalist and covert neo-royalist: Éric Rohmer developed, over the course of his storied career, a variety of reputations—often distorted, always encouraged. But if one feels that the great French director’s apparent contradictions and personal moral codes cannot so easily be summed up, this is only apropos, for his cinema conveys a sense of the world as too mysterious and variegated and unpredictable to accommodate our attempts at comprehending it—even, or especially, through fiction. Indeed, Rohmer’s deceptively spare cinematic practice constitutes a veritable confrontation with the multifarious materials of daily life, grounding its philosophical insight and sense of...

Close-Up is a column that spotlights films now playing on Mubi. The Green Ray is playing on Mubi UK starting today through December 5.

Smitten by a viewing of Eric Rohmer's 1972 film, Love in the Afternoon, French actress and filmmaker Marie Rivière felt compelled to write the director a letter expressing her fondness of the film and offering her professional services. By 1978, she had been given a small role in Perceval, the director's minimalist take on Chrétien de Troyes's 12 century romantic text. Rivière was later given an expanded role in 1981's The Aviator's Wife, the first entry in Rohmer's six-film cycle of Comedies & Proverbs. By 1986, Rivière was called upon to play Delphine in the director's semi-improvised masterpiece, The Green Ray, a film whose form and content innovatively draws upon the actor's personal experiences and fragile emotional state at the time. Such was her connection with Rohmer and his work,...

Maurice Schérer, born in either Tulle or Nancy, a former schoolteacher, a gaunt face with an odd lip. A notoriously private man who was in his late 40s before he found any sort of success, and then under a pseudonym. The obituaries say Eric Rohmer has died; that's not really true. Schérer was a real man whom very few people knew well, and yes, he really did die on Monday, aged 89. "Rohmer," who made his first short film in 1950, when Schérer was almost 30, and formally retired from filmmaking 57 years later, can best be described as the product of Schérer's intellect. An Ellery Queen, or maybe an Émile Ajar. Schérer's body is barely cold, and yet it's already necessary, in a certain respect, to defend his Rohmer. The obituaries have a tinge of faint condescension. It's almost as though some other man, who made "sophisticated" and "talky" "low-key" films "about young...

He made poignant, sensual films about first love and chance encounters. But it was the dialogue that made the late Eric Rohmer's movies magical, says Gilbert Adair

Who says that the ­cinema is not in a state of terminal ­infantilism? ­Consider the case of the French filmmaker Eric Rohmer, who died on ­Monday at the age of 89. It's a sobering thought that My Night With Maud, the work that established his international ­reputation all of 40 years ago – a ­cerebral comedy about a pious young Catholic intellectual and a flirtatious, free-thinking bourgeoise, who spend an ­unconsummated night together mostly discussing Pascalian theology – was a huge popular hit in its day, and not only in France. Nowadays, if My Night With Maud were made at all, it would almost certainly be marginalised, by critics and public alike, as an avant-gardist, even downright experimental, film, with an audience to match.

During those intervening four ­decades,...

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,...