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Gondry is back!! The Jokers distribution in France has debuted the first official trailer for Michel Gondry's latest film titled The Book of Solutions, originally titled Le Livre des Solutions in French. This premiered at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival a few months ago, playing in the Directors' Fortnight sidebar fest, and was one of our Top 10 fest highlights. The quirky, upbeat comedy is a very personal, meta story for Gondry about a filmmaker trying to make a film his way and all the challenges he runs into in the process. Pierre Niney stars as Marc, who escapes the city for a small town where he lives with his aunt and a small crew as they try to finish the film without all the producers chasing them. The cast includes Blanche Gardin, Françoise Lebrun, Vincent Elbaz, Frankie Wallach, Camille Rutherford, and Mourad Boudaoud. This is Gondry's best in years, it's...

The filmmaker at the center of Michel Gondry’s new feature is in a love-hate relationship with his latest project. To protect the work in progress from the studio executives who have just fired him, he absconds to the country with the four-hour cut, his faithful editor and assistant in tow. And then he can’t bear to look at the footage, and gets busy with one tangential undertaking after another. The depiction of procrastination as an essential part of the creative process is one of the delights of The Book of Solutions (Le Livre des solutions), but on the way to its mildly satisfying final punchline, this uneven comedy loses its thread.

Drawing loosely upon Gondry’s postproduction escape from producers when he was making Mood Indigo, his first movie since the 2015 charmer Microbe & Gasoline is a portrait of the director as a gifted man-child. Central character Marc Becker is inspired,...

The Cannes Film Festival has unveiled the program of its Cinema de la Plage section which launched last year with a mix of restored classics, cult films and premieres.

Open to all audiences, the Cinema de la Plage will take place on the beach every evening and will be free of charge. The program, which runs alongside the Official Selection, will celebrate the 50th anniversary of Francis Ford Coppola’s “The Godfather,” the 40th anniversary of Steven Spielberg’s “E.T.,” as well as Peter Weir’s “The Truman Show” with Jim Carrey.

“Save Our School,” a socially-minded and timely comedy directed by Carine May and Hakim Zouhani, will have its world premiere as part of Cinema de La Plage. The screening will be attended by the filmmakers and cast members Anaïde Rozam, Sérigne M’Baye, Gilbert Melki, Sébastien Chassagne and Mourad Boudaoud.

Other movies on the Cinema de la Plage...

With a body of work that rivals any performer’s across the history of film, French actress Isabelle Huppert can swan in and out of challenging material with nary a scratch to her matchless reputation. Often, her cool intensity and versatility is what makes that material work, most recently exemplified in her Oscar-nominated turn in Paul Verhoeven’s “Elle.” But sometimes you get what amounts to a perfect fit of risk and skill, leading to sheer delight. That’s the case with the fleet French crime comedy “La Daronne,” translated with a winking nudge into colloquial English, and toward its particular narrative, as “Mama Weed.”

No, Huppert is not on the toking end in director Jean-Paul Salomé’s film (not that she couldn’t rock a pot comedy), but rather the dealing side. Huppert plays Patience Portefeux, a widow with money problems and a mother with dementia in an expensive assisted home,...

There’s something off about Mama Weed. On a more superfluous level, there’s the translation from La daronne—the original French title and the street name its protagonist comes to earn, itself an informal term for “mother”—to the title and nickname used in its United States release. Textually, problems emerge from the myriad supporting characters, virtually all of whom play like narrative props. The script seems uninterested in its conflict; the filmmaking lacks the style to glue its pieces together. That shines a light on, and strands, our title character.

She’s Patience (Isabelle Huppert), an Arabic-fluent French translator working for the police’s narcotics unit. At first, she’s humble: a woman proficient in her professional life but underpaid, a widow and mother to two daughters (Iris Bry and Rebecca Marder). She’s behind on her rent and hopes to afford her own mother (Liliane Rovère) better...

Prizes to Bulgaria, China and Canada as Clermont Ferrand International Short Film Festival draws to a close.Scroll down for full list of winners

This year’s Clermont Ferrand International Short Film Festival has wrapped with an outlook that juxtaposes the gloomy with the optimistic.

During the closing night ceremony of the world’s biggest shorts festival, Jean-Claude Saurel - the president of organiser Sauve qui peut le Court Métrage - took the opportunity to lament the continuing cuts in budgets for French culture and cultural organisations and urged people to help protest against the current policies of the French administration.

However, with audiences for the festival at approximately 160,000 (up more than 5,000 from the previous year), there was still a sense of cautious celebration for the state of short film in France and beyond.

The festival’s International Grand Prix went to Bulgarian/German co-production Pride, Pavel Vesnakov’s powerfully acted story about a retired grandfather who finds...