Scowlingly serious French film -- as the shot of carrion crows picking at the spilled entrails of a woodland creature soon makes plain. Or as the name of director André Téchiné had made plain beforehand. For all his soberness and somberness, Téchiné has put together an odd and colorful patchwork …
Co-directors Scott McGehee and David Siegel, fresh from The Deep End, turn to a novel by Myla Goldberg. And on the evidence it's difficult to see how anyone could have thought there was a movie in it, even someone in the full flush of the spelling-bee documentary, Spellbound. Fictional spelling …
Famed author Marianne Winckler (Juliette Binoche) goes undercover to investigate the exploitation of the working class in Northern France. She eventually lands a job as a cleaner on the cross-channel ferry and develops close connections with the other cleaning women, many of whom have extremely limited resources and income opportunities. …
Full original title: Three Colors: Blue (it's part of a trilogy, completed by the remaining colors of the French flag, Red and White). Blue is certainly the color of the dawn when the heroine's husband, a world-renowned classical composer, is killed in an auto accident. And elsewhere there's a great …
Filmmaker Anthony Minghella rounds up a cast from past Anthony Minghella films, Jude Law from Cold Mountain and The Talented Mr. Ripley, Ray Winstone from Cold Mountain only, Juliette Binoche from The English Patient, Juliet Stevenson from Truly Madly Deeply, plus new recruits Robin Wright Penn and, in an entertaining …
Well-chilled French thriller comparable in degrees centigrade to Time Out, With a Friend Like Harry, Merci pour le Chocolat, Red Lights, et al. An anonymous videocassette in a plastic bag is left without explanation at the doorstep of the civilized host of a book-chat TV show: a two-hour static surveillance …
The first feature outside Iran by suavely tricky director Abbas Kiarostami (Taste of Cherry). Operatic baritone William Shimell plays an art writer whose main theme is originality vs. duplication. In Tuscany he meets antiques dealer Juliette Binoche, who gives him a spirited, ego-deflating lesson in what is real and isn’t …
Tony historical romance centered around the affair of the twenty-three-year-old Alfred de Musset and the six-years-older George Sand, "poetry and prose," perhaps not a perfect match but an ignitable one. Not half, not a quarter, not an eighth the fun of the cooler-headed and farther-distanced Impromptu, navigating the same social …
Another art-house food film: an agnostic chocolate-maker opens her Little Shop of Temptations during the Lenten fast. Director Lasse Hallstrom follows his discreet pro-choice propaganda (The Cider House Rules) with a smug, complacent, liberal-minded broadside against the smugness, complacency, and narrow-mindedness of a French-Catholic provincial village circa 1959. The motley …
Writer-director Olivier Assayas (Demonlover) puts Juliette Binoche on the rack as an actress coming to grips with the ravages and passages of time. She plays Maria Enders, a grande dame who came to fame by playing a brash young thing who seduces and then abandons her (female) boss. At a …
Annual family gathering (parlor games, touch football, talent show), complicated by romantic rivalry: two brothers, a widower with three girls and a reformed womanizer, both smitten by a worldly Frenchwoman. A showcase for Steve Carell's self-consciousness, somewhat more sympathetic than Dane Cook's luggishness. Juliette Binoche looks as if she could …
The Parisian johns served by two young, clever prostitutes never quite see them as people. But the women are so intensely observed by magazine writer Anne (Juliette Binoche) that their risky lives lift her from middle-aged blahs as a mom and wife. They eroticize her imagination, not just her feminism. …
A kind of anti-Casablanca wherein there is no nobler cause than the fortress of love. It has mystery, romance, two romances in fact, a period setting, desert scenery, a backdrop of war, though none of these in sufficient quantity to necessitate nearly two-and-three-quarter hours of screen time. Neither of the …