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Winifred Jacqueline Fraser Bisset LdH, popularly known as Jacqueline Bisset, is a British actress. She is best known for her roles in films such as Airport (1970), Murder on the Orient Express (1974) and The Sweet Ride (1968). She received multiple Golden Globe Award nominations.

Jacqueline Bisset Biography: Age, Early Life, Family, Education

Jacqueline Bisset was born on September 13, 1944 (Jacqueline Bisset age: 80) in Surrey, England. Her father, George Maxwell Fraser Bisset, is a general practitioner. Her mother, Arlette Alexander, is a former lawyer. Bisset grew up near Reading, Berkshire. She has a brother, Max Bisset.

Bisset entered the industry through modelling. She took acting lessons and worked as a fashion model in order to pay for them. Bisset attended school at the Lycée Français de Londres in London. Her parents divorced after several years of marriage.

Jacqueline Bisset Biography: Career, Roman Polanski

Bisset started her career in film by first appearing uncredited as...

Jacques Audiard’s crime musical “Emilia Perez” won a raft of prizes, including best film and director, at the 50th edition of the Cesar Awards, France’s equivalent to the Oscars, on Friday in Paris.

“Emilia Perez” won a total of seven awards out of 12 nominations. While Zoe Saldana and Karla Sofía Gascón were both on hand and nominated for best actress, they lost to Hafsia Herzi, who starred as a prison supervisor in Stéphane Demoustier’s “Borgo.”

Gascón made her first award show appearance at the Cesar Awards ceremony after laying low in the wake of her offensive posts. Although she skipped the press line on the red carpet, Gascón sat on the same row as Audiard and Saldana inside the Olympia theater, but didn’t seat next to them and didn’t seem to be on speaking terms.

The ceremony’s emcee, French actor Jean-Pascal Zadi, tried to...

It has been a big week for beloved musical The Umbrellas of Cherbourg at the Cannes Film Festival, where it won the 1964 Palme d’Or and went on to international acclaim and five Oscar nominations and served as one of the key inspirations for Damien Chazelle’s La La Land.

The film got a special 60th anniversary Cannes Classics screening Thursday of the exquisitely new restoration at the Agnes Varda Theatre, which is named after the late director and is also wife of late Cherbourg writer-director Jacques Demy. This week also has seen the world premieres of two documentaries related to the film here. On Saturday night at the Buñuel Theatre in the Palais came the premiere of Once Upon a Time: Michel Legrand, an extensive two-hour documentary on the late great composer of Cherbourg and so much more.

Then on Wednesday night, also at the Buñuel, was the unveiling...

Seven classic feature films, to be screened for the first time in Saudi Arabia, are showing at the Red Sea Film Festival’s Treasures sidebar in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.

Director of Arab programs and film classics Antoine Khalife tells Variety: “We really wanted to focus this year on the musical, as well as films about cinema itself.”

Films with a musical theme include a screening of a 4K restoration of Fatih Akin’s 2005 documentary about the music scene in Turkey “Crossing the Bridge: The Sound of Istanbul” and Jacques Demy’s classic French musical “Les Demoiselles de Rochefort,” starring Catherine Deneuve, Françoise Dorléac and Gene Kelly from 1967.

“From the Arab world, we wanted to have something unusual: ‘The Victory of Youth,’ which stars Farid Al-Atrash and Asmahan,” Khalife says. The real-life siblings play brother and sister singer-musicians looking for fame via the silver screen. “We looked really hard to find...

The Triangle of Sadness actor, who has died aged 32, had a singular style and enormous promise

There is always a strange, shocking intensity and unreality in the early death of a beautiful young star - I felt it earlier this year at the untimely loss of the French movie actor Gaspard Ulliel, and perhaps even more so with the sad news about the South African model and actor Charlbi Dean, dead at just 32 years old.

A previous generation probably felt it on hearing about the car crash that killed Françoise Dorleac (sister of Catherine Deneuve) in 1967, just as she was about to hit the big time.

Dean was this year about to make her international breakthrough – a starring role in Ruben Östlund’s Palme d’Or-winning satire about the super-rich – Triangle Of Sadness.

‘Adorable charmer’ of 1960s French film who worked with Jacques Demy and Costa-Gavras and later appeared in the Oscar-winning Cinema Paradiso

At the heart of Jacques Demy’s delirious, gaily coloured musical Les Demoiselles de Rochefort is the cherubic sailor and artist Maxence, who has painted his “feminine ideal” and is now searching for the flesh and blood equivalent, hardly suspecting that she lives nearby in the form of Catherine Deneuve. With his mop of bright vanilla hair and his white bachi hat with its cherry-like pom-pom, Maxence personifies the film’s wistful, ingenuous spirit. He was played by Jacques Perrin, who has died aged 80.

Perrin was already established as a bright young thing of French and Italian cinema before Demy cast him in this big-budget extravaganza alongside Gene Kelly, George Chakiris and Françoise Dorléac, Deneuve’s sister. His roles for Demy – he also played a handsome prince in the...

Star who dubbed French versions of talkies starring Olivia de Havilland and Judy Garland quit acting during second world war

Renée Dorléac, the French film star and mother of actors including Catherine Deneuve, Françoise Dorléac and Sylvie Dorléac, has died aged 109 in Paris, her family confirmed to Le Figaro.

Born in the port town of Le Havre on 10 September 1911, the actor – known professionally as Renée-Jeanne Simonot – began her career aged seven in Paris’s Odéon theatre, where she worked for three decades.

After producing the first two Harry Palmer movies to provide a more realistic, intellectual alternative to his cartoonish James Bond series, producer Harry Saltzman “Bonded” it up for this third entry after The Ipcress File and Funeral In Berlin. Although a troubled production with Big Sleep-level plot complications and an unlikely director in arthouse favorite Ken Russell, it’s considered the liveliest of the Palmer series. Magnetic leading lady Françoise Dorléac (Catherine Deneuve’s sister) was killed in an car accident soon after filming completed.

The post Billion Dollar Brain appeared first on Trailers From Hell.

Bodard worked with iconic directors Jacques Demy, Agnès Varda, Robert Bresson, Jean-Luc Godard, Maurice Pialat, Alain Resnais and Claude Miller.

Legendary French producer Mag Bodard, who worked with iconic directors Jacques Demy, Agnès Varda, Robert Bresson, Jean-Luc Godard, Maurice Pialat, Alain Resnais and Claude Miller, has died at the age of 103-years-old.

Bodard, whose heyday was in the 1960s and 70s, got her first producer credit in 1962 on Norbert Carbonnaux’s comedy The Dance, featuring Françoise Dorléac in her first starring role opposite Jean-Pierre Cassel.

The crew featured production designer Jacques Saulnier, who would go on to work closely with Resnais,...

All hail legendary song-and-dance man Gene Kelly on the 106th anniversary of his birth on August 23. In the history of American film, there were unarguably two great male dancers — Fred Astaire and Kelly. Astaire’s style was romantic and sophisticated, with long lines and elegant movement. Kelly’s style was more athletic — a guy’s guy, if you will — with a scrappy style that set him apart from other dancers of his era.

Kelly appeared to be able to do it all. He could dance, sing, and act in his films, ultimately choreographing and directing them as well. In the course of his nearly four decades on film, he starred in such classics as “An American in Paris” and “Anchors Aweigh,” as well as starring and co-directing the great musicals “On the Town” and “Singin’ in the Rain.”

For his work, Kelly earned two Golden Globe nominations — one for Best...

The musical often feels like a relic of a long-dead Hollywood studio system, but it remains a genre that captures movies’ ability to create story worlds that move freely between reality and fantasy. The worst examples come from filmmakers who give license to music, color, and movement run amok; the best musicals transcend artifice and integrate songs that become expressions of pure character emotion. It offers endless possibilities, but success demands a complete mastery of the medium.

Very few current stars could learn the choreography of Busby Berkeley, Jerome Robbins, or Bob Fosse, and adapting a medium developed and most suited for the stage requires innovative direction. In translating the joy of a live musical to the magic of cinema, some things are easily lost in the shuffle.

Read More:The 10 Best Cinematographers of 2017, Ranked

From “A Star is Born” to “Singin’ in the Rain,” here are 20 musicals that represent the...

Perhaps motivated by the success of La La Land, Criterion has reissued two impressive Jacques Demy musicals as separate releases. This all-singing, all-dancing homage to candy-colored vintage Hollywood musicals is a captivating Franco-American hybrid that allows free rein to Demy’s marvelously positive romantic philosophy.

The Young Girls of Rochefort

Blu-ray

The Criterion Collection 717

1967 / Color / 2:35 widescreen / 125 min. / Les Demoiselles de Rochefort / available through The Criterion Collection / Street Date April 11, 2017 / 39.95

Starring: Catherine Deneuve, Françoise Dorléac, Danielle Darrieux, George Chakiris, Gene Kelly, Michel Piccoli, Jacques Perrin

Cinematography: Ghislain Cloquet

Production Designer: Bernard Evein

Film Editor: Jean Hamon

Original Music: Michel Legrand

Produced by Mag Bodard, Gilbert de Goldschmidt

Written and Directed by Jacques Demy

I was going to squeak by reviewing only Jacques Demy’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, but the interest in the new La La Land prompted some emails and messages that tell me a revisit of the charming...

Jacques Demy’s international breakthrough musical gives us Catherine Deneuve and wall-to-wall Michel Legrand pop-jazz — it’s a different animal than La La Land but they’re being compared anyway. The story of a romance without a happily-ever-after is doggedly naturalistic, despite visuals as bright and buoyant as an old MGM show.

The Umbrellas of Cherbourg

Blu-ray

The Criterion Collection 716

1964 / Color / 1:85 widescreen / 92 min. / available through The Criterion Collection / Les parapluies de Cherbourg / Street Date April 11, 2017 / 39.95

Starring: Catherine Deneuve, Nino Castelnuovo, Anne Vernon, Marc Michel, Ellen Farner, Mireille Perrey, Jean Champion.

Cinematography: Jean Rabier

Production design:Bernard Evein

Film Editors: Anne-Marie Cotret, Monique Teisseire

Original Music: Michel Legrand

Produced by Mag Bodard

Written and Directed by Jacques Demy

What with all the hubbub about last year’s Oscar favorite La La Land, I wonder if Hollywood will be trotting out more retro-nostalgia, ‘let’s put on a show’ musical fantasy fare.

Taking a look at the French director’s fascinating filmography.

One of the biggest films of 2016, La La Land, owes a thing or two to French director Jacques Demy. The bright, colorful musical visually mirrors Demy’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964) and The Young Girls of Rochefort (1967), and director Damien Chazelle was able to capture something of the melancholic sweetness of Demy’s musicals. Demy is not one of the most famous French directors, however his films have a specific charm and intelligence that no other filmmaker could match. The way he blended Hollywood style with French culture was unlike any other filmmaker at the time.

Demy began his career in 1960s France, during the time of the “Nouvelle Vague” or French New Wave. This was the time of films such as Breathless, Jules and Jim, The 400 Blows, and Le Beau Serge. However, Demy lies a little bit outside of this group of filmmakers, and...

Stars: Donald Pleasence, Lionel Stander, Françoise Dorléac, Jack MacGowran, Iain Quarrier | Written by Roman Polanski, Gerard Brach | Directed by Roman Polanski

Roman Polanski’s taste for dark absurdist comedy is in full swing in 1966 comedy-thriller Cul-De-Sac. It’s his second English-language film, sandwiched between Repulsion and Fearless Vampire Killers. Compared with his towering classics (and there are a few) it is slight, but even minor Polanski is a joy to watch.

Especially with a setup like this. We open with Dickey (Lionel Stander, the spit of Ernest Borgnine) and Albie (Jack MacGowran), their car sputtering along the Northumberland coast. Albie is dying from a gunshot wound, so Dickey heads off for help, and finds himself on a coastal island, in a castle owned by George (Donald Pleasence) and his glamorous wife Teresa (Françoise Dorléac).

So begins a strange semi-hostage relationship between the very American gangsters and the gentle married couple.

Four new movies are coming to the Criterion Collection this April: Juzo Itami’s “Tampopo,” Francis Ford Coppola’s “Rumble Fish,” Wim Wenders’ “Buena Vista Social Club” and George Stevens’ “Woman of the Year.” In addition, two musicals directed by Jacques Demy already in the Collection are receiving new standalone editions: “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg” and “The Young Girls of Rochefort.” More information below.

Read More: The Criterion Collection’s 2017 Lineup: What Movies Are Being Added This Year?

“Tampopo”

“The tale of an eccentric band of culinary ronin who guide the widow of a noodle shop owner on her quest for the perfect recipe, this rapturous “ramen western” by Japanese director Juzo Itami is an entertaining, genre-bending adventure underpinned by a deft satire of the way social conventions distort the most natural of human urges, our appetites. Interspersing the efforts of Tampopo (Nobuko Miyamoto) and friends to make her café...

Special tribute to Françoise Dorléac with her sister Catherine Deneuve in Jacques Demy’s The Young Girls Of Rochefort Photo: Unifrance A unique online film festival that last year involved more than 6.5 million spectators all over the world, is all set for its 7th edition, mixing both shorts and features around various themes.

The initiative was launched last night (January 14) at a gala evening at the Royal Automobile Club overlooking the Place de la Concorde in Paris as part of the 19th edition of Unifrance’s Rendez-vous with French Cinema.

Argentinean director Pablo Trapero, president of the Filmmakers’ Jury for MyFrenchFilmFestival.com Photo: Unifrance Argentinean director Pablo Trapero (The Clan), who has taken on the role of the president of the Filmmakers' Jury, officially launched MyFrenchFilmFestival.com. Trapero said that French audiences had always given his films “a warm and respectful reception” and he was pleased to be able to repay the welcome.

Dailies is a round-up of essential film writing, news bits, videos, and other highlights from across the Internet. If you’d like to submit a piece for consideration, get in touch with us in the comments below or on Twitter at @TheFilmStage.

Michael Mann‘s Ali will finally get a Blu-ray release on January 17, 2017, Sony announced today, although which cuts aren’t specified yet.

Watch Catherine Deneuve and Françoise Dorléac rehearse for Jacques Demy‘s The Young Girls of Rochefort:

Remember the late Raoul Coutard with his interview at The Guardian about the making of Breathless:

Jean-Luc fed them their lines as we were shooting and they repeated them after him. That’s why their delivery is a little jerky – there’s a slight time-lapse all the way through the film. We rehearsed the actors’ moves without their knowing what they were going to say. He wanted everything to be very fresh,...

In 1962, two filmmakers met in a room at Universal Studios to discuss (what else?) cinema. Those directors were François Truffaut and Alfred Hitchcock. (Providing assistance was French-language translator Helen Scott.) Together, they talked for over 50 hours, poring over every film the old master ever made. In 1967, Truffaut published what has universally come to be known as an essential text, titled Hitchcock/Truffaut, which contains rich and detailed transcripts of the extraordinary conversation.

Filmmaker Kent Jones‘ documentary about this historic meeting of the minds is now out, which inspired The Film Stage to look back at some of the forgotten, overlooked, and underrated films from these two beloved directors. The following ten titles contain all of the nuance, mystery and joy that we’ve come to expect from Hitchcock and Truffaut, with many overlapping themes and stylistic sensibilities.

Please enjoy the list, and don’t forget to suggest your own favorites in the comments.

Michael Caine young. Michael Caine movies: From Irwin Allen bombs to Woody Allen classic It's hard to believe that Michael Caine has been around making movies for nearly six decades. No wonder he's had time to appear – in roles big and small and tiny – in more than 120 films, ranging from unwatchable stuff like the Sylvester Stallone soccer flick Victory and Michael Ritchie's adventure flick The Island to Brian G. Hutton's X, Y and Zee, Joseph L. Mankiewicz's Sleuth (a duel of wits and acting styles with Laurence Olivier), and Alfonso Cuarón's Children of Men. (See TCM's Michael Caine movie schedule further below.) Throughout his long, long career, Caine has played heroes and villains and everything in between. Sometimes, in his worst vehicles, he has floundered along with everybody else. At other times, he was the best element in otherwise disappointing fare, e.g., Philip Kaufman's Quills.

Director Philippe De Broca (King of Hearts) directed this spy spoof at the apex of Bondmania in 1964 and transformed easy-going art-house favorite Jean-Paul Belmondo into a box office mega-star. Featuring a fast-paced globe-trotting chase for an Amazonian statue, That Man From Rio is more Indiana Jones than James Bond but French audiences didn’t care, making it the 5th highest earner at theaters that year. Co-starring the ethereal Françoise Dorléac and sporting an actual Bond villain, Adolfo Celi, the film earned an Oscar nomination for Best Screenplay. Watch it here.

Director Philippe De Broca (King of Hearts) directed this spy spoof at the apex of Bondmania in 1964 and transformed easy-going art-house favorite Jean-Paul Belmondo into a box office mega-star. Featuring a fast-paced globe-trotting chase for an Amazonian statue, That Man From Rio is more Indiana Jones than James Bond but French audiences didn’t care, making it the 5th highest earner at theaters that year. Co-starring the ethereal Françoise Dorléac and sporting an actual Bond villain, Adolfo Celi, the film earned an Oscar nomination for Best Screenplay.

Two of director Philippe de Broca’s earliest renowned titles get new restorations and are available for the first time on Blu-ray, That Man From Rio (1964) and Up to His Ears (1965), the first two titles from a loose James Bond spoof trilogy featuring Jean-Paul Belmondo. Certainly ahead of his time, de Broca’s amusing adventure films are much more than the kind of lowbrow entertainment that would come to typify the genre known as spoof, and this became a notable inspiration for Steven Spielberg’s Indiana Jones films, particularly 1981’s Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Inspired by the adventures of Belgian cartoonist Herge’s Tintin adventures (which also provided the basis for a 2011 Steven Spielberg adaptation), a prized Amazonian statue is stolen from a Parisian museum. Three such statues left South American on an expedition that involved the late father of Agnes (Francoise Dorleac) and and two colleagues. Professor Catalan...

The Soft Skin

Written by François Truffaut and Jean-Louis Richard

Directed by François Truffaut

France, 1964

Riding high on the critical reputation of the French New Wave (if not its consistent box office success), and with The 400 Blows (1959), Shoot the Piano Player (1960), and Jules and Jim (1962) behind him, François Truffaut’s fourth feature is something rather different. There is still the same cinematic playfulness, a combination of genuine skill, pervasive influence, and a rampant passion for the medium itself, but with The Soft Skin (1964), Truffaut slows things down somewhat, takes a breath, matures. That’s not to say there weren’t adult themes in his earlier films (most certainly there were in Jules and Jim), but here, the entire tone of the film feels more aged, more serious, as if Truffaut was for the first time making a film explicitly for grown-ups, not just featuring them.

Nominated for the Palme...

Qui aime les films français ?

If you do and you live in St. Louis, you’re in luck! The Seventh Annual Robert Classic French Film Festival — co-presented by Cinema St. Louis and the Webster University Film Series begins March 13th. The Classic French Film Festival celebrates St. Louis’ Gallic heritage and France’s cinematic legacy. The featured films span the decades from the 1930s through the early 1990s, offering a comprehensive overview of French cinema. The fest is annually highlighted by significant restorations.

This year features recent restorations of eight works, including an extended director’s cut of Patrice Chéreau’s historical epic Queen Margot a New York-set film noir (Two Men In Manhattan) by crime-film maestro Jean-Pierre Melville, who also co-stars; a short feature (“A Day in the Country”) by Jean Renoir, on a double bill with the 2006 restoration of his masterpiece, The Rules Of The Game, and the...

This month, Criterion marches out a little know title from Francois Truffaut, 1964’s The Soft Skin. Technically his fifth feature, and following behind the monolithic success of Jules and Jim and the 1962 short “Antoine and Colette,” (which served as the second segment in what would flourish into his Antoine Doinel series), the feature did not receive a celebrated reception. Playing in competition at the 1964 Cannes Film Festival (marking the second and last time Truffaut would compete at the festival), the title has since lapsed into a sort of oblivion, which is not surprising considering the winner of the Palme d’Or that year was Jacques Demy’s musical confection, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (launching Catherine Deneuve in stardom, younger sister of Truffuat’s headlining actress, Françoise Dorleac, already a celebrity). Described by its creator as ‘an autopsy of adultery,’ it’s a cold, bitter film about a rather unappealing affair.

Issue #30 of Cinema Retro is now shipping worldwide, as is our special issue "Foto Files #1: Spy Girls",  an 80-page special tribute to the sexiest femme fatales of '60s and '70s cinema.

Highlights of issue #30 include:

Celebrating the 50th anniversary of The Beatles screen debut in "A Hard Day's Night" with exclusive insights from the film's director Richard Lester and David V. Picker, former head of production for United Artists. "Blood, Sweat and Togas": Hercules and the Italian sword and sandal epics of the 1960s. Exclusive! Oswald Morris: the final interview with the legendary cinematographer of such film classics as "The Guns of Navarone", "The Man Who Would Be King", "Moulin Rouge", "Oliver!", "Lolita", "Fiddler on the Roof" and "The Hill". "From Rio Bravo to El Dorado"- Part 2 of the in-depth comparison between two Howard Hawks film classics. "Francoise Dorleac: A Remembrance": a...

Jean-Paul Belmondo in a white dinner jacket. There. That should be enough to sell you on Philippe de Broca's 1964 crime caper–spoof That Man From Rio, but if for some reason it's not, let's throw in Jean-Paul Belmondo on a motorcycle, Jean-Paul Belmondo elbowing his way onto a flight from Paris to Rio de Janeiro with no ticket or passport, and Jean-Paul Belmondo performing his own stunts — he scrambles across multiple stories' worth of construction scaffolding with "what, me worry?" aplomb. Still not sold? Two more words: Françoise Dorléac. And if that doesn't do it, there's no hope.

Dorléac, as fans of Jacques Demy's euphoric musical romance Young Girls of Rochefort will know, is the sultry, flirty redhead (and sister of Cat...

Cohen Media Group is bringing a new restoration of "That Man From Rio," a dazzlingly wild 1964 adventure comedy starring sexy French screen icon Jean-Paul Belmondo and directed by Philippe de Broca, to NY's Film Forum on August 22. Watch an exclusive trailer for the new print, which bowed at Cannes 2014, below. A blow dart-wielding thug snatches a rare statuette from the Musée de l’Homme; anthropologist Jean Servais is kidnapped in broad Parisian daylight; serviceman Jean-Paul Belmondo begins his 8-day leave by changing to civvies in a Métro entrance and witnesses fiancée Françoise Dorléac (Catherine Deneuve’s sister, killed in a car accident 3 years later) getting kidnapped herself – and then the chase begins: by motorcycle, shoe leather, flight to Rio de Janeiro sans ticket or passport, airport baggage carrier, cable car, pink car complete with green stars and a rumble seat, water skies, Amazon river boat, seaplane, jungle...

The Young Girls of Rochefort

Written and directed by Jacques Demy

France, 1967

Jacques Demy’s The Young Girls of Rochefort is the Oscar-nominated follow-up to his immensely popular and successful The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964), which with all of its dialogue sung was something of a reinvention of the movie musical, an almost experiential musical. Young Girls, on the other hand, is simply a great musical. To be sure, Umbrellas is an excellent film as well (see my take on it here), but while it surely resonates with its tale of love unhappily ever after, and it radiates in attractive Eastmancolor, it’s in some ways hampered by its own novelty. There is of course more to it than merely the fact that everyone sings everything, but to many it’s probably best known as the movie where everyone sings everything. Young Girls is more traditional in that it has dialogue...

Ramon Zürcher director of The Strange Little Cat, with producer Silvan Zürcher on the left: "I was always fascinated very much by films of Ingmar Bergman because they deal with inner states."

Find out what Lucrecia Martel's The Headless Woman, the interior in Ingmar Bergman, Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast At Tiffany's, Hitchcock's Rear Window basket and Ernst Jandl's poems have to do with Ramon Zürcher's The Strange Little Cat (Das merkwürdige Kätzchen).

Following a press screening of Jacques Demy's Young Girls Of Rochefort, I met up with Zürcher. In the center of Demy's marvelous and innovative musical which features a pastel clad vision of Gene Kelly, are twins, played by Catherine Deneuve and her late sister Françoise Dorléac. In perfect symmetry, Ramon brought along his twin brother, producer Silvan Zürcher to the office of Criterion Collection, off Union Square, where our conversation took place, arranged by...

Blu-ray & DVD Release Date: July 22, 2014

Price: Blu-ray/DVD Combo $124.95

Studio: Criterion

French director Jacques Demy launched his glorious feature filmmaking career in the Sixties, a decade of astonishing invention in his national cinema. He stood out from the crowd of his fellow New Wavers, however, by filtering his self-conscious formalism through deeply emotional storytelling. Fate and coincidence, doomed love, and storybook romance surface throughout his films, many of which are further united by the intersecting lives of characters who either appear or are referenced across titles.

Six of Demy’s films are collected in The Essential Jacques Demy. Ranging from musical to melodrama to fantasia, all are triumphs of visual and sound design, camera work, and music, and they are galvanized by the great stars of French cinema at their centers, including Anouk Aimée (8 1/2), Catherine Deneuve (Belle de Jour), and Jeanne Moreau (Jules and Jim).

The six works here, made...

Today's top ten list was inspired by the passing of the great Joan Fontaine, half of Hollywood's most embittered And most successful sibling rivalry, all-female division. Usually when a movie star has a sibling, one is considerably less successful than the other which is why the Fontaine & de Havilland business was so enduringly fascinating. (If we're talking mixed gender siblings only Warren Beatty & Shirley Maclaine are truly comparable in terms of parallel mega-careers). I'm dedicating this list to the Talmadge sisters, silent screen stars (though most of their work did not survive) as well as the one and only Catherine Deneuve and Françoise Dorleac (her gorgeous elder sister who died way too young)... those Young Girls of Rochefort. But Rochefort is a long way from Hollywood.

Hollywood's Top Ten Fourteen (Actress) Sister Acts

The Sisters Mara: Kate & Rooney

14 Kate Mara (1983-) & Rooney Mara (1985-)

Rooney, currently playing Joaquin's ex-wife in Her,...

‘La Cage aux Folles’ director Edouard Molinaro, who collaborated with Catherine Deneuve, Jeanne Moreau, Orson Welles, dead at 85 Edouard Molinaro, best known internationally for the late ’70s box office comedy hit La Cage aux Folles, which earned him a Best Director Academy Award nomination, died of lung failure on December 7, 2013, at a Paris hospital. Molinaro was 85. Born on May 31, 1928, in Bordeaux, in southwestern France, to a middle-class family, Molinaro began his six-decade-long film and television career in the mid-’40s, directing narrative and industrial shorts such as Evasion (1946), the Death parable Un monsieur très chic ("A Very Elegant Gentleman," 1948), and Le verbe en chair / The Word in the Flesh (1950), in which a poet realizes that greed is everywhere — including his own heart. At the time, Molinaro also worked as an assistant director, collaborating with, among others, Robert Vernay (the 1954 version of The Count of Monte Cristo, starring Jean Marais) and...

Cinematographer on the first Star Wars film who worked with the Boulting Brothers, Hitchcock and Polanski

The British cinematographer Gilbert Taylor, who has died aged 99, was best known for his camerawork on the first Star Wars movie (1977). Though its special effects and set designs somewhat stole his thunder, it was Taylor who set the visual tone of George Lucas's six-part space opera.

"I wanted to give it a unique visual style that would distinguish it from other films in the science-fiction genre," Taylor declared. "I wanted Star Wars to have clarity because I don't think space is out of focus … I thought the look of the film should be absolutely clean … But George [Lucas] saw it differently … For example, he asked to set up one shot on the robots with a 300mm camera lens and the sand and sky of the Tunisian desert just meshed together. I told him it wouldn't work,...

The French film industry has always been among the worlds most important……at least to film studies professors. Most French movies are either funded by the French government or made with the support of government-linked media companies. Filmmakers face little market pressure in the creative process. That helps explain why they’re so boring!

Starbuck opens this weekend so we here at We Are Movie Geeks have decided to post this article about our favorite French films. Okay, so Starbuck is technically a Canadian film shot in Quebec, but its French language so, in our eyes that makes it French! The Hollywood remake is already in the can. It stars Vince Vaughn. The remake was originally tilted Dickie Donor but they’ve changed it to Delivery Man, so you just know they’ve screwed it up bad. This list may not line up with that of your typical French Cinema scholar.

Roman Polanski is as famous for the events of his tumultuous life as he is for his often brilliant, highly influential body of work.

Born in Paris in 1933 to Polish parents who unfortunately returned to Poland in 1937, Polanski survived the Nazi extermination of the inhabitants of Krakow’s Jewish ghetto (although his mother died in Auschwitz). He roamed the countryside struggling to survive for the remainder of the war, at times being sheltered by sympathetic families but also witnessing atrocities that seem likely to have influenced his choice of material and portrayal of violence on screen.

Polanski met actress Sharon Tate while making The Fearless Vampire Killers, and they were married in January 1968. In August 1969, while Polanski was in Europe, the pregnant Tate and four of their friends were murdered at their La residence at 10050 Cielo Drive in Benedict Canyon by the followers of Charles Manson, a crime that has...

A world of cruelty, where men are cold-blooded and women cold-hearted … The BFI begins a Roman Polanski retrospective – with extended runs of Repulsion and Chinatown – that showcases the director's fascinating pathology

Any hopes that the BFI's forthcoming retrospective – its second in less than a decade – will turn attention away from the glum key terms of Roman Polanski's life (the Kraków ghetto, Manson, statutory rape) back to the riches of his work are based on false reasoning and certain to be dashed. To watch Polanski's films is to be reminded of what produced their dazed brutality, those early experiences of the oppression of the weak that stole his innocence and distorted his sense of things. If ever there was a body of work on intimate terms with cruelty and domination, and steeped in a vision of men as cold-blooded and women as cold-hearted, this is it.

When, in Polanski's first film,...

Starting July 13th and running through September 2nd, prepare yourself to be transported to a summer vacation in France. All you have to do is check in at Tiff Cinematheque (350 King Street West, Toronto).

The 41-film sabbatical will make take you to popular and renowned destinations that include Jean-Luc Godard’s Pierrot le Fou (1965), Luis Buñuel’s Belle de Jour (1967), François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (1959), and Jean Renoir’s La Grande Illusion (1937).

We’ll even be making stops at more remote, recherché locations, such as Jean Eustache’s The Mother and the Whore (1973) and Jean-Pierre Melville’s Army of Shadows (1969).

Remember to pack lightly, re-schedule accordingly, and prepare for the ultimate staycation. Bon voyage!

Screenings include:

La Grand Illusion (1937)

Friday July 13 at 6:00 Pm

Sunday July 22 at 7:30 Pm

117 minutes

Heralded as “one of the fifty best films in the history of cinema” by Time Out Film Guide, Jean Renoir...

Sigh....Polanski in the sixties. Knife in the Water(1962), Repulsion (1965), The Fearless Vampire Killers (1967) and Rosemary's Baby (1968) are all on that list. But so is the not oft remarked on Cul-de-sac (1966). Cul-de-sac trades effectively in Polanski's modern noir Gothic  but amongst the elemental chills is a smart, heartbreaking, very funny, satire of failed aristocracy, would be intellectualism and decayed gangster myth. A pair of hoods on the lam descend on a remote and somewhat decrepit beach property castle inhabited by a decidedly eccentric couple. George (Donald Pleasance) is a scholar, his much younger wife, Teresa (Francoise Dorleac), is a flighty woman who may or may not be in love with him. They meet the intrusion into their home with equal parts moral...

Cul-de-sac Directed by: Roman Polanski Written by: Roman Polanski and Gérard Brach Starring: Donald Pleasence, Françoise Dorléac, Lionel Stander Roman Polanski's darkly goofy Cul-de-sac is a defining moment in the filmmaker's career, dropping a style gauntlet that would shape his future filmography and define the term 'Polanski-esque'. He twists comedy and suspense into a fresh, thrilling, and manic cinematic experience that proves one thing; tough willed men eat eggs raw and weak willed men boil them. The film opens with a man pushing a car through rising waters, his arm in a sling. His bookish looking partner sits in the passenger side wincing in pain. His gut was shot out in what we assume was a botched robbery (maybe an influence on Reservoir Dogs?) Richard, the burlier of the two (played brilliantly by Lionel Stander, who kids of the 80's might recognize as the voice of Kup in Transformers: The Movie...

Someone (but not Anne Hathaway) needs to stick up for the girl geek, a social group so under-represented in movies it's almost extinct

Anne Hathaway's iffy English accent is the least of One Day's problems. It's not the way she speaks so much as the way she looks; even in specs and with dull, lifeless hair (you wonder why they didn't call it One Bad Hair Day), she can't help but radiate movie star glamour. I still don't understand why the role of Emma Morley went to her when Carey Mulligan has already demonstrated, in An Education – and with the very same director, Lone Scherfig – that she can run the gamut from swot to swan, con brio.

Beyond the gimmicky structure, one of the most intriguing things about the idea of David Nicholls's novel being adapted for the screen was its potential to subvert a tiresome movie...

Chicago – Whatever you may think about Roman Polanski as a human being (or a criminal for that matter), it is simply undeniable that he is one of our best living filmmakers. From “Repulsion” to “Chinatown” to “The Pianist” to “The Ghost Writer” — he’s a master of the form, one of my absolute favorite directors of all time. One of his lesser-known works (that would be the best film of many other director’s entire careers but arguably doesn’t even rank top ten for Polanski) is the tense, taut “Cul-de-sac,” given the special edition treatment this week by The Criterion Collection.

Blu-Ray Rating: 4.0/5.0

Synopsis:

“Roman Polanski orchestrates a mental menage a trois in this slyly absurd tale of paranoia from the director’s golden 1960s period. Donald Pleasence and Francoise Dorleac star as a withdrawn couple whose isolated house is invaded by a rude, burly American gangster on the run,...

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The Killing (Criterion Collection) I tried hard to get all the features on this one watched before writing this up and I came close, the last thing I have is the inclusion of Stanley Kubrick's Killer's Kiss, which if you ask me, makes this one of the better releases of the year. Two Kubrick films in one package? Impressive, let alone the fact The Killing is a very good film, but I'll talk more about that in a full review that's coming down the line. The one extra thing I will mention here is this has a great little archival set of interviews with Sterling Hayden, who really can keep you entertained with his unique delivery. He can keep you fascinated in and out of his films. Cul-de-sac (Criterion Collection) I did not yet have a chance to watch Roman Polanski's Cul-de-sac.

It's been nearly two years since Swiss authorities, acting on a request from the Us, arrested Roman Polanski, jailed him for two months and then held him under house arrest for seven more. While incarcerated, Polanski managed to complete The Ghost Writer, which won him a Silver Bear at the 2010 edition of the Berlinale and then swept last year's European Film Awards. While we anxiously await Carnage — his adaptation of Yasmina Reza's play God of Carnage featuring Jodie Foster, Kate Winslet, Christoph Waltz and John C Reilly; it'll see its premiere in Venice before opening the New York Film Festival — MoMA has announced a month-long retrospective (September 7 through 30) and today Criterion releases Cul-de-sac (1966) on DVD and Blu-ray.

"Cul-de-sac remains a searing reminder that Roman Polanski's idiosyncratic grasp of the human mind was once evinced theatrically, rather than through narrative ferocity," writes Joseph Jon Lanthier in Slant. "Where Chinatown,...

Rank the week of August 16th’s Blu-ray and DVD new releases against the best films of all-time: New Releases Jane Eyre

(Blu-ray & DVD | PG13 | 2011)

Flickchart Ranking: #3143

Win Percentage: 55%

Times Ranked: 1594

Top-20 Rankings: 7

Directed By: Cary Fukunaga

Starring: Mia Wasikowska • Michael Fassbender • Jamie Bell • Judi Dench • Imogen Poots

Genres: Drama • Gothic Film • Mystery • Period Film • Romance • Romantic Drama • Romantic Mystery

Rank This Movie

Something Borrowed

(Blu-ray & DVD | PG13 | 2011)

Flickchart Ranking: #8753

Win Percentage: 40%

Times Ranked: 456

Top-20 Rankings: 3

Directed By: Luke Greenfield

Starring: Kate Hudson • Ginnifer Goodwin • John Krasinski • Colin Egglesfield • Steve Howey

Genres: Comedy • Comedy Drama • Drama • Romance • Romantic Comedy • Romantic Drama

Rank This Movie

Priest

(Blu-ray & DVD | PG13 | 2011)

Flickchart Ranking: #6278

Win Percentage: 43%

Times Ranked: 1274

Top-20 Rankings: 5

Directed By: Scott Charles Stewart

Starring: Paul Bettany • Karl Urban • Cam Gigandet • Maggie Q • Lily Collins

Genres: Action • Comic-Book Superhero Film • Horror • Monster Film • Religious Horror • Science Fiction • Sci-Fi Action • Sci-Fi Horror • Supernatural Horror...

Your Weekly Source for the Newest Releases to Blu-Ray Tuesday, August 16th, 2011

Agent 8 3/4 (1964)

Directed by: Ralph Thomas

Starring: Dirk Bogarde, Sylva Koscina, Robert Morley

Synopsis: Unemployed Czech-speaking writer Nicholas Whistler thinks he’s got a job visiting Prague for a bit of industrial espionage. In fact he is now in the employ of British Intelligence. His pretty chauffeuse on arrival behind the Iron Curtain, Comrade Simonova, is herself a Czech agent. Just as well she’s immediately attracted to 007′s unwitting replacement. [highdefdigest.com]

Special Features: Unknown.

Armed And Dangerous (1986)

Directed by: Mark L. Lester

Starring: John Candy, Eugene Levy, Meg Ryan, Robert Loggia

Synopsis: Dooley, a cop wrongly sacked for corruption, teams up with a useless defense lawyer in their new careers… as security guards. When the two are made fall guys for a robbery at a location they are guarding, the pair begin to investigate corruption within the company and their union.

Cul-de-sac, Roman Polanski’s (The Ghost Writer) 1966 absurdist movie about over-the-top paranoia and bizarre sexuality (sound familiar?), comes to Blu-ray and DVD from Criterion on Aug. 16 for the list prices of $39.95 and $29.95, respectively.

Françoise Dorléac gives hubby Donald Pleasance a makeover in Roman Polanski's Cul-de-sac.

The film stars Donald Pleasance (Halloween) and Françoise Dorléac (The Soft Skin) as a cowardly eccentric and his slutty French wife, whose isolated beachfront castle is overrun by a burly American gangster (Lionel Stander, Unfaithfully Yours) on the lam. As the tide rises and flocks of chickens close in (!), the trio engages in a sly game of shifting identities, sexual challenges and emotional humiliations. It’s weird, weird stuff that’s both laugh out loud funny and quietly clever as a metaphor for a modern world in chaos.

As is usual for Criterion’s releases, the movie will have a digital restoration, approved by director Polanski,...

It’s so strange, writing this so long after the announcement yesterday. In today’s internet world of instant information, and twenty four second news cycles, yesterday’s August 2011 Criterion Collection new releases may as well have happened last week, or last month. I’m sure that the page views for this post will be markedly smaller than the usual, as I have tried consistently to have the new release post up within minutes of the pages going live on Criterion’s website. I know this all sounds like inside baseball stuff, but it’s on my mind, and darn it, this is my website.

I had a whole, several paragraph long, write up of the August titles, but since I’m finding myself writing this at 10pm on Tuesday evening, I think it’s better if I just scrap that whole thing and start over. I was going on...

The starburst filter, exploding reality into glistening flares and halations...the clink of brandy glasses before an open fire, or the shimmer of a Los Angeles swimming pool...the device has an aura of dated cliche haunting the lovely tackiness of its images. How strange to see it used in black-and-white in Jean-Gabriel Albicocco's The Girl With Golden Eyes (1961), where it becomes outstandingly beautiful with no hint of kitsch.

Frustratingly, the subtitles (produced by a besotted fan) on my copy of this film are too literal or elliptical or something: at any rate, I can't understand anything that's going on, despite a helpful title crawl at the start setting up the plot, and the knowledge that it's based on one of Balzac's stories of the Thirteen, a group of friends who form a secret society to protect each other's interests (Rivette used Balzac's idea obliquely in Out...