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Each week, the fine folks at Fandor add a number of films to their Criterion Picks area, which will then be available to subscribers for the following twelve days. This week, the Criterion Picks focus on eight delightful French films.

Three decades of exceptional French cinema in the service of that most intoxicating, unpredictable and stubborn of muscles, to which laws of convention and commitment prove no barrier: the heart.

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Children of Paradise by Marcel Carne

Poetic realism reached sublime heights with Children Of Paradise, widely considered one of the greatest French films of all time. This nimble depiction of nineteenth-century Paris’s theatrical demimonde, filmed during World War II, follows a mysterious woman loved by four different men (all based on historical figures): an actor, a criminal, a count, and, most poignantly, a mime (Jean-Louis Barrault,...

Of all the cinéma de papa stylists so despised by the nouvelle vague, René Clair stands alone as the sole member of the old guard to stand down in the face of critical opposition. Or so it seems: Les fêtes galantes (1965) was his last film.

While Carné and the rest struggled on, defiantly filming when they could, Clair apparently had no stomach for the fight: if people thought he was old-fashioned, maybe he should stop.

One doesn't have to hate Clair with the ferocity that Truffaut could muster in order to see some sad wisdom in this retirement: for some time, Clair's films had been a little stiff. His early days among the surrealists, when he could make a kinetic exercise in visual absurdity like Entr'acte (1924), were long gone, and the vein of absurdist fantasy that enlivened his earliest narrative movies had its last expression in 1952's Les belles de nuit,...

Telluride Film Festival 2011, Day 1

The first day of the festival proper also means the first round of Symposium speakers have arrived, and two of them are program fixtures. The first is documentarian Ken Burns, who’s spoken to the Symposium students every year since the second edition; the second is theater director / arts professor Peter Sellars, who’s become a regular over the last few years thanks to his unique speaking style. (More on that later.)

Burns, who’s also on the fest’s Board of Governors, was up first. Each speaker – and this goes for the entire Symposium – gets a 45-minute slot. Burns, whose 35 years as America’s foremost documentary chronicler of American history made him the most familiar of the three speakers to the bulk of the group, opened himself up to questions right away, rather than setting the agenda. Burns would often relate his answer to his latest epic-length production,...