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On the occasion of its 700th issue, legendary French film magazine Cahiers du Cinéma has partnered with the French Institute Alliance Française (Fiaf), New York's premiere French cultural center, to present a special two-part CinéSalon film series. The series features a selection of rarely shown treasures from French film history and continues in June with a showcase of top picks that have been championed in the pages of the magazine. Indiewire pleased to be partnering with Fiaf and Cahiers du Cinéma to present reviews of films in the series originally published in the magazine and available here in English for the first time with translations by Nicholas Elliott, the magazine's New York correspondent. On Tuesday, May 27, Fiaf screens Jacques Rozier’s "Maine-Océan," with the 7:30 p.m. screening to be introduced by director Alex Ross Perry. "Tidal Bore" — a description of a tidal phenomenon, not a value judgment on this...

When the camera moves in Raúl Ruiz's Mysteries of Lisbon (a film that manages to be baroque, Gothic, Expressionist and modernist at all once), it moves so weightlessly, relentlessly and unexpectedly that it seems as though it might at any moment pass—Fincher-style—through a wall. And sometimes it actually does. It performs the trick it's been hinting at. It slides sly, unshowy, snake-like from one room into another without missing a beat of the action.

For example: A priest and a boy are sitting in the waiting room of a country estate. The boy stands up to look at some paintings that are hanging on the wall, and Ruiz cuts from the boy's perspective of the paintings to some reverse shots of him to some vague and distorted images (suggesting "memories" in '40s shorthand) and then back to the wide shot of the waiting room—the trusty,...

After seeing Kiju Yoshida’s debut film Good for Nothing (1960), we can add the filmmaker’s name to the rare list of studio directors whose first films signal immediate, restless talent, vision fully formed, grasp of cinematic tools and expressions already mature. While other Japanese New Wavers were trying to capture a youth audience through filming flighty takes on the too young and too irresponsible, Yoshida aims squarely at the malaise of post-college new adults and the newfound prospect of becoming a tired salaryman in your twenties. Or salarywoman—because as tightly hued as Yoshida’s picture is of lean, exasperated men fidgeting for meaning in their impassive apathy, Good for Nothing devotes just as much time to its female heroine—out of her 20s but wants to be no simple lover, housewife, or member of society, and is just as beset with a need for fulfillment and meaning. With...