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Much has been said of the overwhelming ingenuity of Jean-Luc Godard’s early films, but less so about just how well the director knew how to work around budgetary limitations. Alphaville, a dystopian sci-fi noir set in an Orwellian world of omnipresent surveillance run by a malevolent artificial intelligence, sounds at first blush like a large-scale work filled with the sort of macro world-building one typically sees in blockbusters. But Godard, working with next to no resources, captures the oppressiveness of totalitarian government through the claustrophobic conditions of repressed citizens. Ordinary Parisian streets and buildings are captured as they are, though in inky shadow, so that a certain kind of present-day dilapidation comes to suggest futuristic social decay.

Godard takes private detective Lemmy Caution and illustrates Alphaville’s themes of social tension and incipient fascism by demolishing the man’s image. Godard secured Eddie Constantine, who had already played Caution...

Artificial intelligence is everywhere. Well, perhaps not literally, but AI is certainly expanding its reach, its power, and its uses. Its potential – both good and bad – is on the minds of anyone who works in technology, communications, journalism, and just about every other walk of life.

Of course, science fiction saw all this coming, just as it foretold the arrival of nuclear deterrence, bioweapons, superflus, climate change, the internet, mobile communications, and so much more. Artificial intelligence, whether embedded in the bowels of a supercomputer or ensconced in the head of an android, has been part of the genre since at least 1907, when L. Frank Baum included a mechanical character called Tik-Tok in his book Ozma of Oz. It’s played a variety of roles in books, comics, TV shows, and films ever since – often working for humankind’s benefit but just as frequently mapping our doom.

It’s the...

The recent retrospective of Juliet Berto’s acting work at the Brooklyn Academy of Music presents an artist who occupied the forefront of both formal and ideological reimaginings of the medium during her lifetime. An icon of the French New Wave for her roles in landmark films by Jacques Rivette and Jean-Luc Godard, she also regularly lent her presence to works of radical leftist filmmaking from directors such as Robert Kramer and Marin Karmitz. Neige, Berto’s 1981 directorial debut made in collaboration with her partner Jean-Henri Roger, bears the influence of these artists and synthesizes them into something entirely its own, a playful and unpretentious work that nonetheless retains a fierce political anger.

The title of the film—which translates to Snow in English—refers to heroin, the drug around which much of the plot revolves. Berto stars as Anita, a bartender in Paris’s racy Pigalle district whose committed...

Actor / Filmmaker Alex Winter joins Josh Olson and Joe Dante to discuss movies featuring a cog in the machine – the individual struggling to exist within the system.

Show Notes: Movies Referenced In This Episode

Bill And Ted’s Excellent Adventure (1989) – Alex Kirschenbaum’s Bill and Ted character power rankings

Bill And Ted’s Bogus Journey (1991)

Bill And Ted Face The Music (2020)

The Game (1997)

Showbiz Kids (2020)

The Panama Papers (2018)

Zappa (2020)

200 Motels (1971)

Modern Times (1936)

Metropolis (1927) – Glenn Erickson’s Blu-ray review

Avatar (2009)

Things To Come (1936) – Jesus Trevino’s trailer commentary

M (1931)

M (1951)

The Last Laugh (1924) – Glenn Erickson’s Blu-ray review

Brazil (1985)

Gremlins (1984) – Glenn Erickson’s Blu-ray review, Tfh’s Mogwai Madness

City Lights (1931)

Goin’ Down The Road (1970)

The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972) – Glenn Erickson’s Blu-ray review

The Young And The Damned (1950)

Shock Corridor (1963) – Katt Shea’s trailer commentary

The Naked Kiss (1964)

Stroszek (1977)

Even Dwarves Started Small (1970)

Ikiru (1952) – Glenn Erickson’s trailer...

Webster University Film Series has become the location for many national tours of international cinema, often acting as the only such venue in Missouri. The Series is host to speakers and visiting artists who address the pertinent issues in films presented. In an effort to further integrate film with education, the Film Series provides workshops with artists and experts.

As part of the Film Series virtual Speaker Series, Fassbinder February focuses on the works of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, the prolific LGBTQ+ film director of 1970s West Germany. Once a week, all throughout February, a guest speaker will give a talk on a different film of the trailblazing director. Each film is available on popular streaming services like The Criterion Channel, HBO Max, and/or Amazon Prime. Watch each ahead of time and then join The Webster University University Film Series all month long for interesting and thought-provoking discussions on the...

“The Future Is Now”

By Raymond Benson

If you’re familiar with the work of that French New Wave revolutionary, Jean-Luc Godard, you may not think that he was the type of filmmaker who would make a science fiction film. He did, though, in 1965, and he merged the genre with that of film noir to create a unique hybrid that also contains many of the jarring stylistic elements with which Godard loves to bombard his audiences.

Godard was the “bad boy” of the French New Wave. He seemed to take pleasure in angering viewers and being controversial by choice. That said, though, there is much in Godard’s canon that can be not only shocking and challenging, but truly wonderful.

Such is the case with Alphaville.

Western audiences may not be familiar with the character of Lemmy Caution. He’s a private investigator of the Philip Marlowe/Sam Spade type,...

Razzia is a rather snazzy German police thriller from the post-war years, covering comparable territory to Billy Wilder's A Foreign Affair and Carol Reed's The Third Man: it deals with the then-current European crime wave known as the black market.The director Werner Klingler's career might well repay study, as it leaps around so oddly. In 1929 he was in America and acted in Von Sternberg's Viennese-set melodrama The Case of Lena Smith, now seemingly a lost film apart from one ten-minute fragment. He also played Germans for James Whale in Journey's End and Hell's Angels. Returning to Germany he became an assistant director (S.O.S. Iceberg) and then a director, mainly of lightweight thrillers, passing from the Hitler era through to the post-war denazification seemingly without a hitch.Klingler would make Eddie Constantine vehicles and a Mabuse sequel (when the once-feared embodiment of the zeitgeist...

My teenage introduction to art film culture was something of a science fiction auteur-detour (R2-D2?). I discovered Alphaville at a tiny art theater above the Fox Riverside, where Gone with the Wind had previewed in 1939. I bought the filmscript book to understand what the heck was going on… and slowly began to appreciate Jean-Luc Godard. Fifty-two years later I can’t claim a complete understanding, but I’m certain that the ‘étrange aventure’ of Lemmy Caution is as original a film, of any kind, that I’ve ever seen.

Alphaville

Blu-ray

Kl Studio Classics

1965 / B&w / 1:37 flat Academy / 99 min. / Alphaville, une étrange aventure de Lemmy Caution / Street Date July 9, 2019 / available through Kino Lorber / 29.95

Starring: Eddie Constantine, Anna Karina, Akim Tamiroff, Howard Vernon, Michael Delahaye, Christa Lang, Jean-Pierre Leaud.

Cinematography: Raoul Coutard

Film Editor: Agnès Guillemot

Original Music: Paul Misraki

Poems by Paul Éluard

Produced by André Michelin

Written...

Every week, IndieWire asks a select handful of film critics two questions and publishes the results on Monday.

This week’s question: What’s the best Christmas movie for people who hate Christmas movies?

Ken Bakely (@kbake_99), Freelance for Film Pulse

If you want a movie that emulates the feeling of the holidays without being directly about them, look no further than Todd Haynes’s “Carol,” with the film’s first act taking place against the backdrop of the last days before Christmas. In establishing its characters and setting, everything from the winter weather, crowded department stores, and putting up Christmas trees is included with a delicate sense of detail that is simply haunting. It’s emblematic of how note-perfect and intimately precise the entire movie is, sublimely starting at a time of year rooted in high expectations and the feeling of possibility, and expanding out from there in the development of its central romance,...

The Tenth Annual Robert Classic French Film Festival — co-presented by Cinema St. Louis and the Webster University Film Series continues this weekend. — The Classic French Film Festival celebrates St. Louis’ Gallic heritage and France’s cinematic legacy. The featured films span the decades from the 1920s through the mid-1990s, offering a revealing overview of French cinema.

There are two more events for the Tenth Annual Robert Classic French Film Festival happening this weekend:

Friday, March 16th at 7:30pm – Alphaville

A cockeyed fusion of science fiction, pulp characters, and surrealist poetry, Jean-Luc Godard’s irreverent journey to the mysterious Alphaville remains one of the least conventional films of all time. Eddie Constantine stars as intergalactic hero Lemmy Caution, on a mission to eliminate Professor Von Braun, the creator of the malevolent Alpha 60, a computer that rules the city of Alphaville. Befriended by the scientist’s beautiful daughter Natasha (Godard...

Engaged to direct by a reputable producer, Jesús Franco takes yet another stab at conventional B&W horror. The pulp thrills get a boost through the contributions of talented collaborators: excellent camerawork flatters the idiosyncratic obsessions of a writer-director in search of his own dream-world sensibility. Although it’s not saying much, this might be the best of Franco’s earlier B&W horror output.

The Diabolical Dr. Z

Blu-ray

Redemption / Kino Lorber

1966 / B&W / 1:66 widescreen / 87 min. / Miss Muerte; Dans les griffes du maniaque / Street Date February 6, 2018 / available through Kino Lorber / 29.95

Starring: Estella Blain, Mabel Karr, Howard Vernon, Fernando Montes, Marcelo Arroita-Jáuregui, Guy Mairesse, Antonio Jiménez Escribano, Lucía Prado, Daniel White, Jesús Franco.

Cinematography: Alejandro Ulloa

Film Editor: Marie-Louise Barberot, Jean Feyte

Original Music: Daniel White

Written by David Kuhne (Jesús Franco), Jean-Claude Carrière

Produced by Serge Silberman, Michel Safra

Directed by Jesús Franco

Am I correct when I remember...

Mubi's retrospective For Ever Godard is showing from November 12, 2017 - January 16, 2018 in the United States.Jean-Luc Godard is a difficult filmmaker to pin down because while his thematic concerns as an artist have remained more or less consistent over the last seven decades, his form is ever-shifting. His filmography is impossible to view in a vacuum, as his work strives to reflect on the constantly evolving cinema culture that surrounds it: Godard always works with the newest filmmaking technologies available, and his films have become increasingly abstracted and opaque as the wider culture of moving images has become increasingly fragmented. Rather than working to maintain an illusion of diegetic truth, Godard’s work as always foreground its status as a manufactured product—of technology, of an industry, of on-set conditions and of an individual’s imagination. Mubi’S Godard retrospective exemplifies the depth and range of Godard’s career as...

He’s fast on his feet, quick with a gun, and faster with the to-die-for beauties that only existed in the swinging ’60s. The superspy exploits of Oss 117 were too big for just one actor, so meet all three iterations of the man they called Hubert Bonisseur de La Bath . . . seriously.

Oss 117 Five Film Collection

Blu-ray

Oss 117 Is Unleashed; Oss 117: Panic in Bangkok; Oss 117: Mission For a Killer; Oss 117: Mission to Tokyo; Oss 117: Double Agent

Kl Studio Classics

1963-1968 / B&W and Color / 1:85 widescreen + 2:35 widescreen / 528 min. / Street Date September 26, 2017 / available through Kino Lorber / 59.95

Starring: Kerwin Matthews, Nadia Sanders, Irina Demick, Daniel Emilfork; Kerwin Matthews, Pier Angeli, Robert Hossein; Frederick Stafford, Mylène Demongeot, Perrette Pradier, Dominique Wilms, Raymond Pellegrin, Annie Anderson; Frederick Stafford, Marina Vlad, Jitsuko Yoshimura; John Gavin, Margaret Lee, Curd Jurgens, Luciana Paluzzi, Rosalba Neri, Robert Hossein, George Eastman.

Cinematography: Raymond Pierre Lemoigne...

Every so often, usually while walking around Toronto on a busy day, I'll be struck by the vividness and accuracy of Agnès Varda's singular portrayal of a day in the life (barely two hours, really, making it even more remarkable) spent in the various layers and spaces of the urban environment. I speak, of course, of Cléo from 5 to 7, Varda's 1962 classic and the first film of hers I fell in love with. In those instances, I'll find myself returning to the moments I've cherry-picked as my favorites over the years, skipping across the linear sequence of events that follow the titular singer (Corinne Marchand) across Paris as she waits for the results from a medical examination within the film's designated timeframe (minus half an hour, as the film famously ends at the ninety minute mark). More than for any other film, engaging in these mental replays feels very much like replaying the events of a day I had once experienced myself long ago—albeit one that I’ve been able to revisit and come to know nearly by heart, complete with all of my favorite moments and details waiting in their proper places, so often have I gone back to that June 21st in Paris, 1961.Varda has even made it relatively easy for anyone who wishes to explore and investigate to their heart's content the events of that fateful first day of summer from so long ago now, not only by making such a crisp cinematic itinerary of the various locations visited in the film itself, but also by helpfully providing a map in her book Varda par Agnès complete with a color-coded legend indicating the locations of key scenes from the film, practically inviting the reader to recreate Cléo’s journey for themselves on the streets of present-day Paris. At once attentive and relaxed in its tour of the city (mainly focused in the Left Bank), Cléo is ably conducted in a number of different registers: as an uncommonly lovely essay-poem on the ebb and flow of urban life, an at-times somber meditation on the precarious balance between life and death, and a revealing and honest study of female identity and the ways it is scrutinized and distorted in the public’s relentless gaze. In a feat of remarkable economy and resourcefulness, the film was shot in chronological order across a five-week period, beginning on the date of the story’s events, synchronized as closely as possible to the times in the day Cléo experiences them, in keeping with narrative fidelity and proper quality of light for each scene. Neatly arranged into thirteen chapters, each with its duration clearly stated so we can easily keep track in real time, Cléo’s lucid odyssey through the various public and private spaces that make up her day is observational cinema at its most fertile, free, and magically attuned to its subjects, partly the result of Varda and her team’s carefully planned and executed shoot, partly that of simply being in the right places at the right times.Together, the films of the French New Wave make up one of the most valuable and immersive audiovisual documents of a specific time and place in history—namely France in the late 1950s and early 1960s—that we have. This is especially true of the Paris-situated films, which create the alluring image of an interconnected network of overlapping stories concentrated in a single city. The sharing of certain actors, cinematographers, writers, composers, and other key artists and technicians across different films by different directors especially helped make the impression of one Paris holding an eclectic anthology of New Wave tales. This perception was further reinforced by the cheeky self-referential winks and nods that so many of the New Wave directors—Jean-Luc Godard in particular—lovingly included in their films as gestures of solidarity and support with their nouvelle vague comrades. This is why the eponymous hero of Jean-Pierre Melville’s Bob le flambeur, noted by many as a crucial New Wave precursor, gets name-checked by Jean-Paul Belmondo in Godard’s Breathless, why Truffaut muses Marie Dubois and Jeanne Moreau both pop up in A Woman Is a Woman, with Moreau getting asked by Belmondo how Jules and Jim is coming along, and why Anna Karina’s Nana glimpses a giant poster for the same Truffaut film as she is being driven to her fate in the final moments of Vivre sa vie.Varda got in on the fun herself in Cléo from 5 to 7 not only by casting Michel Legrand, who provided the film with its robust score, as Cléo’s musical partner Bob (a part that gives the legendary composer a substantial amount of screen time and amply shows off his incandescent charm), but also by extending the invitation to Godard, Karina, Sami Frey, Eddie Constantine, Jean-Claude Brialy, producer Georges de Beauregard, and Alan Scott, who had appeared in Jacques Demy’s Lola. They all show up in Les fiancés du pont Macdonald, the silent comedy short-within-the-film that serves triple duty as a welcome diversion for our stressed heroine, a loving cinephilic tribute to the legacy of Chaplin, Keaton, and Lloyd, and an irresistible, bite-sized New Wave party. And yet I find Cléo to be perhaps the most enchanting of all the New Wave films not for the aesthetic commonalities and cleverly devised linkages that bind it to The 400 Blows, Breathless, Paris Belongs to Us, and its other cinematic brethren, but rather for the tapestry of curious details that root it in its specific time and place and entice on the power of their inherent uniqueness and beauty. “Here,” Varda seems to say as she follows Cléo across the city, “let’s have a look at these interesting people and places on this first day of summer here in Paris, and see what we can see after watching them for a while.” The film’s opening scene continues to extend this invitation as it draws us in closer. It shows us, through the sepia-hued Eastmancolor that deviates from the rest of the film’s silvery monochrome and the “God’s eye” overhead shots (long before Martin Scorsese and Wes Anderson adopted the technique as their own), the cryptic spectacle of Tarot cards being shuffled, placed down, and turned over to reveal the story of Cléo’s potential fate before we’ve even gotten a chance to properly meet Cléo herself. The slightly macabre illustrations to which Varda and cinematographer Jean Rabier dedicate their tight close-ups and the elderly card reader’s accompanying explanations of their meanings lend an air of prophecy to the events to come while also fueling Cléo’s anxiety surrounding her fate (when pressed for a clearer forecast of the future through a palm reading, the reader’s evasive response is less than inspiring). This introduction effectively locks us into Cléo’s perspective, preparing us for the next hour and a half that we will spend quietly observing as, following her distraught exit from the reader’s apartment, she grapples with her fears and insecurities, contemplates and revises her appearance and the identity behind it (tellingly, we discover late in the film that Cléo's real name is Florence), and comes to terms with the ultimately fragile nature of her own mortality. In our allotted chunk of time with her, we see the pouty girl-child subtly shift and adjust her attitude, inching a little closer towards a place of earned maturity, grace, and acceptance regarding her fate, wherever it may take her.Along the way, the film seems to expand to take in as much of the people and places around Cléo as it can. Scene by scene, her Paris makes itself felt and known through key peripheral details: a pair of lovers having an argument in a café near where Cléo sits, listening in; the procession of uniformed officers on horseback heard clip-clopping through the street on the soundtrack and seen reflected in the array of mirrors placed throughout a hat shop; a spider web of shattered mirror and a cloth pressed against a bloody wound, indicating some incident that occurred just before Cléo happened along the scene of the confused aftermath. Other stimuli fill a dazzling program of serendipitous entertainments for us to take in one by one: whirlwind rides in two taxis and a bus, an intimate musical rehearsal in Cléo’s chic, kitten-filled apartment (with Legrand, no less, clearly having a great time, his nimble fingers releasing ecstatic bursts of notes and melodies from Cléo’s piano as if they were exotic birds), the aforementioned silent short, a sculpting studio (the space alive with the indescribably pleasant sound of chisels being tapped at different tempos through soft stone), a frog swallower, a burly street performer who wiggles an iron spike through his arm, and the soothing sights and sounds of the Parc de Montsouris, among a hundred other subtle and overt pleasures scattered throughout this gently orchestrated city symphony, a heap of specificities found and sorted into a chorus of universal experience.Very much in her own way, across a body of work informed by a boundless spirit of generosity, Agnès Varda has gone about carefully collecting and preserving a marvelously varied assortment of subjects throughout her busy life, shedding fresh light on some of the most unlikely (and overlooked) people and places in the world. She refers to her self-made approach to filmmaking as ciné-criture (her own version of Alexandre Astruc's caméra-stylo), which, as we’ve come to know it through Varda’s intensely personal works, is a little like cinema, a little like writing, and uses aspects of both media to make a compassionate, genuine, and wholly original film language. Just as Antoine (Antoine Bourseiller), the dreamy young man whom Cléo encounters in the Parc de Montsouris, translates the world around them into a stream of fanciful observations and flowery speech, so too does Varda, in allegiance with poetry, ditch any semblance of objectivity, going instead for presenting the world simply as she sees it, investing it with her own unmistakable blend of charm, warmth, eloquence, and empathy, all somehow executed with nary a shred of ego or preachiness.“All these stories we simply can’t understand!” randomly exclaims a café patron to her young companion at one point late in Cléo’s journey, perhaps suddenly becoming aware, as we gradually have, of the unfathomable multitude of trajectories that trace themselves across every city every day in a dense tangle of narrative strands. In picking up Cléo’s and diligently following it with her camera for an hour and a half, Varda draws our attention to all those other strands that make up the lives of other people, leading off into their own directions, fated to become entangled with others still. Wisely, deftly, one discovered strand at a time, she helps us better appreciate, again and again, the humble miracle of so many lives coursing and thriving alongside each other, each one special and strange, each rooted in its own distinct flavor of being-ness. Cléo from 5 to 7 in turn roots us in another person’s life for its short time span and ends up giving us a whole universe, casually overflowing with meaning, life, lives, and the myriad details that shape and define them. No, we can’t understand all the stories we come across in a day. But then again, sometimes we don’t really need to understand so much as simply see. See, and accept, and appreciate what is...and then move along to whatever’s next.

Bertrand Tavernier on Jacques Prévert and Joseph Kosma's Les Feuilles Mortes with Yves Montand in Marcel Carné's Les Portes De La Nuit: "The birth of the song. I mean, that's a good scene." Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze

In the second installment of my conversation with Bertrand Tavernier on his Voyage À Travers Le Cinéma Français we go towards Ernst Lubitsch's Heaven Can Wait, Lino Ventura and Jean-Pierre Melville, Jean Gabin in Jean Delannoy's adaptation of Georges Simenon's Inspector Maigret, Bernard Blier in Henri Verneuil's Le Président, Nadja Tiller in Gilles Grangier's Le Désordre Et La Nuit, Eddie Constantine, and composers Jean-Jacques Grunenwald, George Van Parys, and Paul Misraki.

Martin Scorsese critiquing a Robert De Niro performance in a film by another director is unimaginable to Bertrand. "Distance is important to give you a wider vision of things."

Lino Ventura to Bertrand Tavernier on...

Throughout the supplements on Arrow’s new (rather impressive) Blu-ray edition of this landmark gangster film, nearly everyone involved speaks of their collective desire to simply make the best film they possibly could, and in many ways, The Long Good Friday is just about the most natural result of that pursuit. Nothing goes unaccounted for, the characters are all richly drawn, the narrative drive is forceful without overwhelming a chance for reflection, and there’s just enough of a mystery to the whole thing to keep the audience hooked. The satisfaction that can come from such a well-rounded, expertly-delivered film can sometimes, however, be diminished by the sheer contentedness of the thing. Life is unwieldy, unpredictable, and sometimes incomprehensible, and films that ignore those qualities in the pursuit of “perfection” can feel closed-off.

Indeed, most of The Long Good Friday follows this tendency – Harold Shand’s (Bob Hoskins) is a...

Jean-Luc Godard in his youthful days. Jean-Luc Godard solution for the Greek debt crisis: 'Therefore' copyright payments A few years ago, Nouvelle Vague filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard, while plugging his Film Socialisme, chipped in with a surefire solution for the seemingly endless – and bottomless – Greek debt crisis. In July 2011, Godard told The Guardian's Fiachra Gibbons: The Greeks gave us logic. We owe them for that. It was Aristotle who came up with the big 'therefore'. As in, 'You don't love me any more, therefore ...' Or, 'I found you in bed with another man, therefore ...' We use this word millions of times, to make our most important decisions. It's about time we started paying for it. If every time we use the word therefore, we have to pay 10 euros to Greece, the crisis will be over in one day, and the Greeks will not have to sell the Parthenon to the Germans.

Stars: Bob Hoskins, Helen Mirren, P.H. Moriarty, Kevin McNally, Alan Ford, Dave King, Bryan Marshall, Derek Thompson, Eddie Constantine, Paul Freeman, Leo Dolan, Patti Love, Pierce Brosnan | Written by Barrie Keeffe | Directed by John Mackenzie

The gangster movie is a beast very like the gangs it is based on. Depending on the country of origin the crime organisations tend to have certain looks and style and a certain tradition that they cling to as their laws of how to do business. The modern gangster movies are definitely an example of this, but they also share one thing in common, they lend a lot from The Long Good Friday which gets the Arrow Video treatment with its new release on Blu-ray.

Harold (Bob Hoskins) is a British gangster with an eye to capitalism and being a successful business man. Seeing London as his empire he is taken aback at the incredulous...

Veteran cinematographer Frank Byers (“Twin Peaks,” “Boxing Helena”) is set to direct an indie remake of Jean-Luc Godard’s 1965 film noir “Alphaville,” TheWrap has learned.

Studiocanal and the director’s Ville Productions are teaming on the project, which was written by Franc. Reyes (“Empire”).

Also Read: ‘Goodbye to Language’ Wins Top National Society of Film Critics Award

“Alphaville” follows Lemmy Caution, who is sent to the titular dystopian city on a series of missions by the Outerlands. He searches for the Outerland’s missing agent Henry Dickson and he’s also there to capture or kill the creator of Alphaville,...

My dear President, dear festival director and dear colleagues,

Once again, I thank you for inviting me to the festival, but you know I haven't taken part in film distribution for a long time, and I'm not where you think I am. Actually, I'm following another path. I've been inhabiting other worlds, sometimes for years, or for a few seconds, under the protection of film enthusiasts; I've gone and stayed.

[Cut to a scene of Eddie Constantine as Lemmy Caution in "Alphaville"]

Eddie Constantine/Lemmy Caution: "I don't feel comfortable in this environment anymore. It's not longer 1923, and I'm not longer the man who fought through the police barricades, the man who fought behind the scenes with a gun in my hand. Feeling alive was more important than Stalin and the Revolution."

The risk of solitude is the risk of losing oneself, assumes the philosopher because he assumes the truth is to wonder about metaphysical questions, which are actually the only ones the everyone's asking.

A long overdue digital restoration of my favorite Jean-Luc Godard film, the glorious 1965 black-and-white surreal sci-fi noir "Alphaville," starring Eddie Constantine, Godard's wife Anna Karina and Paris at night, is playing for a week at La's Nuart in West Los Angeles. Never officially reissued and screened mostly via worn-out 35mm prints, "Alphaville"'s digital restoration features sharp new subtitles by Lenny Borger and Cynthia Schoch. (See other locations here; clip below, review from the Lat's Ken Turan.) ‘’Reality is too complex. What it needs is fiction to make it real,” intones the computer at the film’s beginning. "Alphaville" exaggerates reality. Godard and cinematographer Raoul Coutard did not flood Paris with light. Instead they photographed at night on real Paris locations in order to make a film with the creepy feel of a nightmare. As a young critic in the 50s, Godard spent long days at the French Cinematheque...

There is not a more intoxicating loading dose of uncut movieness available on New York screens at the moment than Jean-Luc Godard's famous hyper-sci-fi-meta-noir, which skylarks about an absurd dystopian future in the wet streets of 1965 Paris.

All totemic genre gestures all the time, the movie tracks trench-coated secret agent Lemmy Caution (aging frogface Eddie Constantine, who had played the character straight in a series of cheap French potboilers) as he enters the citadel of Alphaville, a metropolis controlled by a giant (and possibly mad) computer, looking for its programmer and the key to its destruction.

Everything is a dislocated signifier of totalitarian confusion — language, institutional sex, assassination attempts, scientific lingo, modernist archite...

By Lee Pfeiffer 

The Shadowplay niche market DVD label has released the obscure British film noir crime thriller Room 43. The 1958 B&W film was directed by Alvin Rakoff and features some intriguing star turns. The real star of the film is Odile Versois, a French actress who is largely unknown in English language films. She plays Marie Louise, a young Parisian waitress who is framed for a petty crime in a human trafficking scheme. Faced with trial and jail, she accepts the help of a British benefactor, Aggie (Brenda de Banzie), a middle aged tourist who invites her to immigrate to London to work as her personal assistant. Once in London, she is housed with many other comely young women in a building run by Aggie. She is also introduced to Nick (Herbert Lom), an assertive but seemingly kindly businessman who pretends to have her best interests at heart.

Top 10 Aliya Whiteley 6 Aug 2013 - 07:06

Hitchcock's Vertigo may have dominated 1958, but that year was full of other films about fear and loathing. Here's Aliya's top 10...

There are so many things to be scared of. Apart from the obvious perils, such as large spiders, venomous snakes, and dentists, there are less tangible things to panic about. Fear of growing old. Fear of falling into poverty. Fear of thermonuclear war.

In 1958, Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo was released. It’s very good at making the watcher feel very uncomfortable, through the camera angles and the great score by Bernard Herrmann. But it’s not just the audience who gets to feel scared; it’s there in the script too. Scottie (played by James Stewart) suffers from vertigo, but he’s also afraid of his past, and of the pain of loss. He’s been hurt so badly before that he’ll...

DVD Release Date: Aug. 27, 2013

Price: DVD $69.95

Studio: Criterion

R. W. Fassbinder's Beware of a Holy Whore (1971)

From the very beginning of his incandescent career, the New German Cinema enfant terrible Rainer Werner Fassbinder (World on a Wire) refused to play by the rules. His politically charged, experimental first films, made at an astonishingly rapid rate between 1969 and 1971, were influenced by the work of the antiteater, an avant-garde stage troupe that he had helped found in Munich.

Collected in Eclipse Series 39: Early Fassbinder are five of those fascinating and confrontational works; whether a self-conscious meditation on American crime movies, a scathing indictment of xenophobia in contemporary Germany, or an off-the-wall look at the dysfunctional relationships on film sets, each is a startling glimpse into the mind of a twenty-something man who would become one of the cinema’s most prolific artists.

Love Is Colder Than Death (1969)

For his debut, Fassbinder fashioned an acerbic,...

The late Jesús Franco was, we are told, once named by the Vatican as being, along with Luis Buñuel, "the most dangerous filmmaker in the world." There's little evidence of that in early spy caper Cartes sur table (Cards on the Table, a.k.a. Attack of the Robots, 1966), but there is, by pleasing coincidence, a Buñuel connection or two. Franco's co-writer on this and other early productions was none other than the great Jean-Claude Carrière, the collaborator's collaborator, who worked with Buñuel on all his later French movies (as well as ghosting Don Luis's autobiography My Last Breath). The movie also features regular Buñuel star Fernando Rey among its seamy rogue's gallery of villains.

The movie stars craggy Yank abroad Eddie Constantine as a former Interpol agent lured back for one last job, but betrayed by his bosses who see him as a pawn in the game. Although the movie is light,...

Prolific Spanish film-maker who specialised in psychedelic gothic horror – often laced with sex and violence

According to the Internet Movie Database, the Spanish film-maker Jesús Franco, who has died aged 82, directed 199 films, from El árbol de España in 1957 to Al Pereira vs the Alligator Ladies in 2012, a record few can match in the era of talking pictures. Given that many Franco films exist in three or four variant versions, sometimes so radically different that alternative cuts qualify as separate movies, his overall tally might be considerably higher.

Born Jesús Franco Manera, he was most often credited – at least on international release prints – as Jess Frank or Jess Franco, though he used a host of pseudonyms, writing scripts as David Khune, composing music as Pablo Villa and co-directing pornographic films (with his long-term muse Lina Romay) as Rosa Almirall. He was a true man of the cinema, whose CV ranged from...

Though you have to look twice to find the original title, this stunning Danish poster is unmistakeably for Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville. With its combination of sci-fi settings and two poster-genic stars, Alphaville may have inspired more great and varied posters than most other films. The most famous of course is Jean Mascii’s greyscale masterpiece. Illustrator of some 1500 posters from the early 50s through to the late 80s, Mascii (1926-2003) was an old school artist who fit right into the new world of the Nouvelle Vague with his photorealist illustration of Eddie Constantine and Anna Karina (you can see the poster in detail at the bottom of this article).

Other fabulous Alphaville posters include the Japanese...

...the Italian, titled Agent Lemmy Caution: Missione Alphaville...

...the German, titled Lemmy Caution against Alpha 60...

...the Bass-influenced American one-sheet...

...and the Belgian poster...

The Danish poster, which we started with, trumpets the film...

Post-Oscars award blitz! (ps. Please, vote for us!)

The Rondo Awards — named for the iconically-faced B-movie actor Rondo Hatton — are in their tenth year. Sponsored by The Classic Horror Film Boards, the Rondos celebrate the best in classic horror (and classic horror fandom) and they cut a huge swath through fandom, awarding movies and television and magazines and websites and art. We’ve been honored with nominations a few times over the last few years, even winning a couple of these (Joe’s got a cool statue at his house to prove it).

And this year is no different! Our last DVD compilation — the Shout! Factory release of Trailers From Hell Vol 2 — has been nominated in the “Best Documentary” category and this very website has been nominated as The Best Website. (I’ll presume that’s “best website in the history of everything”, but, hey, you can presume otherwise if you want,...

Richard Williams continues our writers' favourite films series with Godard's vision of a future state that has outlawed love

Is this review forward-thinking enough? Post your own dissident tract here or rebel in the comments thread below

At a time when 10,000 of the world's leading physicists are holed up in a Swiss bunker engaged on a project that may one day enable them to pretend they understand the nature of the universe, Alphaville has never seemed more timely.

Jean-Luc Godard's film – "a science fiction film without special effects" in the words of the critic Andrew Sarris; "a fable on a realistic ground" in Godard's own description – is a cry of protest aimed at the worshippers of science and logic. Unlike Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, which now resembles a picturesque relic of long-abandoned aspirations, Alphaville still seems to be watching the world come to meet it. And...

French dancer and choreographer Roland Petit died in Geneva on Sunday. He was 87. Associated with the Paris Opera Ballet and the Ballet de Marseille for a number of years, Petit was credited for creating more than 100 ballets throughout his career. Additionally, he choreographed dance sequences for a handful of movies, notably Samuel Goldwyn's Hans Christian Andersen (1952), a color extravaganza starring Danny Kaye, Farley Granger, and Petit's future wife Zizi Jeanmaire; two 1955 Leslie Caron vehicles, the Cinderella tale The Glass Slipper and Daddy Long Legs, which paired Caron with Fred Astaire; and Henri Decoin's Folies-Bergère (1956), with Jeanmaire, Eddie Constantine, and Nadia Gray. "With his muse Zizi Jeanmaire," whom Petit married in 1954, "he wrote some of the most beautiful pages of contemporary music hall," French Minister of Culture Frédéric Mitterrand eulogized. Roland Petit and Zizi Jeanmaire remained married until his death. Mitterrand quote via the BBC.

“Sometimes reality is too complex for oral communication,” says the gurgling, gravelly-sounding computer voice at the start of Jean-Luc Godard’s 1965 iconoclastic science-fiction detective picture, Alphaville (available on DVD). “But,” the voice continues, “legend enhances it in a form which enables it to spread all over the world.” Film, of course, is a modern form of legend, so Godard sets his course pretty clearly at the outset. After that, you’re on your own. Apart from a huge close-up of an irregularly flashing light, about the first image in the movie you can recognize is a tough-looking detective figure (Eddie Constantine)…...

The Academy confirms that filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard will not be making the trek across the pond to attend the November 13 Governor's Awards at the Kodak Theatre. Last year, when ailing John Calley couldn't accept the Thalberg award, a heavyweight roster of past winners turned up to honor him, including Steven Spielberg, Dino De Laurentiis, Norman Jewison and Warren Beatty. Who will honor Godard? Gone are Eric Rohmer, Francois Truffaut, Samuel Fuller, Juliet Berto, Eddie Constantine, Akim Tamiroff, Jean-Claude Brialy, Suzanne Schiffman, Yves Montand, Norman Mailer, Burgess Meredith and Jean Seberg. But over the decades Godard worked with an amazing range of international collaborators who are still around. I'd love to see Jeanne Moreau, Jean-Paul Belmondo, Anna Karina, Pierre Rissient, Claude Chabrol, Raoul Coutard. Michel ...

Let’s face it: few things look better than Anna Karina in a movie poster. Even Anna Karina in a wimple. We're all familiar with Karina’s most iconic Godard posters—balancing Belmondo and Brialy on her hands for Une femme est une femme, glancing over the shoulder of Lemmy Caution in that amazing black and white Alphavlle poster, wearing that fabulous checkerboard sweater dress, and balancing a beer and a gun, in Made in USA—so it was a treat to come across this rarely seen Romanian poster for Jacques Rivette’s La religieuse (1966) which, with its posterized cut-out figures and its lack of color, is like the dour devout cousin of the boisterous Femme est une femme affiche.

I also love this rare Japanese poster for Alphaville (1965, below), in which Karina (again in profile), rather than Eddie Constantine, is the main focus (along with that awesome blue thingamajig...

I can't recall precisely where and when I first saw Jean-Luc Godard's landmark 1964 picture Une femme mariée, but I know it wasn't until well after I had seen Alphaville, which came slightly after Une femme, or Le mepris, which appeared slightly before it—the years 1962 to 1968 represented a rather incredible flurry of activity for the director, seeing the creation/release of fourteen features and, depending on which source you believe, eight or nine shorts. That's practically Fassbinderean output. I imagine a good statistician might be able to prove that it actually outpaces Fassbinder at his most fecund. The more salient point is that each of these films—also among them are Vivre sa vie, Bandé a part, Made In USA, and so on—are remarkably different from each other in perspective, look and tone, and yet all are unmistakably Godardian. Nevertheless, a triple feature comprised of Le mepris, Une femme mariée,...

When Dustin "Cinnamon" Rowles assigned me to produce a canon of the top ten foreign language films of the aughts, I felt incredibly intimidated. When Dustin assured me that I was the critic for the job, as I had probably seen the most foreign films out of the entire staff, my anxiety only deepened. I admit that I watch a lot of foreign language flicks, thanks to Netflix, the American Cinematheque's wonderful programming, and owning a region-free DVD player. However, when I spoke to my cinema and media studies classmates and colleagues, I quickly began to realize that I had still missed a torrent of films that could have made this list (Caché, Downfall, 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days, Maria Full of Grace, and Werckmeister Harmonies to name a few). Moreover, to consolidate all the films I had seen over the past decade from all the non-English speaking countries around the world was,...

In the opening scenes of the classic British crime thriller The Long Good Friday, London underworld gangster Harold Shand (played to perfection by Bob Hoskins) says to his partner Victoria (played by a lovely 34 year-old Helen Mirren) on their Thames yacht, "It's Good Friday, have a Bloody Mary."

You just know you're off to a good start with a cast like that...speaking dialogue like that.

In this cornerstone of the British gangster genre — a precursor to later films like Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Layer Cake — Harold is about to close a lucrative new deal with the New York mob when bombs start showing up and/or detonating in inconvenient places...at inconvenient times. He's trying to close a real estate deal that will finally enable him to become a legitimate businessman and to develop a stretch of London's docklands in time for the 1988 Olympics, in the...

The most prolific of French filmmakers and ex-New Wavers, Jean-Luc Godard, has come up with an adventurous-philosophical pic with this one. He takes a popular actor and uses his screen personage in a new way.

That Yank who became a star over here [in France] playing in parody G-Man pix, Eddie Constantine is shown in some future city where human feelings have all but been done away with and where the powerful leader is a super computer.

Though supposed to be some city 30 years hence, Godard has shot strictly on location in Paris. But he has managed to give it a depressing aspect in choosing grubby, large tourist hotels as well as canny use of many modern buildings. This builds up a sort of no-man s-land between totalitarian drabness and super-modern garishness.

Constantine is secret agent Lemmy Caution masquerading as a newsman authorized to bring back a scientist from the old...