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Have you ever noticed how, in Western culture, when referring to someone’s death, writers feel obliged to insert the word “tragic” somewhere in the sentence? Is there any other kind, a reader might rightly ask. Sometimes they mean “unexpected,” a kind of shorthand intended to show that the life in question was cut short before its time. But just as often, the phrase “tragic death” is simply redundant, a trite cliché intended to signify that the speaker isn’t some callous bastard.

Writer-director John Michael McDonagh recognizes that not all deaths are tragic. Some are merciful, others accidental; while many are unfortunate, on some occasions, people meet an end that could be described as “poetic” — or at the least, deserved. McDonagh (like younger brother Martin) is a brute-force moralist. Both siblings write scripts in which the term “reckoning” often applies, which is to say, movies and plays where atonement...

Philippe (Benoît Magimel) and Andres (Nuno Lopes) with Calypso (Clotilde Courau) in Rebecca Zlotowski’s An Easy Girl (Une Fille Facile)

At the UniFrance and Film at Lincoln Center’s 25th Rendez-Vous with French Cinema, just days before the announcement came that Rebecca Zlotowski’s An Easy Girl (Une Fille Facile), co-written with Teddy Lussi-Modeste, and starring Mina Farid, Zahia Dehar, Benoît Magimel and Nuno Lopes would be the last screening of the festival, I met with the director at the Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center. Governor Andrew M Cuomo announced at that time (March 13) that he was limiting gathering in public spaces due to the coronavirus pandemic in New York, which eventually led to the closing of all cinemas by March 16.

Rebecca Zlotowski on Benoît Magimel: “There’s something about him being very melancholic, very sad.”

In the second half of my conversation with Rebecca Zlotowski, André Gide, Marguerite Duras,...

Strengthening even more its standing as this year’s Cannes Competition frontrunner, South Korean Lee Chang-dong’s “Burning,” starring “The Walking Dead’s” Steven Yeun, snagged the Fipresci International Critics’ Prize for best film in the section.

An unconventional thriller and tale of amour fou, “Burning” is already something of a Cannes 2018 legend scoring the highest mark ever on a much-consulted Cannes international critics’ poll. Whether that holds any weight at all with Cannes Cate Blanchett jury will be revealed in just over one hour.

The Fipresci jury, led by France’s Michel Ciment, gave the award to “Burning” as a “visually stunning film and an emotionally complex comment on contemporary society.”

In other plaudits from the jury of the International Federation of Film Critics (Fipresci), Lukas Dhont’s “Girl” took the nod for best film in Un Certain Regard; and “One Day,” directed by Zsófa Szilagyi, was chosen by...

Iconic actress and model Marilyn Monroe, who was born in 1926 and died Aug. 5, 1962, would’ve turned 91 this past June. Long past her death, she has continued to be a source of inspiration for modern day women and continues to have quotes of hers circulated online.

There’s one problem with that, though: Monroe didn’t actually say many of the quotes that are attributed to her. Here are some of her commonly circulated quotes that have the lone drawback of not originating from the iconic actress.

Monroe would spend hours on her makeup and her mother dealt with severe paranoid...

June 1 is Marilyn Monroe's birthday. The iconic actress and model, who was born in 1926 and died Aug. 5, 1962, would've been 90 years old. Long past her death, she has continued to be a source of inspiration for modern day women and continues to have quotes of hers circulated online. There's one problem with that, though: Monroe didn't actually say many of the quotes that are attributed to her. Here are some of her commonly circulated quotes that have the lone drawback of not originating from the iconic actress. Monroe would spend hours on her makeup and her mother dealt with severe...

June 1 is Marilyn Monroe's birthday. The iconic actress and model, who was born in 1926 and died Aug. 5, 1962, would've been 90 years old. Long past her death, she has continued to be a source of inspiration for modern day women and continues to have quotes of hers circulated online. There's one problem with that, though: Monroe didn't actually say many of the quotes that are attributed to her. Here are some of her commonly circulated quotes that have the lone drawback of not originating from the iconic actress. Monroe would spend hours on her makeup and her mother dealt with severe...

Danièle Delorme: 'Gigi' 1949 actress and pioneering female film producer. Danièle Delorme: 'Gigi' 1949 actress was pioneering woman producer, politically minded 'femme engagée' Danièle Delorme, who died on Oct. 17, '15, at the age of 89 in Paris, is best remembered as the first actress to incarnate Colette's teenage courtesan-to-be Gigi and for playing Jean Rochefort's about-to-be-cuckolded wife in the international box office hit Pardon Mon Affaire. Yet few are aware that Delorme was featured in nearly 60 films – three of which, including Gigi, directed by France's sole major woman filmmaker of the '40s and '50s – in addition to more than 20 stage plays and a dozen television productions in a show business career spanning seven decades. Even fewer realize that Delorme was also a pioneering woman film producer, working in that capacity for more than half a century. Or that she was what in French is called a femme engagée...

Marc Allégret: From André Gide lover to Simone Simon mentor (photo: Marc Allégret) (See previous post: "Simone Simon Remembered: Sex Kitten and Femme Fatale.") Simone Simon became a film star following the international critical and financial success of the 1934 romantic drama Lac aux Dames, directed by her self-appointed mentor – and alleged lover – Marc Allégret.[1] The son of an evangelical missionary, Marc Allégret (born on December 22, 1900, in Basel, Switzerland) was to have become a lawyer. At age 16, his life took a different path as a result of his romantic involvement – and elopement to London – with his mentor and later "adoptive uncle" André Gide (1947 Nobel Prize winner in Literature), more than 30 years his senior and married to Madeleine Rondeaux for more than two decades. In various forms – including a threesome with painter Théo Van Rysselberghe's daughter Elisabeth – the Allégret-Gide relationship remained steady until the late '20s and their trip to...

Asked to name France’s greatest poet, André Gide famously answered, “Hugo — alas!” His ambivalence might have been a reaction to the great man’s sideline in sentimental novels, especially the 1862 Les Misérables: 1,900 pages of digression interrupted by occasional outcroppings of farfetched plot. With its overly neat central conflict between the saintly ex-criminal Jean Valjean (morally right but legally wrong) and the obsessed Inspector Javert (the other way around), the tale is surely lacking in the subtlety department. That it was nevertheless an enormous international success — one of the 19th century’s biggest bestsellers — must have been galling to Gide. And he never even saw Les Miz.I’m no fan of the show, which began life as a French concept album in 1978 and has made a couple of billion dollars since. But looking back I can see that some of my antipathy is contextual. The Royal Shakespeare Company’s...

Tom Hooper's gamble of filming Les Misérables with on-set singing has resulted in a work of unusual power and colour

Asked who was France's greatest poet, André Gide responded with the famously rueful answer: "Victor Hugo, hélas!" Cameron Mackintosh, the impresario who brought Alain Boublil and Jean-Marc Natel's Les Misérables to London and transformed it into a worldwide phenomenon after its mild Parisian success and disastrous British first-night reception, would give a rather more positive response. I was in that first-night audience on 30 September 1985, and shared the general opinion that it was an indifferent show, shallow and somewhat forced in tone. I emerged with only one song planted in my head, Master of the House, sung by Alun Armstrong as Thénardier, the outrageously opportunist innkeeper, a number that struck me as rather like You've Got to Pick a Pocket or Two from Oliver!

I wasn't writing about the...

Novelist, playwright and essayist with a complete mastery of the scene he described

Gore Vidal, the American writer, controversialist and politician manqué, who has died aged 86, was celebrated both for his caustic wit and his mandarin's poise. His public career spanned seven decades and included 25 novels, numerous collections of essays on literature and politics, a volume of short stories, five Broadway plays, dozens of television plays and film scripts, and even three mystery novels written under the pseudonym Edgar Box. After 9/11 and the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, he returned to centre stage with a series of blistering pamphlets and public pronouncements that led many, including his former friend Christopher Hitchens, to pounce on him. But Vidal never looked back.

Despite his output as a novelist and playwright, many critics considered Vidal's witty and acerbic essays his best work. Often published first in such journals as the New York Review...

Isaki Lacuesta's The Double Steps has won the Golden Shell for Best Film at this year's San Sebastián Film Festival. Ronald Bergan will be pleased. In his dispatch from the festival to the House Next Door, he calls it "the best film in the main competition. It was certainly the most original and a refreshing change from the well-worn linear narrative devices of the majority of films. After 2002's Cravan vs. Cravan, his profile of Arthur Cravan, the Swiss-born nephew of Oscar Wilde who achieved fame as both a Dadaist poet and boxer, Lacuesta has now turned to Francois Augièras, the eccentric French writer, painter and explorer, and sometime lover of André Gide. The film follows two parallel lines, one about a group of men trying to locate a mythical bunker buried in the North African desert containing paintings by Augièras, and the other about the artist himself, here played by a black African,...

No 86 James Dean (1931-1955)

James Byron Dean was born in the midwestern state of Indiana, less than a year after another fair-haired, blue-eyed, 5ft 8in working-class boy from the same state, Steve McQueen. Both had troubled childhoods, drove fast cars recklessly, and developed Hollywood reputations as kings of cool. When Dean was five, his father, a dental technician, took the family to California. When he was nine his mother died, and he was raised by an aunt back in Indiana and didn't return to California until after graduating from high school. He dropped out of college to act in 1950 and there followed one of the shortest, most dramatic careers of any American actor.

In 1951 he made four uncredited walk-on appearances in Hollywood pictures: as a GI in Samuel Fuller's Korean War movie Fixed Bayonets!; playing a second at a boxing match in the Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis naval...

By Michael Atkinson

Context and perspective can be everything -- it's not difficult to simply view Jennifer Venditti's adroit and honest documentary "Billy the Kid" (2007) as a sympathetic portrait of a working-class high schooler inflicted with Asperger's. You can, if you insist on doing so, take it clinically, or as yet another small-framed nonfiction slice of life bearing with it a fashionable special-needs public issue. Too bad about Billy P., a 15-year-old Maine kid living in a converted mobile home with his remarried mom, remembering an abusive father, and mixing uncomfortably with his neurotypical teenage contemporaries in school, who largely tolerate him but keep him at arm's length. Billy himself is a lively piece of work, chattering endlessly from a headful of old movies and entertaining dreams of being a rock star, but you need only to watch his tense body language and searching eyes for a few seconds to understand that he's disconnected,...