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Catherine Breillat‘s psychosexual reckless return to form is here. Her acclaimed latest film, “Last Summer” (Sideshow/Janus), will premiere on the Criterion Channel on November 21 with a live-streaming event, as IndieWire announces exclusively. The “Last Summer” live-stream, happening that evening at 6 p.m. Pt/9 p.m. Et, is in line with Criterion’s new tradition of launching the Sideshow/Janus titles early — the streamer similarly launched Bertrand Bonello’s “The Beast” that way over the summer.

“Last Summer” also joins the Criterion Channel as a retrospective of provocative filmmaker Breillat’s oeuvre streams on the platform, including “Fat Girl” and “Anatomy of Hell” and “Sex Is Comedy.” Starring Léa Drucker in one of the year’s best performances, “Last Summer” earned raves earlier this year and at Cannes and other festivals in 2023. The streaming premiere is good cause to remember “Last Summer” for your year-end lists. Bonus features accompanying...

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.

Across the River and Into the Trees (Paula Ortiz)

Hemingway’s work across novels and short stories has been adapted for film countless times over, yet Across the River and Into the Trees has never properly been rendered onscreen. Until now. Written by Peter Flannery and directed by Paula Ortiz, here is a handsome film that is decidedly modest in its endeavor. The best thing going for it is Liev Schreiber as Colonel Richard Cantwell, the lead of the picture. Schreiber is one of those actors who has somehow always been underrated, despite being capable of playing nearly any kind of part. A kind boyfriend thrust into an impossible familial situation (The Daytrippers)? Check. Tough-but-fractured fixer living on the edge (Ray Donovan)? Check.

November 2024, Criterion Channel is set to deliver an exceptional lineup of films that will excite cinephiles and casual viewers alike. The month promises a rich exploration of genres, featuring a strong selection of Coen Brothers classics such as Blood Simple (1984) and The Big Lebowski (1998), along with their more recent works like A Serious Man (2009) and Inside Llewyn Davis (2013). Noir and crime enthusiasts will revel in an array of titles, including The Maltese Falcon (1941), Gilda (1946), and The Big Heat (1953), showcasing the genre’s iconic narratives and stylistic depth. International cinema also shines through with compelling French dramas like Fat Girl (2001) and Dheepan (2015), highlighting diverse storytelling from around the globe.

The lineup doesn’t shy away from classic drama, featuring timeless films like On the Waterfront (1954) and Seven Samurai (1954), which continue to resonate with contemporary audiences. Additionally, viewers can look forward to a variety of documentary and experimental films, including Wild Wheels...

With Janus possessing the much-needed restorations, Catherine Breillat is getting her biggest-ever spotlight in November’s Criterion Channel series spanning 1976’s A Real Young Girl to 2004’s Anatomy of Hell––just one of numerous retrospectives arriving next month. They’re also spotlighting Ida Lupino, directorial efforts of John Turturro (who also gets an “Adventures In Moviegoing”), the Coen brothers, and Jacques Audiard.

In a slightly more macroscopic view, Columbia Noir and a new edition of “Queersighting” ring in Noirvember. Gregg Araki’s Teen Apocalypse trilogy and Miller’s Crossing get Criterion Editions, while restorations of David Bowie-starrer The Linguini Incident, Med Hondo’s West Indies, and Dennis Hopper’s Out of the Blue make streaming debuts; and Kevin Jerome Everson’s Tonsler Park arrives just in time for another grim election day.

See the full list of titles arriving in November below:

36 fillette, Catherine Breillat, 1988

Anatomy of Hell, Catherine Breillat,...

Like some of her most memorable films, including 36 Fillette, Romance, Sex is Comedy and Anatomy of Hell, French writer-director Catherine Breillat’s new feature, Last Summer (L’Été dernier), dangerously straddles borders between unnerving drama, dark comedy and erotic exploitation — which is precisely the place the director wants to be.

On the surface, the plot seems to come right out of a softcore stepmom flick, following a successful lawyer, Anne (Léa Drucker), having an illicit affair with her stepson, Théo (Samuel Kircher), a rebellious 17-year-old who looks like a camera stand-in for Timothée Chalamet. But while the film might follow that template at first blush, including a handful of rather direct sex scenes, Breillat is after something other than mere Skinemax fodder, probing the depths of desire among a bourgeoisie constrained to live out dull, cold existences, and the manipulation that can happen between two lovers with a significant age gap.

French director Catherine Breillat has been breaking taboos throughout her career and her new Cannes Palme d’Or contender Last Summer is no exception.

The erotic thriller stars Lea Drucker as Anne, a family lawyer specializing in child protection, who embarks on a forbidden affair with her dissolute 17-year-old stepson Theo (Samuel Kircher), with devastating consequences. Read Stephanie Bunbury’s review for Deadline here.

The film has been warmly received in Cannes where it world premiered to a long standing ovation on Thursday evening.

Breillat addressed the provocative plotline in the press conference for the film on Friday, saying the initial relationship between Anne and Theo was “pure love”.

“I think that when they fall in love it’s unconscious, there’s a kind of happiness, a sort of intoxication that takes over. They’re not analyzing what’s going on. That’s why she is not a predator, it’s something else,...

New films from Wes Anderson, Jessica Hausner, Nanni Moretti, Catherine Breillat, Todd Haynes, Ken Loach and Wim Wenders have all been selected for the 2023 Cannes competition.

The Cannes Film Festival (May 16-27) has unveiled its 2023 official selection already buzzing with the return of veteran auteurs In Competition including Todd Haynes, Jessica Hausner, Wim Wenders, Ken Loach, Nanni Moretti, Catherine Breillat, Wes Anderson, Nuri Bilge Ceylan and Hirokazu Kore-eda.

They join the previously announced Martin Scorsese, whose Killers Of The Flower Moon was announced for Out of Competition but who still could end up in Competition, it was suggested at today’s press conference.

Catherine Breillat doesn’t make porn. Anyone familiar with the 73-year-old French auteur knows her frank portraits of female sexuality are complex, often transcendent explorations of desire through a metaphysical lens. That impulse extends back to Brelliat’s first film in 1976, “A Real Young Girl,” in which she adapted her own controversial novel about a 14-year-old’s sexual awakening. It has stayed with her through the decades in everything from “Fat Girl” to “Sex Is Comedy,” which fictionalizes the discomfort of shooting a sex scene.

Many of those movies are included in a new 11-film Breillat retrospective at New York’s IFC Center, but none epitomize Breillat’s daring aesthetic more than 1999’s “Romance,” the absorbing story of a young woman named Marie who finds catharsis from her sexless relationship with her boyfriend in a series of ambitious trysts. One of these leads to her rape; another inspires her revenge.

Lili Hinstin is looking to shake things up. The new artistic director of the storied Locarno International Film Festival, whose 72nd edition, Hinstin's first as boss, kicks off Wednesday, wants to sharpen the edge that has made the Locarno the film lover's film festival.

Hinstin's announced this year's program with a "manifesto" calling on Locarno, and the indie film industry in general, to embrace risk and controversy. She backed that up by naming Catherine Breillat — the controversial French director known for such taboo-exploding works as Sex Is Comedy, Sleeping Beauty and Abuse of Weakness —...

Lili Hinstin is looking to shake things up. The new artistic director of the storied Locarno International Film Festival, whose 72nd edition, Hinstin's first as boss, kicks off Wednesday, wants to sharpen the edge that has made the Locarno the film lover's film festival.

Hinstin's announced this year's program with a "manifesto" calling on Locarno, and the indie film industry in general, to embrace risk and controversy. She backed that up by naming Catherine Breillat — the controversial French director known for such taboo-exploding works as Sex Is Comedy, Sleeping Beauty and Abuse of Weakness —...

The 72nd Locarno Film Festival, a longtime beacon of the international indie filmmaking community, is being shaken up under new artistic director Lili Hinstin. She is the Swiss event’s second female chief since it was founded in 1946 and one of the few women to head an A-list fest.

Hinstin takes the reins from Italy’s Carlo Chatrian who went on to become Berlinale co-director after six years at Locarno’s helm, his last edition characterized by movies with women at their center. The Swiss fest will run Aug. 7-17.

In announcing her selection, Hinstin, who previously headed France’s Entrevues Belfort Intl. Film Festival, says she’s aiming to “surprise, perturb and raise questions” and points out that “the choices you make for your first festival all tend to become a kind of manifesto.”

The Locarno opener is clearly significant: “If Only,” a partly autobiographical sentimental comedy about three kids of divorced parents,...

Italian director Ginevra Elkann’s directorial debut, “If Only,” about kids with divorced parents, will open the 72nd Locarno Film Festival, its first edition under new artistic director Lili Hinstin, who has assembled an edgy mix of promising titles from young auteurs and more established names.

“If Only” and the fest closer, iconic Japanese director Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Uzbekistan-set “To the Ends of the Earth” will both premiere in Locarno’s 8,000-seat Piazza Grande.

Also set for a launch from the Piazza Grande is Amazon’s terrorist drama “7500,” directed by Patrick Vollrath, with star Joseph Gordon-Levitt in tow; Valerie Donzelli’s comedy “Notre Dame”; and fellow French director Stephane Demoustier’s “The Girl With a Bracelet,” in which a teenager stands trial for murdering her best friend.

Quentin Tarantino’s “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood,” which premiered in Cannes, will also screen on the Piazza (without talent in...

Mubi's retrospective, Catherine Breillat, Auteur of Porn?, is showing April 4 - June 3, 2017 in Germany.Sex Is ComedyThroughout her career, Catherine Breillat has provided viewers with a long-form meta-cinema experience. While metacinema is as old as the medium itself, since her debut feature A Real Young Girl in 1976, Breillat has developed a distinct form of it: one that collapses ‘autobiographical’ material, various artistic sensibilities, and the process of filmmaking itself.Like dozens of other English words—such as ‘aesthetic’ or ‘abject’—the word ‘meta’ has been largely misused or misapplied with regard to the film and literary criticism. Regarding the consumption of fiction, the appropriate use of the term 'metafiction,' 'metafilm,' et cetera, has its basis in the Greek meta, which does not translate directly into English but can be understood as a preposition similar to the English word ‘about’ (‘having to do with,’ or ‘on the subject of’). Metafiction is therefore,...

My Afternoon With Maud’s Money: Breillat’s Most Personal Film Showcases Huppert

Catherine Breillat leaves behind the series of Grimm’s fairy tales she was adapting and returns to autobiographical resources to tell one of her own with Abuse of Weakness, which recounts a scandal from the not too distant past in which a con-man Breillat had cast in her next film swindled her out of all her money. Rigid, frigid, and icy to the core, the re-enactment is less scandalous and perhaps more perversely self-castigating, but what supersedes all aspects of both the film’s origination and directorial intent is another fascinating performance from Isabelle Huppert, the stand-in for Breillat’s on-camera persona and perhaps the warmest rendition of an adult female to appear in her filmography yet.

Prolific film director and author Maud Schoenberg (Huppert) awakens suddenly to find half her body paralyzed after suffering a brain hemorrhage.

In late-2004, Catherine Breillat suffered a debilitating stroke that paralyzed the left side of her body and precipitated a five-month hospital stay. After learning to walk again, she soon returned to work, finalizing pre-production on The Last Mistress (2007). Her next project was to have been an adaption of her novel, Bad Love, starring Naomi Campbell and Christophe Rocancourt, a notorious criminal who, by the time Breillat met him, had already served five years in an American prison for defrauding his victims out of millions of dollars.

In a 2008 interview, Breillat said of Rocancourt: "He is so intelligent, so sincere, so arrogant. You have to be arrogant to achieve anything in this life. When I first saw him, I knew he would be perfect for my film." Breillat was, in fact, under the spell of Rocancourt at the time of that interview. Borrowing small sums at first, he would eventually swindle her out of nearly 700,000 euros,...

Have you ever wondered what are the films that inspire the next generation of visionary filmmakers? As part of our monthly Ioncinephile profile (read this months’ pick), we ask the filmmaker the incredibly arduous task of identifying their top ten (eleven in this case) favorite films of all time. Hannah Fidell (who saw her first feature film A Teacher hit Sundance and SXSW, concludes a busy year with a VOD and theatrical release (September 6th) via Oscilloscope Laboratories. Here are her “favorite films right now (at this very moment)”. Enjoy!

A Face In The Crowd – Elia Kazan (1957)

“In my opinion, this is the greatest film of all time. Everything about this film is spot on: acting, story, camerawork… it is a masterpiece.”

Boogie Nights – Paul Thomas Anderson (1997)

“I will never forget where I was when I first saw this film. It was like a light bulb turned on after the...

Hello internet! My name is Hannah Fidell and I wrote and directed the film A Teacher. It’s screening in rough cut form at Us-In-Progress which is being held at the first ever Champs-Élysées Film Festival in Paris this week. Three other American independent films were chosen to compete for various postproduction grants and all are screened for European distributors and sales agents. Being the first time I’ve ever participated in anything like this, the nice folks over at Filmmaker thought it would be a good idea for me to share my experiences. Enjoy!

June 6, 2012

8:32pm – Dropped off at JFK by my dear friend Emily. Just as we pull up, a Swat team descends upon an unclaimed briefcase by the entrance. I’m able to rush inside with my hastily packed giant suitcase filled with everything I own and more before the area is closed off.

8:58pm...

The twentieth year of Catherine Breillat’s directorial career marked a shift. While her thematic focus and bold vision remained true, her skills as a filmmaker and storyteller began showing strong signs of improvement beginning with 1996′s Perfect Love. It opens with a man explaining to the police how and why he killed his lover as well as her daughter’s account. Building toward such an extreme end, the actual story of the romance that the film flashes back to is surprisingly subtle. Too often this kind of disintegrating relationship story fails to build up the relationship and make you invest in it before tearing it down but on this note Perfect Love excels. Bonus points for excellent use of phallic symbolism.

Four of Breillat’s next five films share bonds that demand a break from a chronological structure. 1999′s Romance and 2004′s Anatomy of Hell share the presence of...

Catherine Breillat is fearless, and at this point in her career that’s almost taken for granted. Provocateur is the word that seems to come up most, as if critics can’t even find a more English word to depict her unique and challenging portrayals of sexuality and female independence. “Anatomy of Hell” pushed the envelope farther than almost any film of recent memory, while “Sex Is Comedy” and “The Last Mistress” are no less frank in their treatment of sexual politics. That’s why there seems to be a bit of confusion regarding her recent plunge into the world of fairy tales,…...

French auteur Catherine Breillat is not known for making childrens' stories, but with "The Sleeping Beauty" (opening Friday at the IFC Center) she turns one on its ear. Known for subversive commentary on feminine representation and sexual desire with films like "Fat Girl," "Sex is Comedy" and "Anatomy of Hell," Breillat has turned in recent years to the realm of adaptations. "Sleeping Beauty" follows on the heels of "Bluebeard," another ...

French auteur Catherine Breillat is not known for making childrens' stories, but with "The Sleeping Beauty" (opening Friday at the IFC Center) she turns one on its ear. Known for subversive commentary on feminine representation and sexual desire with films like "Fat Girl," "Sex is Comedy" and "Anatomy of Hell," Breillat has turned in recent years to the realm of adaptations. "Sleeping Beauty" follows on the heels of "Bluebeard," another ...

French auteur Catherine Breillat is not known for making childrens' stories, but with "The Sleeping Beauty" (opening Friday at the IFC Center) she turns one on its ear. Known for subversive commentary on feminine representation and sexual desire with films like "Fat Girl," "Sex is Comedy" and "Anatomy of Hell," Breillat has turned in recent years to the realm of adaptations. "Sleeping Beauty" follows on the heels of "Bluebeard," another ...

From one of the most provocative French directors of the last three decades, watch the trailer for Catherine Breillat.s The Sleeping Beauty.

Synopsis

The films of French director Catherine Breillat (Fat Girl, Romance, Sex Is Comedy, Anatomy of Hell) are not known for ending with a .. . .happy ever after.. There is always a twist. Although the heroine may find happiness, there is always a price.

The twists are plentiful in Ms. Breillat.s current feature The Sleeping Beauty. In a castle in a far away land in a bygone age, a little girl named Anastasia is born. Carabosse, an older fairy, waits impatiently for three younger fairies to arrive so that they can bestow a blessing on the child. When they finally arrive all is lost. Carabosse has placed a curse on the child: at the age of sixteen Anastasia will pierce her hand and die. Feeling somewhat guilty...

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...

In this season for critical lists, the Best of the Decade survey from the New Yorker's movies editor genuinely stands out

It's the end of the year, and for film critics this is the season for making lists – the best films of the year and, now of course, the best films of the decade. All the papers are doing it and we here are in the process of drawing up our list of the decade's top 100 movies for guardian.co.uk/film. Making lists appeals to the nerdy, Hornby-esque and anally retentive side of all of us. And of course it offers huge opportunities for – whisper it – showing off.

The seasoned list-maker will know how to combine the obscure choices with the mainstream ones, and this latter consideration is important. The seasoned lister knows that the more MoR candidates provide the resonant C-major chords which give solidity and plausibility to the list.

In a move designed to increase the reach of independent cinema, IFC Entertainment, one of the leading distributors of independent and foreign films, and Netflix, the world's largest online movie rental service, today announced a partnership that gives Netflix U.S. rights to 53 unique titles from IFC Entertainment. Through this agreement select titles from IFC Entertainment's eclectic library of independent films will become available to be streamed instantly to televisions and computers via the Netflix service. The deal was announced jointly by Lisa Schwartz, executive vice president for IFC Entertainment, and Robert Kyncl, vice president of content acquisition for Netflix.

The partnership gives Netflix members on an unlimited plan the opportunity to instantly watch the newly acquired films on their computers or TVs through a range of Netflix ready devices. Those devices include Netflix ready Blu-ray disc players and new Internet TVs from LG Electronics; Blu-ray disc players from Samsung...