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Muriel Robin as criminal psych professor Louise Arbus, in French crime series “Master Crimes” on MHz Choice. Courtesy of MHz Choice

The French crime series “Master Crimes: Season One” offers a nice balance among the murders-du-jour, character development and levity. The six 45-minute episodes cover five different cases to be solved by criminal psych professor Louise Arbus (Muriel Robin), police detective Barbara Delandre (Anne Le Nen) and Arbus’ quartet of students she hand-picked for her team.

Arbus had been an exceptionally successful police profiler until she quit a decade earlier due to a conviction she’d obtained that haunted her ever since with doubts about whether they’d nailed the actual perp. That’s why she’d ensconced herself in academia, apart from periodic inquiries into who might have committed that murder most foul. But one particularly dramatic homicide caused her old friend the Chief (Olivier Claverie) to convince her to reenter the fray.

Cyril Metzger and Manon Clavel are set to star in Netflix’s upcoming hotel period drama “Winter Palace.”

Metzger (“Happening”) will play André Morel while Clavel (“The Truth”) is set to star as Rose. Together they portray an ambitious married couple who are running the hotel at the centre of the show.

Simon Ludders (“Bridgerton”) plays ambitious aristocrat Lord Fairfax, whose dream is to turn the hotel in a winter holiday destination.

Also joining the cast are Astrid Roos as Lady Isobel, Henry Pettigrew as Sir Conan Doyle, “Vikings” hero Clive Standen as Lance Raney, Vincent Heneine as Chef Voclain and Axel Granberger as Marcus.

Swiss stars Alix Henzelin, Antoine Basler, Gaspard Boesch, Roland Vouilloz, Serge Musy and Karim Barras round out the cast.

“Winter Palace” is set to start filming in the Swiss resort towns of Montreux and Valais this month and is scheduled to wrap next spring.

The eight-episode period extravaganza,...

Kalavryta was a real war crime committed in Greece, but this fictional drama – featuring von Sydow in his last film role – fails to deliver much justice

Max von Sydow, in his final film role, does what he can to lend gravitas to this odd, stilted and contrived movie, a fictional drama based on a horrendous Nazi atrocity in occupied Greece in 1943, for which the question of reparations still grumbles on. In Kalavryta in the northern Peloponnese, nearly 700 civilians were shot by the Nazi forces, in chilling reprisal for Greek resistance fighters executing 78 German soldiers taken prisoner. Von Sydow plays Nikolas, an ageing Greek writer who as a young boy miraculously escaped the massacre, but has been haunted by it ever since. In the present day, Astrid Roos plays Caroline Martin, an ambitious Berlin lawyer who is tasked by a heartless and cynical German government to go to Greece and to...

A new film about a notorious Nazi massacre in Greece during World War II has angered the descendants of the victims amid accusations that the filmmakers falsified historical events, with a victims’ group saying it’s filed a lawsuit against the producers.

Now the filmmakers are fighting back, with writer-producer Dimitrios Katsantonis describing the legal threats on Wednesday as “empty fireworks that will soon be revealed for what they are.”

“Echoes of the Past,” which is directed by Nicholas Dimitropoulos and stars the late Max von Sydow in his final performance, will have its world premiere Saturday at the Thessaloniki Film Festival before rolling out in Greek cinemas Nov. 11, where it will be released as “Kalavryta 1943.”

The film recounts the brutal massacre of some 700 Greek males by German troops in the Peloponnesian village of Kalavryta, in retaliation for the execution of nearly 80 Nazi soldiers by resistance fighters.

Von Sydow...