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Buckle up. “Black Box” is the kind of smart, taut conspiracy thriller Hollywood used to consistently make, only this one hails from France, which has been beating the American studios at their own game lately in the good-movies-for-grown-ups department. Centered on the eponymous device, recovered from a freak airplane accident, this engaging if slightly overlong film stars Pierre Niney as an obsessive forensic analyst who hears the words “Allahu Akbar!” on a recovered cockpit voice recorder and can’t quite believe his ears.

If the setup sounds a bit like Brian De Palma’s “Blow Out,” that’s hardly a bad thing, except “Black Box” centers on high-altitude hijinks, rather than a Chappaquiddick-like car crash. Opening the movie in mid-air, director Yann Gozlan leaves the crisis mostly up to the imagination, firing our neurons rather than our adrenaline receptors as he dollies backward from the cockpit, through the cabin, all...

The Santa Barbara International Film Festival (Sbiff) has revealed its third annual Wave Film Festival, running July 15 through July 19. This festival highlights eleven brand new French films at the historic Riviera Theatre. Herewith the lineup, with language courtesy of the festival. Read More: Locarno to Honor French Actress Bulle Ogier, Favorite of Rivette, Chabrol and Fassbinder "A Perfect Man" / (Director: Yann Gozlan, Screenwriters: Yann Gozlan, Guillaume Lemans, Grégoire Vigneron) - Mathieu Vasseur is an aspiring writer. But as the refusal letters pile up, he takes a part-time job as a mover. Going through the contents of a recently deceased old soldier’s home, Mathieu discovers a dusty, hand-written diary. Intrigued, he takes the manuscript home to read. And he can’t put it down! Indeed the soldier’s story is captivating. Mathieu submits the book as its own to a publishing house. And he gets his first publishing deal. And the book is a huge.

Words With Friends: Gozlan’s Stylish Noir all Amalgamated Pulp

Enjoyably anxious, director Yann Gozlan’s sophomore feature A Perfect Man (Un homme idéal) would better recall suspense masters like Hitchcock or Chabrol if its narrative felt a little less familiar. As such, it seems more like the B noir cousin of the cinema Gozlan is in conversation with rather than a revisionist take on one of cinema’s greatest femme fatales—karma. Featuring an excellent lead performance from recent Cesar award winning actor Pierre Niney, there’s much to admire even as Gozlan overdoses with increasing complications that hinge on the ludicrous.

Mathieu Vasseur (Niney) is an aspiring novelist, whose first manuscript, The Man From Behind, has been promptly rejected by publishers. Working vaguely as some sort of janitorial staff and/or garbage man, Vasseur stumbles into a lecture being given about scent’s relationship to memory and literature...

Exclusive: Paris-based Snd is reuniting with Yves Saint Laurent producer Wassim Béji and star Pierre Niney on Yann Gozlan’s psychological thriller A Perfect Man, about a writer who rips off a dead soldier’s diary as his own work.

The company will launch sales on the project at Cannes.

It is the second time Snd has worked closely with Béji and Niney, who garnered worldwide praise for his performance as legendary fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent in the recent biopic by Jalil Lespert.

Upcoming French actress Ana Girardot, whose credits include the hit TV series The Returned (Les Revenants) is also attached.

In A Perfect Man, Niney will play aspiring writer Matthieu Vasseur, who takes on a job as a removal man to pay the bills.

While clearing the house of a recently deceased soldier he comes across the man’s hand-written diary. He is captivated by the soldier’s story and decides to send it...