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Wassim Beji, the French producer of “Boite noire,” and Snd have acquired the adaptation rights to iconic French detective novels “Fantomas” and are planning a film and a series based on the franchise.

A ruthless and multi-faceted thief and assassin, Fantomas “was the first occidental super-villain featured in a serialized format, first through comic strips and later in a radio series,” said Beji, adding that “Fantomas” has also been a source of inspiration for some of the greatest artists of the 20th century, including the surrealist poet Guillaume Apollinaire.

Created in 1911 by Marcel Allain and Pierre Souvestre, Fantomas is one of France’s most popular fictional characters, along with Arsene Lupin. Fantomas was first adapted for the big screen by into a silent crime film serial directed by Louis Feuillade for Gaumont in 1913. The property was later adapted into a crime comedy trilogy starring Jean Marais and Louis de Fines...

It’s a big international action epic, filmed in Mexico with a French director. Anthony Quinn is an 18th-century bandit who liberates a Mexican hamlet from marauding Yaqui Indians and a villainous Charles Bronson. Quinn is good, and all the necessary elements are present: fights, handsome scenery and a big battle… but it’s fairly tepid stuff, simplified and prettified. Leave it to Ennio Morricone’s epic music score to bind it all together. With Anjanette Comer, Sam Jaffe, Silvia Pinal and the same fifteen or so well-connected actors that cornered roles in all big Mexican films made with foreign money.

Guns for San Sebastian

Blu-ray

Warner Archive Collection

1968 / Color / 2:35 widescreen / 111 min. / La bataille de San Sebastian / Available at Amazon.com / Street Date June 15, 2021 / 21.99

Starring: Anthony Quinn, Anjanette Comer, Charles Bronson, Sam Jaffe, Silvia Pinal, Jorge Martínez de Hoyos, Jaime Fernández, Rosa Furman, Leon Askin, Ivan Desny, Pedro Armendáriz Jr.,...

With his latest feature, Buñuel in the Labyrinth of the Turtles, writer/director Salvador Simó dove into a pivotal moment in the life of one of his artistic heroes. Striving to demystify an icon who maintained a shroud of secrecy around himself, Simó opened up a complex character in Luis Buñuel—the Spanish filmmaker behind L’Age d’Or and Un Chien Andalou—examining one of his first directorial efforts focused on the mountainous Spanish region of Las Hurdes. Titled Land Without Bread, the film was made with the intention of putting a human face to the suffering intense poverty brings, though Buñuel’s early filmmaking methods were highly questionable, as Simó’s film reveals.

Though concerned for those around him, Buñuel had no qualms about exploiting the environments around him for his own ends. In the end, though, Labyrinth of the Turtles is no rebuke of the director. For Simó,...

Will somebody explain the sheep and the bear? Luis Buñuel really knows how to disturb people. This, his most characteristic surreal drama proposes an impossible, irrational situation – which isn’t all that different from the reality we know. Petty social rules, jealousies and bitterness make life hell for group of dinner guests stuck with each other, caught in an existential trap.

The Exterminating Angel

Blu-ray

The Criterion Collection 459

1962 / B&W / 1:33 flat full frame / 93 min. / available through The Criterion Collection / Street Date December 6, 2016 / 39.95

Starring Silvia Pinal, Jacqueline Andere, Augusto Benedicio, José Baviera, Antonio Bravo, Claudio Brook, Rosa Elena Durgel, Lucy Gallardo, Tito Junco .

Cinematography Gabriel Figueroa

Film Editor Carlos Savage

Original Music Raúl Lavista

Based on a story by Luis Alcoriza, Luis Buñuel

Produced by Gustavo Alatriste

Written and Directed by Luis Buñuel

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

That intransigent rebel imp Luis Buñuel never mellowed — after ten or so...

Luis Buñuel's most direct film about revolutionary politics brandishes few if any surreal touches in its clash between French star Gérard Philipe and the Mexican legend María Félix. Borrowing the climax of the opera Tosca, it's an intelligent study of how not to effect change in a corrupt political regime. La fièvre monte à El Pao Region A+B Blu-ray + Pal DVD Pathé (Fr) 1959 / B&W / 1:37 flat (should be 1:66 widescreen) / 96 min. / Los Ambiciosos; "Fever Mounts at El Pao" / Street Date December 4, 2013 / available at Amazon France / Eur 26,27 Starring Gérard Philipe, María Félix, Jean Servais, M.A. Soler, Raúl Dantés, Domingo Soler, Víctor Junco, Roberto Cañedo, Enrique Lucero, Pilar Pellicer, David Reynoso, Andrés Soler. Cinematography Gabriel Figueroa Assistant Director Juan Luis Buñuel Original Music Paul Misraki Written by Luis Buñuel, Luis Alcoriza, Charles Dorat, Louis Sapin from a novel by Henri Castillou Produced by Jacques Bar, Óscar Dancigers, Gregorio Walerstein...

So, Luis Buñuel had a couples of sons, one of whom, Juan Luis Buñuel, worked as his assistant director from 1960, before going on to a directing career of his own. So, is he Jacques to his father's Maurice Tourneur, a worthy successor, or is he another Kinji Fukasaku II?

On the strength of Au rendez-vous de la mort joyeuse (At the Meeting with Joyous Death), sometimes known, fatuously, as Expulsion of the Devil, there's a talent worthy of further exploration. This 1973 drama behaves like a stereotypical restrained arthouse drama, but charts a story beginning in territory familiar to anybody who has read accounts of poltergeist activity, before heading for more uncharted terrain.

Don Luis Buñuel would probably never have troubled himself with as straightforward a set-up, and indeed his unique sensibility might have rendered him simply incapable of attacking any story as simply as his son does. But the idea of a no-frills,...