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In this stop-motion animation from the director of My Life As a Courgette, our heroes stan up to deforestation with likable courage

Claude Barras is the Swiss animator whose 2016 debut My Life As a Courgette was a wonderfully tender study of childhood which won hearts (and an Oscar nomination). His followup is a likable, admirably intentioned if slightly more predictable entertainment, in which the good guys and the bad guys are more obvious. Again it is a stop-motion animation, now set in Borneo’s rainforest, threatened by commercial exploitation and destruction.

Kéria (voiced by Babette De Coster) is a teenage girl living on the edge of this rich and beautiful wilderness, with her widower dad (Benoît Poelvoorde), who is glumly employed by one of the palm-oil plantations that is eroding it. Kéria is partly of indigenous Penan heritage, and is irritated when her Penan cousin Selaï (Martin Verset) comes to...

MetFilm Distribution has debuted the trailer for filmmaker Claude Barras’s animation ‘Savages.’

At the edge of Borneo’s vast rainforest, Kéria rescues a baby orangutan found in the palm plantation where her father works. Together with her young cousin Selaï, who comes to live with them, seeking refuge from the conflict between his indigenous tribe and the logging companies, the trio bravely overcome every obstacle in their battle against the planned destruction of the rainforest, their ancestral home.

Voice cast includes Babette De Coster (Keria), Martin Verset (Selaï), Laëtitia Dosch (Jeanne), Benoît Poelvoorde (Mutang) and Pierre-Isaïe Duc (Along Sega). Nicolas Burlet produces ‘Savages’ with co-producers Laurence Petit, Barbara Letellier, Carole Scotta, Vincent Tavier, Hugo Deghilage, Annemie Degryse, and Olivier Glassey.

Also in trailers – Teaser trailer is served for ‘Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale’

The movie will be released in cinemas across the UK and Ireland on 1st August, both...

Exclusive: France’s Studio TF1 has taken on international sales rights to Ludovic Bernard’s Scotland-set con artist comedy The Perfect Family (Les Parfait(s)) and to Frédéric Forestier and Antonin Fourlon’s ensemble comedy sequel Open Season 2 (Chasse Gardée 2).

The Paris-based company, which has just rebranded from its former Newen Studios label, will kick off sales for both films at the Cannes Marche.

The Perfect Family, which stars Audrey Fleurot, Ramzy Bedia and Alan Cumming, is about three generations of a family of master scammers on the run from bloodthirsty gangsters who flee to Scotland where they steal the identities of a picture-perfect family.

A mother’s death set the stage for “My Life as a Zucchini,” the heartsore 2016 Swiss stop-motion that landed director Claude Barras an Oscar nomination for best animated feature. Now, the passing of a different maternal figure at the hands of unscrupulous men ignites the filmmaker’s eco-conscious, anti-colonial follow-up “Savages.” When a female orangutan is killed by loggers on the Indonesian island of Borneo, 11-year-old Kéria (Babette De Coster) and her father Mutang (Benoît Poelvoorde) adopt her adorable offspring and name it Oshi. Kéria becomes immediately protective of the young ape.

“Savages” deems those willing to enact such violence against other living creatures as uncivilized brutes, destroying the Earth for money while Indigenous peoples live in accordance with age-old principles of coexistence with nature. A musical number in Disney’s “Pocahontas” contrasted the same notions. Yet, even if departing from a rather obvious, if timely, environmentalist premise, Barras and...

Newen Connect has added a trio of French comediesto its EFM slate:Cycle Of Time, No Signal!andThe Family Road.

Vinciane Millereau’s Cycle Of Time stars Elsa Zylberstein, Didier Bourdon, Aurore Clément and Dider Flamand and is about a 1950s French family catapulted into 2025 due to a freak accident with their washing machine, forcing them to face a new world dominated by technology and adapt to a new reality.

Olivier Kahn produces for Ugc which is releasing the film in France in October.

Edouard Pluvieux’s No Signal! is about two young step-siblings spending the weekend with their parents in...

Newen Connect has boarded Pascal Elbé’s Lucky Star, one of four newcomedies the company will launch at Unifrance’s Rendez-Vous in Paris later this month.

Actor/filmmaker Elbé’s fourth feature as a director is set in 1940 France and stars Benoit Poelvoorde as an army deserter who hatches a plan to escape Nazi punishment and protect his wife and sonby pretending his family is Jewish, but ends up being swept into the Resistance.

Elbé also stars in the film with Audrey Lamy, Zabou Breitman and Hugo Becker. It is produced by Yze’s Yann Zanou and Adnp/Quad’s Nicolas Adassovsky.

"Thinking of you meant worrying about you..." Studiocanal has revealed an official trailer for a French epic romance film titled Beating Hearts, featuring English subtitles so everyone can hear what they're saying. This premiered at the end of the 2024 Cannes Film Festival earlier this year, with mostly negative and a few positive reviews. The decade-spanning love story thriller is about a boy and girl who fall for each other as teens. But he's a criminal and gets locked up – hoping to find her years later. Local rebellious teen Clotaire falls for his schoolmate Jackie, but gang violence leads him down a darker path. After years apart, the star-crossed lovers discover every path they've taken leads them back together. Does it? Adèle Exarchopoulos & François Civil star as the older versions of Jackie & Clotaire. It also stars Mallory Wanecque & Malik Frikah as teens, Jean-Pascal Zadi, Benoît Poelvoorde, Alain Chabat, Élodie Bouchez, Vincent Lacoste,...

Do you relish the eerie thrill of watching creepy killers in action? Inspired by the creepy af vibes of Longlegs, we’ve curated a list of 12 of the most disturbing serial killer movies ever made. These films plunge deep into the minds of the most twisted and terrifying murderers, delivering spine-tingling suspense that will make you question the very fabric of humanity.

Serial killer movies are all about the psychological thrill, the nerve-wracking tension, and that unshakable sense of dread. We’re not just talking about gore—though there’s plenty to go around. We’re diving into the chilling calm of meticulous murderers, the grotesque enjoyment of their gruesome deeds, and the horrific genius that makes these films unforgettable. If you’re a true crime fan or just love a good scare, these movies are guaranteed to haunt your thoughts.

New Line Cinema 12. The Cell (2000)

The Cell is a...

The popular French actor working in just about every film genre has been on the Croisette on a couple of occasions but as a filmmaker got his first taste when Sink or Swim (also known as Le grand bain) — a 2018 selection slotted as an Out of Competition item. Six years later we have L’amour Ouf (Beating Hearts) which was was packaged and advertised at last year’s Cannes and moved into production with a huge ensemble of players in May. Gilles Lellouche directs François Civil, Adèle Exarchopoulos, Malik Frikah, Mallory Wanecque, Alain Chabat, Anthony Bajon, Jean-Pascal Zadi, Benoît Poelvoorde, Vincent Lacoste, Élodie Bouchez, Karim Leklou and Raphaël Quenard star.…...

Translating film titles for international markets can be a commercial necessity, but magic is often lost in the process. It’s hard to think of a more perfect name for Gilles Lelouche’s latest movie than “L’amour ouf,” which punchily captures the bruising nature of the love story at its heart. The clue is in the wordplay: If l’amour fou is an affliction of the mind, l’amour ouf tells us the force we’re dealing with is rather more physical, perhaps even painful.

Squint, though, and “Beating Hearts,” the anglophone title that seems sentimental by comparison, suggests not just life but flagellation. It befits a film that contains its fair share of bloody thrashings over the course of some 20 years in the lives of its star-crossed protagonists, whose love is battered at the peak of their relationship by a miscarriage of justice that goes on to change everything — and nothing — between them.

Seemingly from out of nowhere, actor turned director Gilles Lellouche throws a Molotov Flanby into the Competition with only his second feature, a terrific and unexpectedly potent piece of genre filmmaking that could, to avoid spoilers, be described as a kind of mash-up of Badlands and La Haine, as if directed by Walter Hill. Throw in a little Eurocrime, from the likes of Fernando Di Leo and late-period Jean-Pierre Melville, and you’re getting close to what Lellouche has achieved here, a romantic banlieue opera that delivers all the gritty, vicarious thrills of the now-standard post-Goodfellas gangster movie but also burrows into issues of class and gender in refreshingly unpredictable ways.

It arrives as a movie seemingly made by committee, since the film is based on an Irish novel — Jackie Love Johnser Ok? by Neville Thompson — and features contributions by fellow filmmakers Ahmed Hamidi and Audrey Diwan. It quickly...

If you took Magnolia, Goodfellas, Boyz n the Hood and perhaps Claude Lelouch’s A Man and a Woman, plugged them all into the latest version of ChatGPT and asked it to spit out a brand new film, you could wind up with something like Gilles Lellouche’s (no relation to Claude) swooning French crime romance, Beating Hearts (L’Amour ouf).

A hodgepodge of movie clichés and overwrought scenes, directed with zero tact and plenty of pounding needle drops, actor-turned-director Lellouche’s third stab at the helm after his rather likeable ensemble comedy, Sink or Swim, is less a disappointment than a serious assault on the viewer’s intelligence. The fact that it premiered in Cannes’ competition, rather than in a sidebar “Première” slot, speaks to the general level of one of the festival’s weakest main slates in recent memory.

Sink or Swim was a major hit in France that grossed $40 million,...

This evening the Cannes Film Festival welcomed another world premiere of an ambitious French title with Beating Hearts (L’Amour Ouf). Gilles Lellouche’s competition entry from Studiocanal was greeted with a 15-minute standing ovation inside the Grand Théâtre Lumière.

The modern Romeo and Juliet tale co-stars François Civil, who featured as D’Artagnan in last year’s Three Musketeers reboot, and Blue is the Warmest Color’s Adèle Exarchopoulos. The pair play former childhood sweethearts from different sides of the tracks.

Having gone their separate ways when the boy gets caught up in gang violence and lands in jail on trumped-up murder charges, the couple reconnects against the odds years later.

Further cast includes Raphaël Quenard, Benoît Poelvoorde, Elodie Bouchez, Vincent Lacoste, Alain Chabat and Jean-Pascal Zadi.

The film is adapted from Irish writer Neville Thompson’s 1997 novel Jackie Loves Johnser Ok? which unfolded against the backdrop of Dublin’s tough...

Cannes film festival

Gilles Lelouche’s new movie aims for a Springsteenesque blue-collar energy but buckles under the weight of its own naivety

Gilles Lelouche’s new film is a giant operatic crime drama of star-crossed lovers and hurt feelings; it’s very French, but aiming for some blue-collar Springsteen energy. There are some good performances, and a very serviceable armed robbery scene. But Beating Hearts suffers from a lack of subtlety and bloat, with an increasingly insistent cry-bully sensitive-macho ethic, and a colossally inflated final section belatedly reassuring us of the film’s belief in the power and importance of love. In the end it is sentimental and naive, particularly about the legal consequences of beating your husband half to death in a phone box, however abusive he has been. And I had a strange taste in my mouth after a late scene in which the heroine, working on...

Love, as everyone has long agreed, makes you do crazy things. Silly things, too, and vastly indulgent things, and occasionally even beautiful ones. Gilles Lellouche does all of these, in significant quantities, in his supersized gangster melodrama “Beating Hearts,” which takes the slender plot of innumerable B-movies of the past — as time and crime collaborate to derail the pure-hearted romance between two pretty young things — and blows it up to a dizzily grand scale, complete with widescreen camera gymnastics, daydreamy reality breaks and sporadic swirls of Old Hollywood musical choreography. It’s a mad indulgence, but also one fully attuned to the mindset of its two besotted lead characters: When you fall completely in love for the first (and maybe last) time, doesn’t your life become its own Technicolor epic?

That air of big-swinging, love-drunk bravado will buy Lellouche’s film a lot of goodwill from audiences — particularly those at home in France,...

Films about the ecological stakes of contemporary life often center the results of unfettered human consumption. By showing the abuses suffered by the environment, they function as both an urgent warning and a desperate plea. Claude Barras takes a different route in Savages (Sauvages), his incisive and edifying animated feature about an 11-year-old girl trying to protect her land and people from encroaching deforestation.

Premiering at Cannes, Savages focuses on elemental beauty and the dignity of community-driven preservation. It is the latest film from the Swiss director whose last film My Life as a Zucchini premiered at Cannes in 2016 and went on to critical acclaim and an Oscar nomination. As in that movie, Barras does not condescend to or patronize his youngest audience members. Savages, written by Barras and Catherine Paillé in collaboration with Morgan Navarro and Nancy Huston, is uncompromising in its messaging, deceptively spare in its instruction and absolutely gorgeous to look at.

Gaumont has added French-language action feature The Orphans starring Dali Benssalah, Alban Lenoir, Anouk Grinberg and Sonia Faidi, to its Cannes slate.

The film is the first feature from Olivier Schneider who has worked as stunt coordinator on films including No Time To Die, Spectre, Taken and Fast and Furious X. It is about a cop and a mob fixer who team up to search for the killer of a former friend from their orphanage. Producers are Inoxy Films and Gaumont.

“Our ambition is to rehabilitate the French action movie and bring it back to cinemas,” said Alexis Cassanet, Gaumont’s head of international sales.

Quentin Dupieux’s The Second Act gets the opening out of competition berth at the Cannes Film Festival Photo: Courtesy of Cannes Film Festival Ahead of next week’s big reveal of the Cannes Film Festival’s main programme for the 77th edition the organisers have jumped the gun by announcing Quentin Dupieux's The Second Act (Le Deuxième Acte) will open the event with an out of competition premiere. The latest production from the wacky and prolific French director, screenwriter and musician will also seen simultaneously at French cinemas across the country on the same night ahead of its French release.

The occasion will deliver a starry cast of among others Léa Seydoux, Vincent Lindon, Louis Garrel and Raphaël Quenard, and of course, Dupieux himself who has managed to make 13 features including Deerskin, Rubber, Mandibles, Incredible But True and Smoking Causes Coughing shown at Cannes out of competition in 2022.

Quentin...

The 77th edition of the Cannes Film Festival will kick off with Quentin Dupieux’s “The Second Act,” a star-studded surreal French comedy headlined by Léa Seydoux, Vincent Lindon, Louis Garrel and Raphaël Quenard, Variety has learned.

The anticipated movie is produced by Hugo Selignac at Chi-Fou-Mi, a Mediawan company, and is represented in international markets by Kinology. The film will play out of competition on May 14 and will be released on the same day in French theaters.

Laced with absurdist humor, the meta movie follows actors starring in a doomed film production. Dupieux is one of France’s most popular and prolific filmmakers. He delivered two films in 2023: “Daaaaaalí,” which played out-of-competition at Venice, and “Yannick,” a French box office hit that sold around the world.

In confirming the film’s selection at Cannes, the festival described Quentin as a “filmmaker who embraces freedom – in tone, form and...

Studiocanal rolled out the red carpet at the Unifrance Paris Rendez-vous this week for actor Gilles Lellouche’s upcoming feature film Beating Hearts (L’Amour Ouf).

First images for the unconventional romance played on the big screen to two packed-out screenings at the swanky Royal Monceau hotel off the Champs-Elysées on Thursday evening.

The modern Romeo and Juliet tale co-stars François Civil, who is currently riding high on the back of his D’Artagnan role in Pathé’s Three Musketeers reboot, and Adèle Exarchopoulos as former childhood sweethearts from different sides of the tracks.

Having gone their separate ways when the boy gets caught up in gang violence and lands in jail on trumped-up murder charges, the pair reconnect against the odds years later.

The picture is adapted from Irish writer Neville Thompson’s 1997 novel Jackie Loves Johnser Ok? unfolding against the backdrop of Dublin’s tough suburb of Ballyfermot in the...

The film is directed by five rising female directors.

Six rising female directors from around the world have joined forces for the animation anthology Animal Tales Of Christmas Magic which is being launched by The Bureau Sales at this week’s Rendez -Vous With French Cinema in Paris this week.

Caroline Attia, Ceylan Beyoglu, Olesya Shchukina, Haruna Kishi, Camille Almeras and Natalia Chernysheva have used uses poetry and humour to tell five Christmas stories that take place across the globe from Japan to the Far North and the Northern Lights.

The stories are all told in 2D digital animation, and...

Belgian-French comedy is directed by Stefan Liberski

Paris and London-based The Bureau has inked early pre-sales for Stefan Liberski’s Art Or F-art? starring Camille Cottin and Benoit Poelvoorde.

The Bureau co-produces alongside Belgium’s Artemis Productions and is handling international sales for the satirical look at the world of contemporary art.

Art or F-art? (L’Art de Rien) stars Poelvoorde as a conceptual painter who leaves Brussels after a career setback to settle down in French Normandy in search of creative inspiration. Cottin plays a gallery owner and manipulator who disrupts his concentration as he interacts with colourful locals...

Filmmakers such as Jean-Luc Godard, John Ford, and Michael Curtiz rank among the most prolific directors of all time, each amassing well over 100 directorial credits throughout their careers. Auteurs of this caliber constantly produce films that earn critical acclaim and achieve success at the box office, allowing them to continue working on subsequent projects.

Conversely, some potentially great directorial talents only received the opportunity to make one film. Some filmmakers only directed a single movie for reasons such as poor initial reviews, abysmal box office performances, or untimely deaths.

Related: 10 Great Actors Who Became Even Better Directors

Rémy Belvaux, André Bonzel, and Benoît Poelvoorde

Directed, produced, written by, and starring Rémy Belvaux, André Bonzel, and Benoît Poelvoorde, Man Bites Dog is a black comedy crime mockumentary about a film crew who follows around a serial killer recording his horrific crimes. Belvaux also served as the film's co-editor, while Bonzel was the cinematographer.

Filmmakers such as Jean-Luc Godard, John Ford, and Michael Curtiz rank among the most prolific directors of all time, each amassing well over 100 directorial credits throughout their careers. Auteurs of this caliber constantly produce films that earn critical acclaim and achieve success at the box office, allowing them to continue working on subsequent projects.

On the other end of the spectrum, some potentially great directorial talents only received the opportunity to make one film. For reasons such as poor initial reviews, abysmal box office performances, or untimely deaths, some filmmakers only directed a single movie.

Related: 10 Great Actors Who Became Even Better Directors

Rémy Belvaux, André Bonzel, and Benoît Poelvoorde

Directed, produced, written by, and starring Rémy Belvaux, André Bonzel, and Benoît Poelvoorde, Man Bites Dog is a black comedy crime mockumentary about a film crew who follows around a serial killer, recording his horrific crimes. Belvaux also served as...

Quentin Dupieux’s chaotic, bizarre film about a monster-fighting squad controlled by a rat named Didier will greatly annoy some, which is one of its strengths

Only a pedant and a bore would complain that the last word of that title should be “cancer”. The phrase’s childlike naivety and irrelevance, apparently taken from an obsolete era when smoking was considered bad in the sense that eating cream cakes was bad, is a hint of what you’re in for: a fantastically silly and magnificently inconsequential comedy from French film-maker and former DJ Quentin Dupieux. For the life of me, I can’t think of another director right now who wants (or is allowed) to do just straight comedy for theatrical release, without having to buy the right to do so by also being unfunnily dark and disturbing.

Dupieux has put together something chaotic, disparate, entirely negligible yet oddly gripping and also funny.

Alain Attal and Hugo Selignac have formed a producing duo known for delivering original, starry French films that probe uneasy subjects that earn B.O. gold and critical laurels. Attal is in Cannes with Un Certain Regard title “Rosalie,” while Selignac has “Omar à la Fraise” in Critics’ Week.

The pair is now about to hit a new milestone in 2024, starting with Gilles Lellouche’s epic romance drama “L’Amour Ouf,” which boasts a budget of €32 million ($34 million) and marks Studiocanal’s biggest investment in a French-language film to date. They also have “And Their Children After Them,” an adaptation of Nicolas Mathieu’s Goncourt Prize-winning novel to be directed by Ludovic and Zoran Boukherma (“Teddy”), which has been boarded by Warner Bros. France and HBO Max and France Televisions, the first French movie to bring together these three partners.

“L’Amour Ouf” also marks the first film co-acquired by Canal Plus,...

“My Life As a Zucchini” director Claude Barras has set up his latest stop-motion animated feature, “Savages!”

Production company Gebeka International — a Hildegarde-Goodfellas company formed in 2021 — and production, financing and sales studio Anton are behind the project, which will be written by Barras and Catherine Paille (“Magnetic Beasts”). The project will be shopped to buyers in Cannes next week.

“Savages!” follows the emotional journey of a girl, her father and a rescued baby orangutan. The film has a strong environmental and conservationist message, exploring the crisis of the destruction of rainforests.

An official synopsis for the film reads as follows: “In Borneo, at the edge of the tropical forest, Kéria is given a baby orangutan that has been rescued from the palm oil plantation where her father works. At the same time, Kéria’s younger cousin Selaï comes to live with her and her father as he seeks refuge from...

Catherine Breillat’s erotic drama is a remake of May el-Toukhy’s Queen Of Hearts.

Paris-based Pyramide International has closed deals in key territories for Catherine Breillat’s erotic thriller Last Summer ahead of the film’s world premiere in Competition at Cannes later this month.

Pyramide has sold the film to September Films in Benelux, Potential Films in Australia and New Zealand, Nk Contents in South Korea, Xenix Film in Switzerland, Hooray Films in Taiwan, Estinfilm in the Baltics and Nashe Kino in Russia.

Last Summer stars Léa Drucker as a lawyer who develops a relationship with her 17-year-old...

For starters, they’re called the Tobacco Force, and these intergalactic “avengers” battle extraterrestrial monsters by giving them cancer via chemicals like nicotine, mercury and ammonia… but let’s assume that any similarities to other groups of helmeted, high-kicking heroes, living or dead, are not coincidental.

This quintet — technically a sextet if you count their suicidal robot, Norbert 500 — have just blown up an oversized, homicidal turtle in a quarry when a message comes through from their leader. His name is Chief Didier, and though he’s a grotty rat puppet...

Smoking Causes Coughing is ostensibly a riff on Power Rangers/Super Sentai, Ultraman, and other tokusatsu-style media in which spandex-clad superheroes battle intergalactic monsters, but — as is the case with writer-director Quentin Dupieux’s entire filmography — his latest genre-bending slice of French absurdity is predictably unpredictable.

The Tobacco Force is a team of avengers in which each of its five members represents a different chemical found in cigarettes: Benzene, Nicotine (Anaïs Demoustier), Methanol (Vincent Lacoste), Mercury (Jean-Pascal Zadi), and Ammonia (Oulaya Amamra). When they’re unable to defeat an enemy in hand-to-hand combat, they call upon their powers — which only work when they’re sincere — to infect their foe with cancer to the point of bodily combustion.

The Tobacco Force has a mentor in Chief Didier. He’s a wise, mutant rat, like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles‘ Splinter, except Didier is a womanizer that drools green goo. The team is...

Paris-based sales company beefs up slate ahead of Berlinale market.

Paris-based sales company Pyramide International has boarded Anna Novion’s Le Théorème de Marguerite and Marie Garel-Weiss’s Sur La Branche and will kick off pre-sales for the French dramas at the upcoming EFM.

Novion’s Le Théorème de Marguerite stars Ella Rumpf as the titular character, a brilliant mathematics student at France’s top university the Ecole Normale Supérieure. On the day of her thesis presentation, a mistake shakes up all the certainty in her planned-out life and she decides to quit everything and start afresh.

Rumpf notably starred...

This weekend, Netflix is adding a TV series set in the 1990s, a French historical drama TV series, and a French comedy TV series to add some balance. Last weekend, the streaming giant didn’t see much licensed content added to its catalog, with the limited series Scattered Barriers, the Indian movie Thai Massage, and the Nollywood movie The Wait, but it brought the true-crime documentary The Hatcher Wielding Hitchhiker, season 2 of Vikings: Valhalla, and the drama movie Dog Gone, starring Rob Lowe.

This weekend, Netflix will add a variety of licensed content, with the first seasons of the Japanese TV series Miu404 and Quartet, the thriller movie The Devil To Play, the documentary The Pez Outlaw, season 1 of the Korean TV series Awaken, the Turkish documentary Sweetie, season 28 of The Real World, and season 2 of the anime series Demon Slayer. As for original content, Netflix will bring one of its most anticipated TV shows,...

Represent (En Place) is a series created by François Uzan and Jean-Pascal Zadi starring Jean-Pascal Zadi, Eric Judor, Benoît Poelvoorde and Fadily Camara. You can watch it on Netflix from January 20.

Represent is the new comedy that brings us to the most comical side of politics in this series which, at the very least, will make you laugh because it views politicians at their most ridiculous.

En Place is a parody with a well created script, characters and well paced, with that “French” touch that at times is so great and knows how to find that exact point of irony and elegance and at the same time, social critique.

This is a very entertaining comedy that is on Netflix and is like a very sharp dart that, under the guise of a comedy, goes straight to the heart of the “problem”, which is dealt with in an intelligent way and...

A trio of French films, the melodrama “A Family for 1640 Days,” political thriller “Goliath” and comedy “Adieu Paris,” are set to be released in the U.S. by the New York-based company Distrib Films.

Both Fabien Gorgeart’s “A Family for 1640 Days” (“Une vraie famille”) and Edouard Baer’s “Adieu Paris” are represented in international markets by Le Pacte.

“A Family for 1640 Days,” winner of the top prize at last year’s American French Film Festival, revolves around Simon, a six-year old adopted boy who is about to reunite with his biological father. The movie stars Melanie Thierry (“En therapie”) and Lyes Salem. Distrib Films is planning to release the film in early 2023 and have it play at festivals.

A love letter to the French capital, “Adieu Paris” marks the fourth directorial outing of actor-turned-helmer Baer, who last directed “Ouvert la nuit” in which he starred opposite Audrey Tautou and Sabrina Ouazani.

French cartoonist Jean-Jacques Sempé, best known for the ‘Le Petit Nicolas’ (‘Little Nicholas’) children’s books, has died at the age of 89.

The mischievous schoolboy who is constantly getting into scrapes in and out of school but somehow always comes out on top was inspired by Sempé’s own childhood memories.

Sempé’s collaborations on the series with late Asterix co-creator René Goscinny sold millions of copies worldwide and have been adapted to the big screen on numerous occasions, especially in France.

The latest production inspired by the works, Amandine Fredon and Benjamin Massoubre’s Little Nicholas – Happy as Can Be won the top prize at the Annecy International Animation Film Festival in June.

Sempé’s wife Martine Gossieaux Sempé told French news agency Agence France Press that her husband died on August 11.

Born in 1932 in the town of Pessac just outside of Bordeaux, Sempé left formal education at the...

Belgian-Congolese TV personality Kody Kim has signed with CAA for representation.

Kim is best known for hosting a flagship program on Belgian broadcaster La Deux from 2015 to 2017. The presenter, who was born in Belgium to Congolese parents, stood out for his impersonations of famous French stars such as Gérard Depardieu and Jean Paul Belmondo.

He’s also a comedian, actor and radio personality. Kim first appeared in the 2015 fantasy dark comedy “The Brand New Testament,” which was directed by Jaco Van Dormael and screened as part of Directors’ Fortnight in Cannes. The French-language movie, which also stars Catherine Deneuve and Benoît Poelvoorde, is centered on a cruel Belgian man who plays God from his tiny apartment in Brussells.

Since then, Kim has played various roles in multiple films, including “Lucky” in 2019, and “Losers Revolution” in 2020. He most recently wrapped Gaetan Liekens and David Mutzenmacher’s burlesque thriller “Music Hole.”

Kim...

Urf (“Aka”) Director Geetika Narang Abbasi, 2022

I spent a number of years living in France, and one of the most interesting words I learned was “sosie” – someone who perfectly resembles someone else, to the point that people could confuse them. I was familiar with impersonators, mostly comedians who did voice imitations of famous people, whether actors or singers. I knew about Elvis impersonators, people who would perform dressed as Elvis. But that’s as far as it went, until I discovered the world of “sosies” in France. Where impersonators or doubles were fairly marginalized here at home, in France I discovered a whole side business of people who resembled famous performers – usually singers – and would hire themselves out to perform at local events. Writer Yann Moix published a book called “Podium” about a bank employee who must choose between his family and the career he longs for: to be a “sosie” of the late,...

For a film featuring bloody interspecies warfare, rampant murder and mutilation, a pessimistic treatise on environmental pollution and (maybe) the end of the world — all crammed into just 77 minutes — “Smoking Causes Coughing” feels both rather jaunty and entirely inconsequential. That would be surprising if it came from anyone but Quentin Dupieux, the current absurdist-in-chief of French auteur cinema: Everything in his latest that feels, in and of itself, out of left field also happens to be comfortably in his lane. Following a group of spandex-clad, cigarette-toting superheroes on a rural retreat, intended to recharge their powers, that goes shaggily awry, this is a minor escapade even for Dupieux, its already slack structure eventually devolving into disconnected sketches. It’s a film of fragmentary but funny rewards — funnier still, most likely, if accompanied by smoking of a different kind.

Aptly unveiled in the Midnight program at Cannes this year — Dupieux’s...

Absurdist director Quentin Dupieux is back with another bat sh*t crazy film, Smoking Causes Coughing (Fumer Fait Tousser). This film centers around a group of vigilante superheroes called the Tobacco Force. Through all the madness of his, like Rubber (a serial killing car tire), Deer Skin (where a guy hears his Deer Skin jacket speaks to him), or Mandibles (a film about a giant fly), there is always a hidden message under the surface. This time around, he’s addressing cigarettes, smokers, and stress. I mean, stress can cause smoking, and smoking can cause coughing. Makes sense to me. *shrug*

In their tight blue leotards and white helmets, the Tobacco Force is kicking ass and taking names to save the world. Most of all, they hate smoking. At the film’s beginning, the group is in a fierce battle with a giant foam turtle. The five members are Benzene...

Anaïs (Anaïs Demoustier) with Daniel (Denis Podalydès) in Charline Bourgeois-Tacquet’s Anaïs In Love (Les Amours d'Anaïs)

Anaïs Demoustier has been busy recently with Quentin Dupieux’s Incroyable Mais Vrai premiering in Berlin and now in Cannes she has Dupieux’s Fumer Fait Tousser and Cédric Jimenez’s Novembre coming up.

Anaïs Demoustier with Anne-Katrin Titze: “I like having to act with sensations and elements of gaze and all of that was something I enjoyed.”

Flowers, lots of them, in manic speed fill the screen. Anaïs, played by Anaïs Demoustier in a whirlwind performance in Charline Bourgeois-Tacquet’s Anaïs In Love (Les Amours d'Anaïs) is working on her thesis in literature. Demoustier told me about her work to find the physical intensity of the role and noted that she knew from being in Charline’s Pauline asservie, that the character would be an intersection of the director, herself, and the...

Belgian filmmaker Joachim Lafosse is wasting little time between projects and will be teaming with veterans thesps Emmanuelle Devos and Benoît Poelvoorde for his tenth feature film titled, Un silence. An August or September start date is expected and we can already include this project as a possible 2023 Cannes showing seeing that The Restless (Intranquilles) which stars Leïla Bekhti and Damien Bonnard was selected for last year’s comp. Lafosse was developing a project called Le Fils de la Loi which is topically related to Belgium’s recent history – but we have no clue whether this project is one of the same.…...

Le Pacte is set to host market premieres for Édouard Baer’s “Adieu Paris” and Giordano Gederlini’s “On the Edge” at the Unifrance Rendez-Vous in Paris, which takes place this week.

“Adieu Paris” stars an ensemble cast, including some of France and Belgium’s best-known actors, notably Benoît Poelvoorde, François Damiens, Gérard Depardieu, Isabelle Nanty, Pierre Arditi and Ludivine Sagnier. The dialogue-driven comedy takes place entirely at a Parisian bistro. Camille Neel, head of international sales at Le Pacte, said the film will appeal to traditional French films lovers and admirers of iconic actors. “Adieu Paris” is the fourth directorial outing of actor-turned-helmer Baer, who last directed “Ouvert la nuit” in which he starred opposite Audrey Tautou and Sabrina Ouazani. The film, produced by Cinéfrance Studios, Les Films en Cabine, Le Pacte and Artémis Productions, had its world premiere at the Lumiere Festival in Lyon, France.

“On the Edge...

Fumer fait tousser

Especially comforting in these awkward pandemic days of 2022, we’ll be receiving not one, but two servings of chicken soup for the soul via Mr. Oizo. Quentin Dupieux‘s tenth feature began production in September with a demented cast comprised of a good helping of Dupieux alumni. In Fumer fait tousser we have Adèle Exarchopoulos, Anaïs Demoustier, Gilles Lellouche, Vincent Lacoste, Benoît Poelvoorde, Alain Chabat, Doria Tillier and Blanche Gardin. Chi-Fou-Mi’s Hugo Sélignac who has developed a rather impressive track record in the past decade produced the comedy – which should please former smokers, anti-smokers and avid smokers alike.…...

Dekanalog, the New York-based speciality distributor, has signed a home video partnership with Ocn Distribution that will see Dekanalog exclusively release Ocn theatrical titles on Blu-ray disc in the United States.

The first film under the deal will be Quentin Dupieux’s French absurdist comedy Keep an Eye Out (Au Poste!), which was Dekanalog’s debut theatrical release in March 2021. Benoît Poelvoorde (Man Bites Dog) stars alongside Grégoire Ludig (Mandibles) in the crime comedy about Fugain (Ludig), an ordinary guy who discovers a dead body outside his apartment building and becomes the only subject in the murder investigation. Police commissaire Buran ...

Dekanalog, the New York-based speciality distributor, has signed a home video partnership with Ocn Distribution that will see Dekanalog exclusively release Ocn theatrical titles on Blu-ray disc in the United States.

The first film under the deal will be Quentin Dupieux’s French absurdist comedy Keep an Eye Out (Au Poste!), which was Dekanalog’s debut theatrical release in March 2021. Benoît Poelvoorde (Man Bites Dog) stars alongside Grégoire Ludig (Mandibles) in the crime comedy about Fugain (Ludig), an ordinary guy who discovers a dead body outside his apartment building and becomes the only subject in the murder investigation. Police commissaire Buran ...

French actor, director, producer and writer Edouard Baer, in Lyon for the premiere of “Adieu Paris!” at the Lumière Festival, drew endless laughs from his audience at his masterclass in the city’s Comédie Odéon theater.

Displaying a gifted talent for improvisation, Baer amused the audience with self-deprecating tirades and anecdotes. Commenting on the short introductory film displaying his career highlights, he told the crowd: “It’s easy to make me look good with smooth editing and good music. Really, it’s just a succession of small accidents. There aren’t just masterpieces there. But from bad movies to acceptable ones, you build a small career and then you die happy,” he smiled.

Baer brings together a stellar cast in “Adieu Paris!” including Gérard Depardieu, Pierre Arditi, Jean-Francois Stévenin – who passed away in July and to whom the film is dedicated – and Belgian duo Benoît Poelvoorde and François Damiens, who...

While handsomely shot, well-cast, and occasionally atmospheric, the latest from Belgian director Fabrice Du Welz qualifies as a watchable disappointment. Inexorable reaches for the somber allure of Claire Denis’ Bastards and instead has the psychological force of a particularly rote ’90s thriller. A shame when all the ingredients are in place for something deeper and more unsettling.

Benoît Poelvoorde, so memorable as the lead in 1992’s Man Bites Dog—streaming on Criterion Channel, still a must-watch—is Marcel Bellmer, a novelist moving into a gob-smackingly large country estate with his wife and young daughter. Said wife is Jeanne (Mélanie Doutey), and the estate was the home of her late father, a noted publisher. The giant mansion goes oddly unexplored in Inexorable, and that is a literal waste of space. We never get a sense of its geography or feel any sense of its hidden corridors.

Into this environment comes Gloria...

"Is it true there's a drug that gives you superpowers?" Netflix has unveiled an official trailer for an action thriller titled How I Became a Super Hero, marking the feature directorial debut of French filmmaker Douglas Attal. This originally premiered at last year's Deauville Film Festival in the fall. And it's set to arrive streaming on Netflix this July. Set in Paris in a world where superheroes are perfectly assimilated within society and want to be famous at all costs. A drug that gives super powers to mere mortals is spreading all over town. Moreau & Schaltzmann are investigating the case with the support of two ex-superheroes, Monte Carlo and Callista. They'll do whatever it takes to dismantle the drug traffic ring. Starring Pio Marmaï, Vimala Pons, Benoît Poelvoorde, Leïla Bekhti, and Swann Arlaud. There are so many films trying to reinvent the superhero concept and make the stories more gritty and realistic,...

"What do you feel for me?" Altered Innocence has debuted the US trailer for the Belgian film Adoration, which originally premiered at the Locarno Film Festival in 2019, and also stopped by L'Étrange, Sitges, and Fantastic Fest that year. This is the final film of Fabrice du Welz's "Ardennes trilogy", following Calvaire (2004) and Alleluia (2014). The film follows shy 12-year old Paul who lives near a psychiatric institute. After an encounter with a young patient there, the troubled yet beautiful Gloria, he becomes infatuated and vows to protect her. Insisting doctors are holding her hostage for an inheritance the two escape and wreak havoc across the French countryside. Described as "a potent combination of violent thriller and romantic sexual awakening, du Welz masterfully captures the teenage intensity of 'amour fou' pairing perfectly with Manuel Dacosse's sumptuous 16mm photography." With Thomas Gioria & Fantine Harduin as Paul & Gloria, Benoît Poelvoorde, Anaël Snoek,...

In the pantheon of love-them-or-hate-them auteurs, Quentin Dupieux resides somewhere in the middle — neither as provocative as a Gaspar Noé nor as clever in his absurdity as a Yorgos Lanthimos. His latest, “Keep an Eye Out,” isn’t actually his latest: Distributed abroad three years ago, its stateside release follows those of 2019’s “Deerskin” and last year’s “Mandibles.” Devotees of the French filmmaker (who also goes by Mr. Oizo) may find “Keep an Eye Out” worth the wait, but anyone not already on board with Dupieux’s brand of offbeat humor and forays into the surreal can safely ignore the title’s advice.

The film begins with a speedo-clad man conducting an open-air orchestra and continues at the same bizarre pace for all 73 minutes of its scant runtime, which is for the best — even those with an affinity for this kind of outré offering would concede that a little goes a long way.