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"Let the game begin." Janus Films has revealed a brand new trailer for the 4K restoration and re-release of the Jean Renoir 1939 classic The Rules of the Game, considered one of the best films ever made despite opening to very negative reviews. The film depicts members of upper-class French society and their servants just before the beginning of World War II, showing their moral callousness on the eve of destruction. At la Colinière, the deceptively idyllic country estate of a wealthy Parisian aristocrat, a selection of society’s finest gather for a rural sojourn and shooting party, and reveal themselves to be absurdly, almost primitively, cruel and vapid. Starring Nora Gregor, Paulette Dubost, Mila Parély, Marcel Dalio, Julien Carette, Roland Toutain, Gaston Modot, and Pierre Magnier. The film received terribly negative reviews and even provoked near riots in Paris upon its initial release. As a result, Renoir cut 23 minutes from the film at the time.

The already-incredible line-up for the 2016 New York Film Festival just got even more promising. Ang Lee‘s Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk will hold its world premiere at the festival on October 14th, the NY Times confirmed today. The adaptation of Ben Fountain‘s Iraq War novel, with a script by Simon Beaufoy (Slumdog Millionaire), follows a teenage soldier who survives a battle in Iraq and then is brought home for a victory lap before returning.

Lee has shot the film at 120 frames per second in 4K and native 3D, giving it unprecedented clarity for a feature film, which also means the screening will be held in a relatively small 300-seat theater at AMC Lincoln Square, one of the few with the technology to present it that way. While it’s expected that this Lincoln Square theater will play the film when it arrives in theaters, it may be...

1929 was the end of silent cinema in France, the process of conversion beginning in earnest for the following year's releases. So what height of expressiveness had the French movies reached?

Quite a bit, if Henri Fescourt's epic three-and-a-half-hour-and-change adaptation of Dumas' The Count of Monte Cristo is anything to go by. The novel is a cracking yarn, a bit of a warhorse perhaps but always reliable and dramatic, full of crimes, revenges, outrageous coincidences and spectacular reversals in the best nineteenth-century tradition. One would expect a movie to be, at best, bold and operatic, at worst, staid and stagey. But Fescourt, who had already made a vast version of Les misérables (1925), manages to combine the best of commercial cinema's dramatics with the innovations of the impressionist filmmakers, to create something strikingly modern.

Stop me if you've heard this before: hero Edmond Dantès is maligned by a fellow sailor, snitched on by a romantic rival,...

10. Altered States (1980)

Directed by: Ken Russell

Is it a horror film? Many of Ken Russell’s films could be argued as such, but there’s enough in Altered States that makes it less horror and more science fiction/psychological thriller. Based on the novel by Paddy Chayefsky, Altered States introduced the world to William Hurt (and also featured the film debut of Drew Barrymore). Edward Jessup (Hurt) is studying schizophrenia, but branches out into sensory deprivation experimentation with a floating tank. Eventually, he travels to Mexico to visit a tribe that provides him with an extract which he begins to take before his trips into the flotation tank, resulting in bizarre imagery and eventual physical devolution, once to a primitive man and to a near primordial blob. Side effects start to occur, causing Edward to suffer from episodes of partial regression even without the hallucinogenic drug. Russell’s direction shifts...

At first exposure, we are likely to wonder what it is about Jacques Becker’s films that make them feel distinctive.Antoine et Antoinette, his fourth completed feature, expresses his sensibility as fully as any of his films; yet Becker is clearly playing by a great many of the rules of entertainment cinema. His visual ideas are not radical: he relies on conventional patterns of decoupage, often uses gentle camera moves when introducing locations, favors a moderate expressionism of lighting that enhances the pictorial qualities of his sets. His manipulation of narrative is likewise familiar: the complicated plot is handled deftly and light-heartedly to convey the basically comic nature of the enterprise; there is a stock villain, the lecherous businessman Roland (Noël Roquevert), whose offenses are accompanied by comical music cues that limit his threat; the story line is designed in broad movements of joy and despondency, with events within...

The Rules of the Game

Directed by Jean Renoir

Written by Jean Renoir

France, 1939

F. Scott Fitzgerald once famously wrote in his 1925 short story, Rich Boy, that “the rich are different from you and me”, to which Ernest Hemingway trenchantly retorted, “yes, they have more money”.

Under the simplicity of this quote and counter-quote parley hides a grain of truth inherent to both. Yes, the rich have more money, and for that very reason, they live differently from the rest of society. With their abundant riches and excess wealth, they can afford to do things most others cannot. For one, they can afford to play games.

Fitzgerald himself masterfully portrayed the hedonistic lifestyles of the rich and famous in The Great Gatsby, and in the realm of literature, it lacks a suitable rival in that regard. But in cinema, the very same notions and ideas were also well accomplished by the storied French filmmaker,...

The first in a short series celebrating the films of the Pathé-Natan company, 1926-1934.

The late silents and early talkies of France are arguably neglected in comparison with, say, the German cinema. Yet at Pathé-Natan, work was produced which rivals in sophistication that of any other country you care to name. Directors from France, Germany and Russia worked there, innovating and developing under the umbrella of a distinctive "house style." Time they had their due.

La merveilleuse vie de Jeanne d'Arc (1929), directed by Marco de Gastyne, was a big hit: it easily beat Dreyer's La passion de Jeanne d'Arc (1928) at the box office, benefitting, in the eyes of French audiences, from having a real Frenchwoman as Joan. The Dreyer was a multi-national co-production, but what audiences overlooked was that the Gastyne film was produced by a Romanian Jewish emigre, Bernard Natan, who had bought control of Pathé, the country's most distinguished film company.

French actor best known for her role in Jean Renoir's 1939 masterpiece The Rules of the Game

Although Paulette Dubost, who has died aged 100, appeared in far more films than the number of years she lived, most cinemagoers know her best as Lisette, the coquettish chambermaid in Jean Renoir's La Règle du Jeu (The Rules of the Game, 1939), one of cinema's masterpieces. Lisette, who attends the Marquis de la Chesnaye during a lavish weekend party at a country chateau, flirts dangerously with a poacher turned servant (Julian Carette), while her overly jealous gamekeeper husband (Gaston Modot) tries to catch them at it.

Dubost and Carette play a deliciously sly and comic cat-and-mouse game with the absurdly rigid Modot, especially during the after-dinner entertainment, a breathtaking sequence, described by the critic Richard Roud as something from "a Marx brothers film scripted by a Feydeau who suddenly acquired a tragic sense...

The comparison is inevitable between John Huston's Moulin Rouge (1952) and French Cancan (1954), Jean Renoir's first film to be shot in a French studio after 15 years of wartime and postwar exile, and it became the conventional wisdom to prefer Renoir's film for its supposedly authentic Frenchness. In fact the films are very different in tone and intent. Huston's movie is a dour well-considered biography of Toulouse-Lautrec, essentially a tragic story. It's marvellously lit by Oswald Morris, one of Britain's greatest cinematographers, and begins with an extended and breathtaking evocation of the Moulin Rouge at its most ravishing, one of the cinema's greatest sequences. French Cancan is a romantic, sentimental, largely fictionalised account of the creation of the Moulin Rouge, a show-business success story starring Jean Gabin, one of the greatest stars of European cinema, as a suave nightclub manager and talent spotter. It concludes with a magnificent 10-minute sequence when,...

"Fantômas."

"What did you say?"

"I said: Fantômas."

"And what does that mean?"

"Nothing. . . . Everything!"

"But what is it?"

"Nobody. . . . And yet, yes, it is somebody!"

"And what does the somebody do?"

"Spreads terror!"

This extract from the opening of Marcel Allain & Pierre Souvestre's original Fantômas novel crystallizes the character's sinister appeal. Louis Feuillade's first 1913 serial capitalizes on the same abstraction and threat. The title figure is a function, rather than a character. It's fruitless to think in terms of motivation. His actions are all that matters. Despite the period decor, the immediacy of Feuillade's street locations gives his work a modern edge, like a gaslight melodrama gatecrashing a newsreel, and so does his antagonist: the shadowy, violent, incomprehensible force of destruction and terror.

 "Criminals who operate in the grand manner have all sorts of things at their disposal nowadays. Science has done much for modern progress, but...